how are scientific beliefs caused?

[Jim B.]

from
Victor Repert on his Dangerous idea blog

Sunday, April 30, 2017
How are scientific beliefs caused?
Assuming no God and setting aside any life on other planets that might have evolved prior to earth's life, no agent-driven teleology has existed throughout virtually all of natural history.

So, what is happening now? In order for the accounts we have to give a Darwin inferring natural selection from finch beaks, or physicists rejecting the ether theory as a result (among other things) of the Michelsen-Morley experiment, to make any sense, we have to describe them in teleological terms. The reasons, the evidence, have to be causally responsible for the beliefs these scientists came to hold. Otherwise, the presumed advantage of following science as opposed to superstition goes out the window.

Yet naturalists insist that when minds arose, no new mode of causation was introduced. Matter functioned in the same way, it is just that evolution but it into forms of organization that made it seem as if it had purposes when it really didn't, and this explains the very theorizing by which scientists like Dawkins and philosophers like Mackie reach the conclusion that God does not exist. In the last analysis, you didn't accept atheism because of the evidence, you became and atheist because the configuration of atoms in your brain put you in a certain brain state, and C. S. Lewis became a Christian and a theist for exactly the same reason. If this is true, how can the atheist possibly claim superior rationality?

For true justification, you need something beyond efficient causation, the purview of the natural sciences. This ties in with the free will/determinism dilemma, that determinism alone cannot allow for justifcation based on reasons. There has to be some sort of teleology already built into things or at least an efficacy to reasons as reasons over and above efficient causes that allows us to justify our beliefs.

[The Pixie]

For true justification, you need something beyond efficient causation, the purview of the natural sciences.

How then do we get true justification?

This ties in with the free will/determinism dilemma, that determinism alone cannot allow for justifcation based on reasons. There has to be some sort of teleology already built into things or at least an efficacy to reasons as reasons over and above efficient causes that allows us to justify our beliefs.

Why?

[Metacrock]

What has that got to do with the topic of the OP?

I don't know just trying to get confab going again,

[Metacrock]

For true justification, you need something beyond efficient causation, the purview of the natural sciences.

How then do we get true justification?

This ties in with the free will/determinism dilemma, that determinism alone cannot allow for justifcation based on reasons. There has to be some sort of teleology already built into things or at least an efficacy to reasons as reasons over and above efficient causes that allows us to justify our beliefs.

Why?

He is makimng sense,He;s saying we need a higher order method for bigger questions that transcend immediate empirical needs. We can observe the sene of C/e and we can use that dichotomy to express relationship signature but to say that is so exacting that all defects are preordained we would have to step outside the systemn to observe. Why? because being detained would bias our understanding,

It just stands to reason that yo can't make system wide analysis from within the system,it will always be speculative. Like the asserting the mathematics prove multiverse,m ugt without actually going outside space time we can;t really prove there is one,

my old joke I[m determined to believe free will.

[Metacrock]

Pix let me explaimn Reppert, the guy I quoted is famous for making a CS Lewis argument called argument from Reason.i am not sure it prove the existence of God but I find use for it in my work,Here is my description of what the argument says:


Ultimately he appeals to rational intelligibility to explain mind, which might require mind itself as an organizing principle. That argument is driven home even more so by Victor Reppert following C.S. Lewis in the “argument from reason.” Unlike Nagel, however, Reppert (Lewis) is making an actual God argument.
In essence the argument might be summarized in three stages as Reppert does (p72) He does not enumerate premises as a deductive presentation this is not a deductive argument in a formal preservation but merely a summary of observations:

(1) reasoning process is essential to our epistemic ability

(2) to fit reasoning into our universe we must accept a dualism, that is we must accept rational explainable for fundamental assumptions and inferences in addition to physical explanation

(3) theism is necessary to account for these fundamental explanations,i

Reppert uses a supporting argument, from intentionality, that illustrates the nature of the argument. This by no means the only such supporting argument but it's the only one I'll look at. His objective in making this argument is to show that there are elements in making argument that can't be fitted into a naturalistic framework. Lewis argued that it made no sense to say that one state is about another state. If we think about brains as merely lumps of matter one lump of matter is about another lump of matter? The reasoning process is essential for understanding human being. But if naturalism is true that natural inference just does not occur.ii Reppert terms this the “absoluteness argument.” He has eight more on the same principle I'll just deal with a couple. Laws of physics govern physical states without reference to what they are “about.” Then how can there be determinate meaning to the words we use? Our thought processes are incidental to the lumps of matter and how the laws of physics describe what they do. As Reppert points out “W.V. Quine argued that physical conformation leaves it indeterminate as to what a speaker of a foreign language means by...[a word] but would not this argument also show that there is no fact of the matter as to what Quine means by “naturalism” when he says “naturalism is true?” iii
At this point Reppert makes a deductive argument:

(1) if naturalism is true then there is no fact of the matter as to what somone's thought or statement is about.”
(2) But there are facts as to what someone's statement is about (implied by the Existence of Rational inference).
(3) Therefore, naturalism is falseiv
He raises the issue of eliminative materialists who think that if intentional brain states are not found nonscientific data then there must not be any. For that reason this group maintains that there are no beliefs. Of course it's not wasted upon Reppert that this is a belief. An example of eleminative materialists is Wayne Proudfoot in rejecting the idea of internal mental states due to the difficulty in solving the hard problem, He just makes it go away by refusing to accept there could be truth beyond the ability of his methodology to find it. I deal with this in chapter six ( on Reductionism)of my book God, Science, and Ideology.v Reppert et al published an article proving that the eliminative position is self refuting.vi