If the Darwinists are right and Fuller is wrong, we cannot hope to understand nature

In the post below, where U Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller replies to the attempted hatchet job by third-rate Darwin hack Sahotra Sarkar, I think this point made by Fuller is especially critical:

The overarching sense of scientific progress and its concomitant faith in greater explanatory unity and increased predictive control of nature over time: All of these trade on an ID-based view of the world, in which human beings enjoy a special relationship to reality that enables us to acquire a deep knowledge, most of which affords no particular reproductive advantage and more likely puts our continued survival at risk. Armed only with a Darwinian view of the world – and without the implicit ID backstory – it becomes difficult to justify the continuation of the scientific enterprise in this full-bodied sense.

The idea that we can understand nature is daily retailed to science students in publicly funded schools. We want them to know that we can somehow acquire the ability to understand reality – but that requires explanation.

And the explanation cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian view is, as I have noted before, that our minds are illusions created by our neurons – which are in turn under the control of our selfish genes. These systems did not originate in order to discover truth but to enable us to leave offspring.

So Sarkar’s theories cannot be true to nature. They can only be meaningless (but for those who take them seriously, they may possibly result in a need for infant shoes).

That is okay with me, to be sure. But producing the infants to wear the shoes is not an intellectual enterprise. So whatever is going on with the intellect, and therefore about philosophy of science, is not Darwinian, apparently.

For that, advantage Fuller.

Also at Colliding Universes, my blog on theories about our universe:

The best that a Darwinist can aspire to is a thought that is meaningless (but possibly productive of a need for infant shoes).

Major media, imagining themselves sober, think there are many universes, not just double vision

Flatland: Helping us think about the dimensions of our universe

Science fiction mag discovers intelligent design theory

Weird news from far-off galaxies …

Big Bang exploded? Seriously, is there room for reasonable skepticism about the Big Bang?

The number 137 has its own Web page? Why?

Origin of life: Random origin of life was exploded by 1970s discovery – who didn’t get the memo?

Astronomer argues that we can test whether Earth is fine-tuned as a science lab

Our unique solar system is less probable than our universe? – a reader writes