Upright Biped: It is not a physical property of tree rubber to mix with sulpher, heat itself, and then mould and mill itself into a sphere and dye itself red.

No, the Upright Biped, a natural being, does the mixing.

Upright Biped: So you plainly failed to explain the existence of a red plastic ball in terms of its physical properties.

The question was “What characteristics of a red plastic ball exist outside the realm of physical laws?” The answer is none, and you were provided the means to verify this for yourself. Your new question requires reference to the properties of other entities, such as a few common chemicals and an Upright Biped.

StephenB: Methodological naturalism is an arbitrary rule imposed by one group of scientists on another group of scientists.

We agree then that Methodological Naturalism dates to the Middle Sages.

StephenB: No such rule existed before Darwin, nor did one group of scientists ever presume to lecture another group of scientists on methods.

Your concern, then, is that there is some sort of “rule” being imposed. Your claim is that the concept may be old, but the rule is new. Is that correct?

StephenB: What is it about the word “rule” that you do not understand.

Is this a law? In every nation or just some? What prevents you from practicing your preferred investigations? It surely can’t be because someone wrote a book. Can you be specific? Exactly what observations, or whatever it is you think is being denied you, can be done to confirm your hypothesis, or whatever it is you call it?

My apologies for the delay in replying. I hope you had a good New Year celebration.

The following link explains what I’m talking about. It is David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness.”

how it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp”

Huxley seems to be arguing solely from personal incredulity, not on the basis of any evidence.

So far as we are aware, all of our experience, however rich, is the result of electrochemical patterns in our physical brains, all of which obey the laws of chemistry and physics (with, no doubt, some emergent phenomena due to the complexity of those brains).

Unless and until there is evidence otherwise, Occam’s razor applies. We have no necessity to multiply entities.

Thank you for your post, and sorry for my delay in responding to you.

I’m afraid I’ve taken even longer to reply to you. My apologies and I hope you had a good holiday.

“The essence of the scientific method is testability. To the extent that critiques of anything are testable, either against logic or objective, empirical evidence, they are subject to the scientific method.”

1. Testability alone does not and cannot define the scientific method. It’s too vague. At any given point in history, the scientific method is defined in terms of a particular set of recognized procedures that are considered appropriate for testing hypotheses. Over the course of time, scientists (and philosophers of science) may need to subject these procedures to further criticism and refinement. When they do so, they are stepping outside the scientific method as it is defined at that point in time.

That’s an interesting point. I’m not sure I agree that testability is vague, though. Certain testing procedures may work better or worse than others, but the ultimate arbiter is how well a prediction corresponds to objective, empirical evidence. Similarly, the value of a testing procedure is measured against how well it allows such predictions to be measured.

2. Insofar as one can speak of appropriate procedures for critiquing a method for testing hypotheses, it should be clear that what counts as an appropriate procedure for critiquing a method for testing hypotheses is not the same as what counts as an appropriate procedure for testing a hypothesis. The former is one level “up” from the latter. That’s what I meant when I wrote that meta-science could not be explained within the framework of science.

I see your point, but both are subject to comparison against objective, empirical evidence of their efficacy. In that sense, both are testable.

3. If I read you aright, you seem to be suggesting that the notion of a test is an “uber-concept” that serves as a yardstick for judging the validity of all other concepts. However, I do not think that this approach to science could possibly work. For in order to answer the question of what constitutes a good test, you would first need to know something about the world in which you were performing your tests – i.e. the framework of reality, or structure of the world. In other words, questions about what makes a good test presuppose at least a rudimentary grasp of metaphysics. That has to come first. Scientists need to explore the world and try to understand it before they can think of a good way of testing hypotheses about events occurring in it.

Another excellent point. My view is that mechanisms that allow our predictions to iterate to more closely approximate what we see in reality are more useful. They are tested, in fact, against the real world.

That being said, there is an assumption there that the real world is understandable. As long as it is recognized as an assumption that may lead to a contradiction if the real world is not actually understandable, I don’t think it interferes with using testability as a criteria.

You also wrote:

I agree with you that the process whereby we come up with ideas (or concepts) is constrained by our brains. “Constrain” is not the same thing as “determine,” however. A necessary condition is not a sufficient one.

While I found the rest of your comment interesting, I’ll stop my response here because the remainder follows from this point of disagreement (or confusion on my part). Do you have any objective, empirical evidence to suggest that there is anything other than a physical brain, operating according to laws of chemistry and physics, responsible for our thought processes? Without such evidence, speculating on possible other mechanisms is premature.

There is no such thing as “THE Scientific Method.”:

If you go to science fairs or read scientific journals, you may get the impression that science is nothing more than “question-hypothesis-procedure-data-conclusions.”

But this is seldom the way scientists actually do their work. Most scientific thinking, whether done while jogging, in the shower, in a lab, or while excavating a fossil, involves continuous observations, questions, multiple hypotheses, and more observations. It seldom “concludes” and never “proves.”

Putting all of science in the “Scientific Method” box, with its implication of a white-coated scientist and bubbling flasks, misrepresents much of what scientists spend their time doing. In particular, those who are involved in historical sciences work in a very different way—one in which questioning, investigating, and hypothesizing can occur in any order.

Its a complete head-shaker, starting with the term “special evolution”.

I assume Mr Hart is a TE, one who will invent phrases in order to swallow.

Methodological naturalism is an arbitrary rule imposed by one group of scientists on another group of scientists. No such rule existed before Darwin, nor did one group of scientists ever presume to lecture another group of scientists on methods. What is it about the word “rule” that you do not understand.

“Assuming you are really interested in making a plastic ball, you can start with naturally occurring rubber (from trees), vulcanize it by heating it with sulpher, then mould or mill the final product. Quite servicable. You can dye it your favorite colour too!”

So you plainly failed to explain the existence of a red plastic ball in terms of its physical properties. It is not a physical property of tree rubber to mix with sulpher, heat itself, and then mould and mill itself into a sphere and dye itself red.

Your smugness in that face of what is obvious is noted. It no doubt comes from an assumption on your part.

One which suggests you know more than you can prove through science.

There are some non sequiturs in this long sentence. Essentially, it is ok that certain subjective things (reality of form, the intelligibility of the universe, consciousness or (most importantly) ontological contingency) can be considered as evidence of something which is not stated here but which we assume is an intelligent creator but that somehow biological complexity is not. How is this logical?

While these subjective arguments and the laws of physics (which are very objective ) are solid arguments, to classify the fact that biological organizational complexity is so absurdly unlikely by natural processes as not a good argument is how can I say illogical. A major argument that is based on science and data is suspect to Hart. Why? No reason is given by Hart other than his objection. The extremely high likelihood that natural processes could not produce this organized complexity but is routinely produced by intelligent intervention seems to be meaningless to Hart. The production of information and the use of this information to control highly complex functions is at the essence of ID. The fact that this information has never been produced by naturalistic processes and then Hart criticizes ID, astonishes (and I should be careful how I use the term) credulity.

My guess is that Hart has an agenda and it is not seeking the truth or wishes to have a conversation about it.

An aside. In his full review, Hart uses the term special evolution more than once and I was curious if Dawkins actually used the term since Denton uses it in his book, Evolution, a Theory in Crisis. So I downloaded Dawkins book onto my wife’s Kindle and searched for the term special. Dawkins does not use the term special evolution in his book.