Adelphiasophism
Naturalism and Science—True by Practice
Abstract
It is manifestly unhealthy to be one kind of person in the role of believer and another in other areas of life.John Bowden, SCM
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 05, 1999
Gnosis, Belief, Faith
When we destroy our environment, we do not destroy the Goddess, though we might scar her, but we certainly destroy ourselves. Through the Goddess’s endless cycles of living we have evolved wonderful gifts and the ability to appreciate the blessings of the womb of the Goddess in which we live. Gnosis is the realisation that we are behaving like a monster, trying to gnaw our way out of the womb into a supposedly greater world, but simply destroying the only one that preserves and succours us.
The fate of the planet depends upon our thoughts and our actions. All life is interconnected and all life is sacred. We can self-righteously pour cups full of chlorine-based bleach down our loos and sinks to kill off nasty germs, but when the chlorine poisons the atmosphere, we too will die.
The hurt child within us is our intuitive self who understands what we are doing to ourselves and our world. It is properly divine because it understands its place in the cosmos that is itself divine. The divine child or the gnostic spark is our understanding that we are part of the Goddess and can only seek to ignore it at our peril.
Adelphiasophists will accept nothing as fact or knowledge that cannot be verified by reason and evidence, and inasmuch as it affects decisions made in the macro world in which we live, also feels right intuitively. Suppose we are given some absolute truth, or can infer some truth by methods that we know from experience lead to verifiable truth—we cannot know our information is objectively true unless we have a means of verifying it. In either case, we do not have knowledge until our sources or inferences are confirmed by further experience.
We might have information but not “know” it is true. Knowledge is always relative, for we infer or receive information as some state of consciousness caused by the external reality that we call matter. We can know nothing except that which affects our state of consciousness. Knowledge is limited and subject to chance.
Luck and ill-luck, good and bad fortune, are events which are due to accidental circumstances, over which humans have no control. By accident IBM bought DOS when they would have preferred CP/M with the result that Bill Gates has amassed a large fortune. Without this lucky event, the outcome is unlikely to have been so beneficial for Bill Gates however good a software engineer or business executive he is.
Belief is a choice made based on some evidence though not sufficient to count as knowledge. Everyone has beliefs, even scientists, but they are not immutable like a religious belief, an immutable and irrational dogma. A hypothesis is a temporary belief to be verified by observation and evidence. If it is not verified, it is discarded, if it is, it might be elevated into a law of nature.
Faith is an acceptance, on unreliable or inadequate evidence of some declaration made by another. As an act of faith, one can accept as a belief someone else’s assertion but those who do so are simply leaving themselves open to charlatanry. There is no obligation on any one to believe anything on the word of another without sufficient evidence. To accept any statement, whether concerning religion or anything else, on blind faith is to be guilty of credulity.
Scepticism is the highest of duties, and faith the one unpardonable sin.T H Huxley
To accept religious dogma on faith while rejecting truths acquired by scientific research, and proved by reason and experience to be true, is to wilfully choose ignorance.
Yet some who accept reason and the validity of experience can also chose faith. Somerset writer, Ralph Estlin, once proposed to write a book on “scientists whose dedication to logic, rationality and the scientific methodology of empirical analysis and deductive reasoning is only equalled by their devout, unquestioning, burning and unquenchable belief in the existence of a supernatural beings who possessed what can only be described as an inordinate fondness for humans.” The title of the book was to be “Yes, We have No Hosannas.” It was to be sent free of charge to all scientists that insist there is no contradiction or hypocrisy in their devotion to science and to God.
The confusion of such words as knowledge, belief, and faith has led to disastrous results. In social and domestic life, serious injuries have been inflicted on individuals and their reputations. In public life, wholesale cruelty and persecution have taken place, most often under the name of religion. Dogmas concerning the unknowable have been forced upon people as truths, which were only pious beliefs.
A first principle of Adelphiasophism is that we should accept no statement as true on the simple word of another, without verification. The chance of verification might not be immediately forthcoming but we should retain our right to doubt, even while accepting something pro tem.
Science
Women should not tilt against science and rationality. Scientists might be overwhelmingly male but science itself has no penis. The scientific method would be the same if all scientists were female. The main interests of the investigators would be different but the method itself would not change. If some form of misguided political correctness were to enjoin matriarchs to alter the method of science, they would soon find it did not work.
Lysenko tried it in Soviet Russia, sucking up to the political bigotry of Stalin, but nothing now remains of Lysenkoism because it was wrong and was only made to appear correct for a while by fiddling results. Women should also beware of tarring the method of science with the uses made of its discoveries by patriarchal society with its wholly unnatural hyper-competitiveness.
Assertion of such falsehoods, in spite of the rules of the scientific method, will lead us only to the sterility of patriarchal religion. The religion of the Goddess has to be scientific because science is the means the Goddess has given us to understand her.
Modern civilisation depends on the methods and fruits of science. Science alone has given a progressively better understanding of and application of Nature. As it builds up, scientific knowledge remains essentially true because it is continually tried and tested by a reliable method and found to work. Science and engineering have given us reliable sources of food, clothing, shelter, energy, medicine, communication, transportation, information and entertainment. No other human endeavour can make these claims Science, solely because of its method, is the most successful human endeavour in history. Because of the continuing success of science, it and scientists achieved great prestige among intellectuals and the public. Civilisation would indeed collapse without science.
Science is usually thought of as a body of knowledge but, really, it is investigation—the body of knowledge is what the investigation found. Scientific method depends on empiricism, rationalism, and scepticism. Observation provides empirical evidence used to propose hypotheses that rationally explain natural causes by predicting natural effects. But scientific hypotheses are treated sceptically—scientists attempt to show that they are false, testing them by further empirical observations or experiments to check that their predictions are true. If so, the hypothesis can tentatively be accepted as true, and used in more elaborate hypotheses that ultimately can explain complex conditions.
Scientific method is disciplined, critical thinking and practice. Critical thinking is scientific thinking. We need to think critically to be successful. In practice, conclusions are tested objectively against reality, not against statutes and case law or holy books. So, it is in science rather than law or theology that critical thinking has developed highest. Natural science does not have a monopoly on scientific method, or on the empiricism, rationalism, and scepticism that lie beneath. Scientific method is of wide applicability. It can solve problems and answer questions, not only in science but in business, government, jurisprudence, the arts, the humanities, the social sciences and philosophy. But science remains the most visible practitioner of scientific method because its use in other disciplines is rarely taught.
Naturalism
Science could not work without unity and lawfulness in Nature Without these, Nature’s reality could not be objectively understood and the pursuit of scientific knowledge would be useless. Naturalism expresses the unity and lawfulness of Nature, but naturalism is not a premise of science, a common criticism. It is an hypothesis that has been tested and repeatedly corroborated, such that we now know it is true within that range of our experience. Providing that the universe is based on laws that can be elucidated, naturalism is unconcerned what it is made of. However, the hypothesis that the world is material is so successful in practice, it seems idle to challenge it and naturalism has adopted it too.
Naturalism is established or rejected by examining and justifying its statements as a scientist would examine and justify the statements of a scientific theory. Statements thus verified can be accepted as true knowledge—they are supported by empirical evidence, they have a reasoned and logical structure, and they have been exhaustively tested and corroborated. As with all scientific truths and unlike theological ones, the truth of naturalism is established through scepticism and held tentatively subject to future tests of its statements and their implications. So, as far as we can tell, naturalism is true.
The Hypothetico-Deductive Method
Science and naturalism are not the same thing. Before the nineteenth century, naturalism existed only as a non-rigorous method occasionally used by natural philosophers. It is a philosophical novelty in that it developed largely due to the influence of science.
Naturalism begins with Galileo and Isaac Newton, who sought to explain Nature by theoretical and experimental descriptions of matter and their motions. The outstanding success of this method led others to emulate them, and the understanding of the universe was begun. Galileo and Newton were not naturalists. They attributed supernatural causes, through the hand of God, to things that they thought could not be explained naturally. Until the late eighteenth century, most scientists agreed with them, but with the “Enlightenment,” scientists abandoned supernatural explanations for natural ones. Biology was the last science to emerge from supernaturalism and the vital force of life.
The hypothetico-deductive method is central to the scientific method. It means that scientists make hypotheses to explain their observations. The hypotheses are restricted to those from which testable deductions can be made. Charles Darwin deliberately used this approach to scientific method in his effort to establish the fact and his theory of evolution in 1859. In the twentieth century, Karl Popper championed and extended the idea in his work on prediction, deduction, testing, and falsification in science, but testability dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century when scientists began to reject supernatural explanations.
Since the supernatural is not amenable to prediction and so supernatural conjectures cannot be tested scientifically, the hypothetico-deductive method and empirical-sceptical testing of hypotheses demands naturalism. The scientific method did not exclude supernaturalism at any particular moment or for arbitrary reasons. Yet, by the start of the twentieth century, science had no place for supernaturalism within its bounds. It had become solely naturalistic. Naturalism as a necessary part of science had developed gradually, alongside science, with the practice and understanding of scientists. Scientists abandoned supernatural causes because they explained nothing and led to no progress in knowledge whereas natural explanations began an avalanche of discovery.
Naturalism as a Philosophy
Naturalism as a philosophy of existence developed from the hypothesis of naturalism by American Philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. It reached its zenith, as a twentieth century American philosophy, in the 1930s and 40s and is enjoying a resurgence.
Naturalism would not exist as a philosophy without the prior existence of science, but shares its status with the philosophy of existentialism. Scientists discovered the meaninglessness and purposelessness of the cosmos, and now this fact is established in the philosophy of naturalism.
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.George Gaylord Simpson
People are arrogant enough to want to feel important, and that their lives have a purpose. Before science made its discoveries, they attributed cosmic purposes to God. To deal with the discovery that they do not exist for any purpose and that God himself has no purpose in a scientific world, people still primitive enough to need religion try to shoot the messenger. Existentialism deals with human realisation of natural purposelessness, and the task of accepting and overcoming it.
Naturalism is the philosophy that science created and that science now follows with such success. It is central to the success of science, being the view that Nature is all there is, everything is natural and Nature’s truths and laws can be discovered by the methods of science, methods like observation, evidence and reason which lead to the prediction of natural occurrences. It follows that nothing in Nature is supernatural or transcendental. Yet, despite the success of science, naturalism is an unpopular philosophy. The majority of people—90% in the US—do not believe naturalism. They believe supernaturalism, the antithesis of naturalism.
What is Knowable
What is spiritually uplifting about naturalism?—the act of freeing ourselves from the darkness of medieval mysticism and instead finding that spirituality is there for us to react with in the most intimate way. Once we realise the pleasure and meaning of it, let us substitute the mystery of the realisable unknown in place of the unrealisable unknown. This is true spirituality.
Most generally, naturalism places us firmly within the natural realm, extending from quarks to quasars. The scope of this realm in our sciences is staggering. It is a more varied, complex and vast creation than any provided by religion, offering an infinite vista of questions to engage us. Naturalism gives us the open-ended excitement of being part of something whose dimensions, purpose and precise nature are offered to us by the Goddess as potentially knowable.
The whole of humanity might not live long enough to know what is knowable, but it is in principle not a conundrum like “Life after Death.” In place of a task which seems mysterious because of its impossibility, we face a task which also might be impossible, but only because of our limitations, not because we believe in something which defies the laws of Nature. Our quest for understanding might be unending but we can feel a sense of getting there rather than the disatisfaction of having to wait for death to know the mysteries of life.
Is it not astonishing that we are made up of inanimate matter yet are alive and able to think? We have only to meditate on this or any feature of Nature and we shall start the spiritual journey. The stuff of our bodies came from the big bang, was transmuted by stars and expelled in supernovas, connecting us to the most far flung corners in space and time of the universe—the whole body of the Goddess herself. Who cannot feel her spirituality knowing this. And we do know it! It is proper knowledge not like “knowledge” of life after death. The totality of Nature’s aspects, knowing that we comprehend just a fraction of what might be known, and knowing that there is no end to it gives us feelings of profound awe, delight, and mystery, a feeling of revelation but revelation that can be confirmed through the Goddess’s gift. Appreciation of naturalism is more uplifting than any religion.
Ultimate Purpose
From a naturalistic perspective there is no goal-oriented purpose to existence. The cosmos was not created with a task assigned to it by someone beyond all existence. The cosmos is the Goddess and encompasses everything. Like everything else, we therefore find our individual purpose in relation to the rest of existence. Good or ill are conceptions in relation to the totality of creation. Feedbacks can be positive—assisting the cosmos to survive—or negative—impeding survival of the Goddess. Positive feedback is Good, negative feedback is evil.
Life is therefore not devoid of meaning. Though there is no absolute ultimate purpose, every mote within creation has a purpose, and it is the same whatever the mote might be. And if we were somehow to discover that the cosmos itself had some incredible purpose, would it be likely to change our lives? If NASA and the US President declare that mankind’s purpose is to get to Mars, it will mean nothing to the lives of the large majority of us. And the US President is infinitesimally insignificant compared with the Goddess.
Living means being in the Goddess’s biofeedback mechanisms which means that we can be positive or negative. We could live out many lifetimes without knowing this and most things that ever lived do. But we know! It is therefore our duty to be positive.
It is not a duty to the Goddess, who is willing if not happy to allow us to be expunged. Our duty is to our own kind, to our children and descendants, and ultimately, strange though it might seem to some other creature, the creature into which we might evolve. Is it to be a superior creature, a lesser creature or no creture at all because we have decided upon the negative oprion and have killed ourselves off. The human drama is set on a much larger stage than we normally consider. While we are free of any confining ultimate purpose, we will participate in a positive or negative feedback within the biosphere whatever we do. We are unique on earth in having a choice.
Some naturalists deny free will. They seem to be arguing against a belief that free-will implies an agent outside of normal experience, presumably the soul, to make the decision. These naturalists conclude that all our behaviour including our decisions are preconditioned by our circumstances. Nevertheless, “our actions have causal effects which sometimes make all the difference.” Yet, T Clark can add:
We can’t help but act as we do, constituted as we are, but we can’t, except within very broad limits, predict just what we’ll do next, or what will happen to us. We don’t know just what we’ll think or feel or say in the very next moment, let alone the next day, week, or year.
In practice then we have free will and the argument is rather sophist. In fact, all animals make choices and, when the animals are not sentient, they are the sum total of their experience. The same applies to us although we are conscious of making a choice. The point, however, is that the experience of complex and inquisitive creatures is itself complex and cannot be weighed up by rational processes. We either try to put boundaries on the experience that counts and attempt to use reason to reach a choice or we abandon the attempt and trust to luck, which means, unless we literally toss a coin, we use intuition.
In doing this we are like other creatures and using a much neglected facility that evolution has given us. Yet because we are conscious animals part of our experience is the codes of ethics of the society that we live in. The multiplicity of decisions we take daily matter to few people other than ourselves, so whether they are conditioned or independent decisions does not matter, but when we take descions that impinge upon the rest of society and particularly have a bearing on its social taboos, then free will really comes into question.
So we find that, whereas our behaviour might be fully conditioned by our make up and experience, for conscious creatures it involves consciously agreeing or denying certain rules and codes of group behaviour. Whatever it is that motivates us to break a code, and that is when it matters, we must do it consciously, knowing that our fellow creatures have placed a ban on it. That is free-will.
Once people accept the Goddess, many codes of behaviour and taboos fall into place as ways of creating positive rather than negative feedback cycles. If we do not accept the Goddess we have to justify accepting codes that are thousands of years old. People will have to exercise their free will to throw these ancient codes into the dustbin of history where they belong.
Being part of the Goddess’s whole being means we, nor anyone, supreme panjandrum or otherwise, cannot step outside the system to observe it. There is no perfect truth to be attained, or salvation to come later, so this world is unique to us. There is no mystical final understanding to seek nor are we forced to cling to any priest dictated certainty.
The purest mysticism will be had through contemplation of the wonders we see in our unique and beautiful world. There is purpose on looking upon this that no one can find by contemplating their navel, or the thousand names of God, or by staring intently at His fancied glory in heaven until we are blinded to the jay in the woods or the campion in the hedge. We find wonder and enchantment in the least things of life. When you gasp in astonishment, look up with joy and feel with arms stretched out: “It’s just wonderful” then the Goddess has touched you and you know we cannot let it go. This unheralded moment shows that nothing is profane, all is sacred and our purpose and duty becomes clear—to preserve it.
