The Ideology of Scientism (part 2)
We left off talking about E.O. Wilson.
Wilson started
sociobiology and then it transmogrified into evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary
psychology seeks to explain psychological traits in terms of direct relation to
evolutionary needs. Wilson didn’t
just invent evolutionary psychology out of the air, there were other thinkers
involved. From 1963 to 1974 William Hamilton, George Williams, Robert Trivers,
John Maynard Smith pioneered in the sort of understanding we find in
evolutionary psychology.[1] Wilson
galvanized this trend with his work Sociobiology: the New Synthesis
which has been said to mark the epoch.[2]
In speaking of the spread of evolutionary psychology Wright says “a new world
view is dawning.”[3] He uses the phrase world
view literally. He says it’s a body of theory and fact, much like quantum
theory, or molecular biology, but unlike that, “it’s also a way of seeing every
day life. Once truly grasped (it is easier to grasp than either of them
[quantum theory or molecular biology]) it can entirely alter one’s perception
of social reality.”[4] Well that’s actually one
good definition of ideology. That fits my concept of ideology: One idea that
defines the world and determines how one sees everything filtering all
perceptions through the lens of its truth regime.
The Questions addressed by the new view
range from the mundane to the spiritual and touch on just about everything that
matters: romance, love, sex (are men and/or women built for monogamy? What
circumstances can make them more or less so?); friendship and enmity (what is
the evolutionary logic behind office politics—for that matter politics in
general; selfishness, self sacrifice, guilt, (why did natural selection give us
that vast guilt repository known as the conscience? Is it truly a guide to
moral behavior?)…[5]
Evolutionary psychology draws biologically oriented thinkers
and is rejected by social science types such as anthropologists and
sociologists, who chafe under the reductionism of the view point. They refuse
to accept the explanatory power of naturalistic models. This is largely either
the result of or fueled by the nature vs. nurture debate.[6]
There have been criticisms of evolutionary psychology to the extent that it is
seen as ideological. Stephen J. Gould, as David J. Buller tells us, “disparaged
evolutionary psychology as ‘pseudo science’ and Darwinian fundamentalism.”[7]
Buller goes to on to talk about the nature of his own flirtation with
evolutionary psychology. He was lured into interest and then “once I began to focus on evolutionary
psychology, I seemed to encounter it everywhere I turned…it seemed to be all
over television, not just on highbrow channels like PBS…ABC Special Report with
John Stossel examining the evolutionary psychology of sex differences…” [8]
This was in the period where there was also some popular idea like “Men are
From Mars, Women are from Venus,” or men hunt and women nest, a lot of it
backing the so called “Regan Revolution.” He goes to describe falling out of
love with the theory.
Initially I was completely captivated
by evolutionary psychology, I was certain that it was providing a deep and
accurate understanding of human mentality and behavior…after six months
research it was unclear to me how everything that went by the name
‘evolutionary psychology’ fit together and I began having serious doubts…a
years research latter, it was clear to me that there were distinctly different
lines of research being conducted under the evolutionary psychology label. I
became convinced that the line of research that had garnered the most
attention, both within academia and through popular media was wrong in almost
every detail.[9]
The first
aspect that seemed to draw Buller to evolutionary psychology was a sense that
genes almost have a mind of their own, they are the one’s actually guiding our
moves. “I recalled a vivid passage in Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene that
describes us as survival machines for our genes, which created us body and
mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational for our existence.” [10]
The way he describes his infatuation, and subsequent disillusionment, sounds
like a teenager’s crush or a young student turning to the Romance of Marxism
and protest in the sixties. One can see how easy it might be to get caught up
in such a romance. At least at one time, almost everyone who took an intro
psychology class in college would go through a phase of spouting pop psychology
at everyone and trying to diagnose problems with pseudo Freudian sounding
labels. That process might even be more alluring if tied to Darwin
and modern research. Evolutionary psychology has generated a fiercely loyal
following. Buller again, “…I found evolutionary psychologists dismissing their
critics as anti-scientific, politically correct postmodernists, or closet
creationists. Any skepticism about the claims of evolutionary psychology was
typically portrayed as a product of dogmatic indoctrination in the social
sciences…”[11]
Exacerbating the conflicts, some
evolutionary psychologists present their paradigm as replacing, rather than
coexisting with, current paradigms, alienating advocates of epistemological
diversity. An alternative explanatory model is presented - one that is grounded
in evolutionary theory, reflects recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and
developmental psychology, and achieves a dialectical balance between nature and
nurture.[12]
Evolutionary psychology seems to present a totalizing view
that some times overshadows even other scientific work, not as a result of
careful scholarship, but merely because it is the word form the camp.
We can see
the same kind of ideological defense at work in the wanton attacks upon Thomas
Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos. [13]
Nagel is a philosopher at NYU and achieved fame and respect for his 1974 essay
“What’s it like to be a Bat?”[13]
This work has become a standard among those who seek to disprove the
reductionist’s take on brain/mind issues. His Mind and Cosmos has drawn
fire from many quarters, no doubt including evolutionary psychology. It’s not
clear what he means by “Neo Darwininan” but no doubt it must include
evolutionary psychology. By labeling it “materialist” he’s taking in the
largest possible group since that would include not only materialists but most
naturalists and physicalists. He’s arguing that we can’t have a grand theory of
everything as long as that theory is coming out of a ideological camp that only
allows one view point. That is essentially the nature of the Neo Darwinian
understanding. That’s not such a radical thing to say, but the tendency of the
scientistic Zeitgeist won’t
allow him to say it; the tendency is to reduce all knowledge to one form of
knowledge. Not so much because it’s connected to atheism, although atheism is a
part of it, but because it’s accepted as scientific fact in modernity, Neo
Darwinian view point predominates because science predominates. Philosophy and
Religion are not treated as knowledge, so they are not treated as valid
alternative view points.
The major thrust of the attack as been to label Nagel as
“creationist” or “Intelligent Design” which he famously is not. It doesn’t help
him that the Intelligent Design’s Discovery Institute has lauded the book.
Brain Leiter and Michael Weisberg began the assault by attempting to tear it to
pieces in The Nation, then
Harvard psychologist, champion of evolutionary psychology Steven Pinker
dismissed it as “shoddy reasoning,” not likely. New York Times Review of Books
and London Review of books panned it. The Guardian (America) named it the “most despised science book of 2012.”[15] Alva Noë argued that Nagel is being
confronted by Orthodoxy, “and they are responding the way the Orthodox
respond.”[16] Nagel didn’t attack
evolutionary psychology per se but one assumes that’s part of the
“Neo-Darwinan” crowd. The reaction of anger certainly betrays and ideological
vent, a “them and us,” a certain mentality of solider confronting the enemy.
There is a
cadre of physicists who are busy beating up on philosophy, even though their
views can actually be described as philosophical. This is another aspect of the
ideological tentacles claiming their grasp on a slice of science. These
physicists are primarily but not exclusively part of the new atheist movement.
Professor Massimo Pigliucci (City University of New York) complains about how
in the days of Einstein and Bohr Physicists were intellectually sophisticated
and respectful of other branches of knowledge. They were honored to work
together with philosophers and theologians. [17]
In fact there is a picture of the young theologian Paul Tillich together with Einstein
and other physicists, philosophers, and theologians at a conference in Davos Switzerland,
march 18, 1928.[18] That meeting may have
had some influence on the production of Einstein’s publication arguing against
the personal God. Tillich responded with an article, not chiding Einstein but
lauding his views, yet putting them into a larger theological perspective that
didn’t confine God to the realm of dead matter, nor did it defend God as a
magnification of human psyche.[19]
This is the kind of exchange that used to exist between philosophers and
physicists. Now, Pigliucci complains, it seems physicists are more concerned
with attacking philosophy. “These days it’s much more likely to encounter
physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merely go about
dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons.” [20]
Nonetheless, let’s get to the core of
Krauss’ attack on philosophy. He says: “Every time there's a leap in physics,
it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away
to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of
philosophers.” This clearly shows two things: first, that Krauss does not understand
what the business of philosophy is (it is not to advance science…);
second, that Krauss doesn’t mind playing armchair psychologist, despite the
dearth of evidence for his pop psychological “explanation.” Okay, others can
play the same game too, so I’m going to put forth the hypothesis that the
reason physicists such as Weinberg, Hawking and Krauss keep bashing philosophy
is because they suffer from an intellectual version of the Oedipus Complex (you
know, philosophy was the mother of science and all that... you can work out the
details of the inherent sexual frustrations from there).[21]
He continues amusingly in the vain. Basically he shows that
the physicists want to deal with philosophy as though its goal is to reproduce
science. All of their criticisms are oriented around the notion that philosophy
is not contributing to scientific understanding but is reacting to it.
Essentially Pigliucci’s entire publication is in reaction to this movement he
perceives of science types fighting against and trying to take over philosophy
(and liberal arts in general) this is made explicit and typified in is article
“on the Difference between Science and Philosophy.” [22]
George Musser sums it up by affirming that in the days of Einstein philosophy
and physics were close. As a sign of the drift apart he points to the Weinberg
chapter title “Against Philosophy,” from the book Dreams of a Final Theory
(Vintage 1994).[23]
He also points to what may be a trend of the move back to reunion due to a
sense that the search for grand theory is stalling. “At meetings where the two
groups come together, they strike me as quite compatible. The philosophers in
attendance tend to have training in physics, and the physicists, even if they
can’t tell their Hegel from their Heidegger, are eager to learn.”[24]
But are they compatible because they are becoming more attune to tolerating
diverse opinion or because they are all becoming scientism’s pawns?
There seems
to be an amalgam of several ideologies that turn on the same naturalistic
assumptions and that really go together. It’s often the case that one holds all
of them at the same time, they include: materialism, physicalism, naturalism,
and reductionism. Reductionism is a mythological procedure or assumption in
many scientific fields. It also amounts to a philosophical stand within
naturalism, et al. All of these “isms” go together, bleed into one another, and
form an overarching set of ideas or a sort of “meta ideology,” so to speak. We
could break it down endlessly into types of reductionism and so forth, but
there’s no point in doing that. For brevity sake I’ll just refer to this whole
amalgam as “Scientism,” when speaking in general of the major flow of ideas
around that admixture, and as “reductionism” when talking about the connection
to the assumptions of any form of reductionism. There are different kinds of
naturalism and this may become confusing but I basically mean scientific
naturalism as an opposition to religious thinking. The terms materialism and
physicalism are related. They can be used interchangeably but have different
histories. Phsyicalism is usually preferred as it recognizes that matter is
also a form of energy so while matter isn’t all there is, it’s not necessarily
the basis of all there is, it’s related to energy. That term reflects the
reality of a modern understanding of science. Materialism is the older word and
came out of the mechanistic era when the workings of the physical world were
compared to a machine. “Materialism” was used in opposition to the concept of
spirit. Physicalism was introduced in the 1930’s by two prominent members of
positivism’s Vienna Circle,
Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap.[25]
Naturalism is the more general term. Turning to an atheist movement
understanding of these terms:
Materialism (or physicalism) can signify either a broad metaphysical
view, or, more narrowly, a type of theory of mind. Metaphysical materialism
is a specific kind of naturalism
which contends that everything that exists is either physical or
dependent upon the physical. Broadly understood, reductionist materialism
maintains that everything is strictly physical; more narrowly, it
maintains that the mind (at least) is purely physical. Nonreductive
materialism also allows the existence of nonphysical properties that inhere
in, or emerge from, a physical substrate. Consequently, it is sometimes called emergent
materialism or property dualism. In the broad sense, nonreductive
materialism holds that everything is physical or at least dependent upon the
physical; and in the narrower sense it holds that the mind can have both
physical and nonphysical aspects even though it must be instantiated in a
physical system like the brain.
While metaphysical materialism entails a materialist theory of
mind, one can be a materialist about the mental without believing that everything
is physical (e.g., some
theologians are nonreductive materialists about the human mind but believe
that God is neither physical nor dependent upon the physical; and some
philosophers who think that the mind is purely physical also believe in nonphysical
abstract objects).[26]
Even within
their own movement those who understand the terms acknowledge that they are
metaphysics and don’t try to pass them off as science. “Philosophical
materialism (physicalism) is the metaphysical view that there is only one
substance in the universe and that substance is physical, empirical or
material. Materialists believe that spiritual substance does not exist.
Paranormal, supernatural or occult phenomena are either delusions or reducible
to physical forces.”[27]
The amalgam we are talking about doesn’t necessarily limit itself to atheists.
E.O. Wilson is not an atheist. Nevertheless, in some quarters of the atheist
movement adherents are constantly beating the drums for these philosophies
while denying that’ it’s a movement and trying to pass them off as science
proper. They try to juxtapose their view of the world, which they claim to be
factual and scientific, while at the same time imposing these philosophical
ideas as we see Thomas doing above. At the philosophical level academics make
no attempt to hide the fact that this is philosophy, no holds barred. Geoffrey
Hellman and Frank Wilson Thompson state:
In [11] we laid the groundwork for a
comprehensive materialism based upon physical science which the problems of
ontology and of the interrelations between higher order sciences—biology,
psychology, social theory, and so forth on the one hand, and basic physical
science on the other could be correctly stated and accessed. It was our aim to
formulate principles of phsyicalism which are strong enough to incorporate the
kinds of appeals to the comprehensive and fundamental character of physical
science that materialists have sought to make…[28]
Materialism and phsyicalism are metaphysical assumptions.
Both of these constitute philosophical positions; they are going beyond the
domain and nature of science.
There are several
types of phsyicalism. Supervenience physicialism, for example, and minimal phsyicalism. The word
supervenience is currently enjoying a renaissance in philosophical circles. It
basically means, as used in philosophical circles, that there are two sets of
characteristics and one set is dependent upon the other or connected with it in
such a way that a change in one means a change in the other. The concept came
out of meta ethics but is being used in physics and philosophy of mind and
other venues.[29]
Daniel
Stoljar illustrates supervenience with the use of an analogy by David Lewis.
The analogy is to a dot-matrix picture, that is just dots and the global
properties are formed solely from patterns in the dots. The pictures supervene
on the patterns of dots and non dots. No two pictures could differ in their
global properties unless they differ in the placement of dots.
Lewis's example gives us one way to introduce the basic idea of
physicalism. The basic idea is that the physical features of the world are like
the dots in the picture, and the psychological or biological or social features
of the world are like the global properties of the picture. Just as the global
features of the picture are nothing but a pattern in the dots, so too the
psychological, the biological and the social features of the world are nothing
but a pattern in the physical features of the world. To use the language of
supervenience, just as the global features of the picture supervene on the
dots, so too everything supervenes on the physical, if physicalism is true. [30]
Lewis says that “no two pictures can be identical in the arrangement of
dots but different in their global properties”.[31]
The other versions of Physicialism include “minimal,” “token
and type,” “reductive and non reductive,” and “a priori and a
posteriori.” Minimal physicalism is tied up with philosophy of mind. That’s
the version that’s always discussed wherever people discuss the brain/mind
issue. It’s in this venue that we most often find arguments about the falsehood
of physicialism.[32] Minimal physicalism is
basically the core commitment of all phsyicalism. Supervenience physicialism is
neutral in a good many issues. Minimal physicalism is the basic core belief of
the physical nature of everything.
There can
be no doubt as to the philological basis of these ideas. While rank and file
atheists profess their disgust for philosophy because “it’s making stuff up”
the leaders of their movement have always and still are basing their world view
and their movement upon obviously philosophical view points. Materialism is in
line with the classic definition of metaphysics, reasoning about that which is
beyond our observation, and phsyicalism takes up where materialism left off.
Physicalism is completely rooted in philosophy of mind. Physicalism serves as
the basis for atheist thinking.
Andrew
Brown, himself an “old” kind of atheist, identifies and summarizes the ideology
of the new atheists based upon the works of their major leaders and spokesmen.
So, who are they? The ideas I claim are
distinctive of the new atheists have been collected from Richard Dawkins, Sam
Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Jerry Coyne, the American physicist Robert L.
Park, and a couple of blogging biologists, P Z Myers and Larry Moran. They have
two things in common. They are none of them philosophers and, though most are
scientists, none study psychology, history, the sociology of religion, or any
other discipline which might cast light on the objects of their execration. All
of them make claims about religion and about believers which go far beyond the
mere disbelief in God which I take to be the distinguishing mark of an
atheist….
❄ There is something called "Faith" which can be defined as unjustified belief held in the teeth of
the evidence. Faith is primarily a matter of false propositional belief.
❄ The cure for faith is science: The existence of God is a
scientific question: either he exists or he doesn't. "Science is the only
way of knowing – everything else is just superstition" [Robert L. Park]
❄ Science is the opposite of religion, and will lead people
into the clear sunlit uplands of reason. "The real war is between
rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while
religion is the most common form of superstition" [Jerry Coyne] "I am
not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all
gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have
been or will be invented." [Dawkins]
❄ In this great struggle, religion is doomed. Enlightened
common sense is gradually triumphing and at the end of the process, humanity
will assume a new and better character, free from the shackles of religion.
Without faith, we would be better as well as wiser. Conflict is primarily a
result of misunderstanding, of which Faith is the paradigm. (Looking for links,
I just came across a lovely example of this in the
endnotes to the Selfish Gene, where lawyers are dismissed as "solving
man-made problems that should never have existed in the first place".)
❄ Religion exists. It is essentially something like
American fundamentalist protestantism, or Islam. More moderate forms are false
and treacherous: if anything even more dangerous, because they conceal the
raging, homicidal lunacy that is religion's true nature. [Sam Harris]
❄ Faith, as defined above, is the most dangerous and wicked
force on earth today and the struggle against it and especially against Islam
will define the future of humanity. [Everyone]
All of these propositions will be found in the authors I have cited as
well as in the comments
to religious articles here. I sometimes think that only the last two are unique
to the new atheists: you can certainly find the others in earlier authors. But
those are the six doctrines which I would reject when saying rude things about
the new atheists.[33]
Each of these opinionated positions summarized by Brown
appeals to science as its justification; none of them can really be based upon
science. Take the counter intuitive opinion that moderate religion is more
dangerous than extreme religion because it’s somehow concealing some hidden
lunacy (there’s a clinical scientific term, “lunacy.”) within it. That’s the
sort of scientific thinking that motivated the mental health industry in the
days of witch trails and brain stones. There is no data justifying this
bromide. It’s obviously a slogan serving to energize the base and prevent
defection to more reasonable versions of religion. At the same time it casts
the aura of science over the evil essence of religion. The implications of
essentialism alone mark it as totally unscientific. Science, in the hands of
the new atheist leaders, takes on a role and a make up that real scientists
would never recognize as scientific. It becomes more than ideology, something
close to religion itself.
These view
points bear the ear marks of ideology. They reduce knowledge to one kind of
knowledge and they reduce the world to one idea that fits everything. They form
the basis of a kind of politics as they motivate and urge and define society in
terms of negative results based upon the following of the antithetical ideas
they seek to challenge. In that sense they are very reminiscent of Marxism:
Marxism has the eternal struggle between the worker and the owner. The working
class is exploited by the ruling class, and all the ills of society are due to
that exploitation. The ruling class justifies itself through a false
consciousness, if that consciousness was property cleared up by the “truth” of
the proper van guard understanding, the workers paradise would be inaugurated.
The same is true of atheism. According the ideas Brown discusses, there’s a
great evil that spawns all the social ills, created by the false consciousness
of religious belief. The priest class keeps the believer enthralled with
“superstition” as the ruling class keeps the workers enthralled with promises
of wealth. In Marxism the workers are save by the revolutionary van guard of
the party. In new atheism the brain washed believers are saved by the van guard
of science. Workers are liberated by the
party line, believers are liberated by the facts of science.
Making a chart like this is not meant to suggest that there
is no truth in Marxism or that reduces neatly to just these points. In fact
Christianity can also be put on such a chart. Yet is does illustrate the fact
that these ideas lend themselves to an ideological perspective and unwary can
be led down the garden path into some tempropal human idea of an eternal struggle
for the good.
|
|
Marxism
|
New Atheism
|
|
Great struggle
|
Class struggle
|
Brain washing of believers
|
|
Victims
|
workers
|
everyone
|
|
Enemy of people
|
Capitalists/owners
|
Religion/religious
people
|
|
Van Guard
|
party
|
Scientists/atheists
|
|
Knowledge
(gospel)
|
Party line
|
Science/skepticism
|
|
eschatology
|
Workers paradise
|
Secular society
|
|
means
|
Propaganda
|
Mocking and ridiculing reiligion
|
Christianity
|
Great struggle
|
Sin/evil
|
|
victims
|
Human race
|
|
Enemy of people
|
Satan
|
|
Van Guard
|
church
|
|
Knowledge
|
Gosepl
|
|
Eschatology
|
End of times, second coming, judgment
|
|
Means
|
Preach gospel
|
Does the fact that Christianity can be subjected to
ideological analysis mean that it is an empty ideology? No more so than
science. The fact that science can be distorted and laced with ideological
assumptions doesn’t mean there is no clear idea of science, nor does it mean
that science doesn’t have a valid basis. Ideology can take over any view point.
Any truth can become reduce to an ideological understanding if one is not
careful. While we might consider that Christianity is like the prototype,
ideology the copy. Although Christianity was not the first religion thus we
could say religion as a whole is the prototype and these other versions are the
ideologies. Yet we know religion can be ideological as well.
One of the
major examples of religion as ideology is creationism. Of course in saying that
we have to aware of the fact that the counters to creationism can also be very
ideological.
The
ideology of new atheism is a subset of the larger ideology of scientisim. Not
all scisentistic types are atheists and not all atheists are scientistic. There
is an atheist ideology that is an outgrowth and subset of the lager umbrella of
scientism. What the umbrella has in common all of its many departments is the
reduction of all knowledge to one thing; that one thing is the illusion of
technique. In even the one thing is an illusion because the ostensible one
thing is “science.” Yet it’s not really science because science is about
hypothesis testing and this is more what William Barrett called “the illusion
of technique.” The illusion of technique is the manipulation of all knowledge
and fact, all feeling and questions into the closed realm of discourse. The
reduction assumes the only possible questions and the only possible answers go
back to the same circular concept, both problem and solution: the reduction of
all knowledge not to science but to technology. It’s the bait and switch, the
substitution of science for technology. Science leaves off with debunking what
it could and then the offering of possible knowledge in the form the best
explanation.[34] Yet technology assumes
we have the answers. Technology assumes we have the answers and we are going to
apply them. It assumes either we know the truth or it doesn’t matter. What is replacing
truth is the ability to control things.Science is put over as “the truth” when
in fact its’ only a means of hypothesis testing. That leaves us with a void in
our understanding of the nature of truth.
[1] Robert Wright, The Moral
Animal: Why We are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New
York and Canada:
First Vantage Books edition, Division of Random House. 1995.4.
Robert Write is an award wining American Journalist,
writes scholarly books about science is respected for his scholarship.
[2] Ibid. 4
[3] Ibid. 4
[4] Ibid., 4-5
[5] Ibid., 5
[6] Harvey Whitehouse,
“Introduction,” The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Vs. Ethnography.
Oxford, New York:
Berg Publishers. 2001,1.
[7] David, J. Buller, Adapting
Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for human Nature. Cambridge
Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Press, 2005, 4.
[8] Ibid.3
[9] Ibid., 3
[10] Ibid., 2
[11] Ibid., 5
[12] Linda Gannon,
“abstract,” “A Critique of Evolutionary Psychology.” Psychology, Evolution,
and Gender. Volume 4 Issue 2, (2002), 173-218, 173.
[13] Thomas Nagel, Mind
and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost
Certainly False. Oxford:
Oxford University
Press, 2012. no page cited.
[14] Thomas Nagel, “What’s it
Like to Be A Bat?” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4., (Oct.
1974) 435-450.
[15] Jennifer Schuessler, “An
Author Attracts Unlikely Allies,” New York Times, Feb 6, 2013, ON line copy
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/books/thomas-nagel-is-praised-by-creationists.html?_r=1&
accessed 10/18/13.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Massimo Pigliucci, “Lawrence
Krauss: Another Physicist With an Anti-Philosophy Complex.” Rationally
Speaking, online publication, http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.ca/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html accessed 9/27/13.
[18] Krista Tippett,
“Einstein’s Refutation of Personal God,” On Being, online publication http://www.onbeing.org/program/einstein039s-god/particulars/1930 accessed 9/27/13.
Photograph from conference in Davos Switzerlan, March 18, 1928, courtesy of Image
Archive, ETH-Bibliotek, Zurich.
Published, On Being,
[19] Paul Tillich, “The Idea
of a Personal God.” Online article from a blog by Krista Tippett, Speaking
of Faith reprinted with permission form the Yale Divinity School Library.
URL: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/einsteinsgod/tillich-einsteinresponse.shtml
(visited 8/31/2010) No
indication is given of a translator or original publication.
I document this in a footnote to an article I wrote on
my blog, “Paul Tillich and the Personal God: was Paul Tillich’s Ground of Being
an Impersonal Force? Part 1.” Metacrock’s Blog, March 14, 2011 on line
In that article I put a caption under the picture (same
Photograph published by Tippett the converence in 1828 In Switzerland) it
says Einstein’s paper was presented at a
New York Conference science, philosophy and Religion, 1940.
[20] Pigliucci, Op Cit.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Massimo Pugliucci, “On
the Difference Between Science and Philosophy.” Rationally speaking, on line
publication, http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2009/11/on-difference-between-science-and.html accessed 9/27/13.
[23] Steven Weinberg, “Against
Philosophy” (chapter VII) Dreams of a
Final Theory: Scientists Search for The Ultimate Laws of Nature. New
York, NY: Vintage, reprint
edition, 1994. 166.
[24] George Musser, “Deep in
Thought, What is a Law of Physics Anyway?” Scientific American Blogs (June 4, 2010) Onilne http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/06/04/deep-in-thought-what-is-a-law-of-physics-anyway/ accessed 9/27/13.
George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific
American. He focuses on space science and fundamental physics, ranging
from particles to planets to parallel universes. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String
Theory. Musser has won numerous awards in his career,
including the 2011 American Institute of Physics's Science Writing Award.
[25] Daniel Stoljar,
“Physicalism:Terminology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy fed 13,
2001, sept 9, 2009. Online resource: URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#1 visited 3/11/11
[26] Keith Augustine, “Materliaism,” The Secular Web Internet resource online URL: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/naturalism/materialism.html visited 3/11/11.
[27] Robert T. Carroll,
“Philosophical Materialism (Physicalism),” The Skeptics Dictionary. 1994/2012 the article updated last 2010. on
line resource, http://www.skepdic.com/materialism.html accessed 9/22/13
[28] Geoffery Hellman and
Frank Wilson Thompson, “Physicalist Materialism,” Nous, 11, Blackwell
Publishing, 1977 available online through JSTOR URL: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2214560 visited 3/11/11.
[29] Stoljar, Op Cit.
[30] Ibid, citing David
Lewis, On The Plurality of Worlds,1986, 14. no page numbers for Stoljar.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid
[33] Andrew Brown, Andrew
Brown’s Blog, “New Atheism, A Definition and Quiz.” online version published by
The Guardian. URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2008/dec/29/religion-new-atheism-defined visited, 11/1/11.
[34] Popper, find
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