Atheism and Science - Is There a Relation?, part 2 - On the Difference Between Science and Philosophy: Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci treks from science and philosophy to urging us to “reject religious nonsense” and affirming that “no scientist today would defend…the original version of Darwin’s theory.”

Pigliucci is the professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Lehman College. He is also an opposer of all things creationist or intelligent design. He elucidates a point from which I will build; first consider his, then mine.

Attentive readers of this blog may have noticed that those who post comments to my entries often show two interesting and complementary attitudes: a fundamental distrust of (if not downright contempt for) philosophy, coupled with an overly enthusiastic endorsement of science. Take, for instance, my recurring argument that some (but not all!) of the new atheists engage in scientistic attitudes by overplaying the epistemological power of science while downplaying (or even simply negating) the notion that science fundamentally depends on non-empirical (i.e., philosophical) assumptions to even get started…

the all-too common mistake of thinking of philosophy as of an activity whose entire worth is measured by how useful it is to solve scientific problems. But why should that be so? We already have science to help us solve scientific problems, philosophy does something else by using different tools…why not ask why art critics don’t produce paintings, for instance, or editors write books?...

the intricacies of the epistemological and metaphysical problems inherent in the practice of science (and there are many: as Daniel Dennett put it in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”) Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other philosophies of). Philosophy does this by methods of analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation.

Now, it seems to me obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated that: a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?...

It is also interesting to note that the process I just described [how philosophy progresses] may never reach and end result, but neither does science! Scientific theories are always tentative, and they are always either improved upon or abandoned in favor of new ones…we are willing to live with uncertainty and constant revision in science…[1]

This is a very important lesson for atheists to learn, important for anyone who claims to premise their atheism on “science,” those who claim to only believe that which is material, those who oppose supernaturalism based on a materialistic worldview: you too are a metaphysician, you too premise your beliefs/views upon the intangible, immaterial, unobserved, un-experimented upon, something that is not proved nor evidenced but assumed—first principles, axioms, propositions, presuppositions, which are intuited.

Nature, for example, cannot explain nature or the very nature of nature. Science cannot explain itself. Likewise atheism is premised upon such metaphysics and has no material reality upon which to be premised. Atheism is, ultimately, taken on “faith.”

This sentiment is certainly not a new insight but one that we must muse upon as we will apply it to Richard Dawkins in the next segment.

[1] Massimo Pigliucci, “On the difference between science and philosophy,” Rationally Speaking, November 11, 2009