From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Environment and native issues
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 01:07:13 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

 Renn Tumlison writes:

> Who set up two categories (natural vs. supernatural) in which
> to divide observable realities?  This really is a non-argument.  We
> can call all observable events natural, eventually explainable
> through scientific inquiry, and still not have validly addressed the
> question of a spiritual basis.
>

A question. Does "spiritual" have to imply "supernatural"? The "natural"
is anything that can happen in the universe (whether we understand it
or not). If you believe, as I do, that spirituality emerges from nature
(as conciousness does -- spirituality in my view is sacred conciousness),
then it is not "supernatural".

> I think it comes down to the lack of appreciation western society has
> for the inter-relationships of all things.  Science (not just
> evolution) is essentially a religion.

Science is a world-view. To be a religion it first has to get clear about
its values, a duty it has shirked so far. This is why the intellectual west
is messed up -- its official world view (though not widely understood) has
a large hole in a place where humans abhor a vaccum. Consequently, all sorts
of other stuff rushes into that hole (mostly old rubbish).

>We teach that it is *not*
> because religion is a set of beliefs that cannot be tested, whereas
> science is based on falsifiable hypotheses.  Science purifies itself
> as more study is applied (it seems to me that religious beliefs also
> go through this metamorphosis, particularly within the individual but
> also within the body of believers over time).  As Peshewegunzh notes,
> science is based on assumptions.  We assume that the data represent a
> random sample, that our experimental designs are almost flawless,
> that any statistical inference we may draw (based on probability
> distributions) are not due to chance.  Finally, science can only
> disprove or *fail to disprove* an hypothesis.  The popular media
> often tells us that science has *proven* something, but this cannot
> be true of studies that rely on inferential statistics.  If we find
> significant results, we have failed to disprove the hypothesis, and
> we then *accept* the alternative hypothesis.  Acceptance depends on
> having *faith* that assumptions, data, design, and statistics have
> shown something to be valid that really is - i.e., science in based
> on faith, the essence of religion.

Not quite -- this "faith" is no more than the induction which any organism
performs when it makes a move based on filtered sensory input. You might
as well say that a monkey's leap is a leap of faith. It's stretching the
idea too far, I think. Action with less than perfect information can be
thought of as a calculated risk. It's when you delude yourself into thinking
it is really certainty that it becomes faith.

I'm not sure that faith is the essence of religion in any case. I see no
reason why there couldn't be a testable, provisiional religion, a fusion of
scientific cosmology and investigation with sacred conciousness, a respect for
the fact that the universe contains unknowns. We are some distance away from
having such a religion, however. A "scientific" religion based on a frozen,
incorrigible cosmology might become "faith" but would cease to be science.
It would then be no different from creationist cosmology, which is not open
to revision.

> This (hard core) evolutionist's philosophy also is intriguing.  At
> one time people supposedly believed that everything was very ordered
> by some supernatural power, and that it was all part of one grand
> design, with purpose.  Evolutionary thought sometimes suggests that
> it is all random, as McGowen inferred about Huxley with reference to
> "fondness for beetles".  McGowen mentioned (in a previous article)
> that "the history of life in no way suggests that we were the purpose
> of the whole thing."  I must add that it also in no way suggests that
> we were not.  To say either way on this issue based purely on the
> history of life is to impose philosophical, rather than scientific,
> interpretation on the data.  We generally use *our inability* to
> predict as the basis for describing a phenomenon as random.  It is
> sometimes, then, our inadequacy that makes us incorrectly or
> unrealistically interpret things.  As a case in point, random events
> are considered to be chaotic (unpredictable).  Yet, the new
> mathematics of chaos and "random walks" is beginning to perceive
> of randomness as being *ordered*.  Could the Great Spirit just be
> smarter than we are?
>

Actually, it was just that chaotic aspect of speciation which I had
in mind when I wrote that "the history of life doesn't suggest", etc.
No species has a high a priori probability of developing: the point of
chaos is that the tiniest perturbations are amplified enormously, like the
butterfly's wingbeat and the storm 6 months latter. Every species is the result
of a long chain of speciation events, most or all of which were low probability
occurences in tiny populations. A difference of location of an individual
or two, and they are eaten by a predator, and no new species -- no new
phyletic line, none of its descendent species. Stephan Gould has written
extremely well about this in his latest book on the Burgess Shale.
Mathematical models of coevolution are also often chaotic.

So, when I said that *we* weren't the point of the whole thing, it is
only because *no* one species is ever the point of the whole thing. If
it has a point which is visible to us, it is probably diversity -- at
least that increases with geological time.

------------
Alan McGowen

Newsgroups: alt.native