While out for a walk my mind meandered to consider what an ideal dog repellant might be...maybe lion scent would do the trick. One sniff of a lion and dog is out of there! But then, why? Why does the dog have a view about its mortality that it wants to avoid death?
In fact, in a naturalist conception, why life? Why do genes impel themselves into the future with ostensible purpose? It seems impossible to avoid at least implying purposeful action at every point in the course of life.
But whence purpose? Purpose is teleological, it is about something that is not, materially. Nor could we propose with any confidence that life ‘just is’, because it then takes of on its path dense with purpose. The purpose that came from nowhere and has, itself, no...purpose.
Anyway, genes have no purpose; there is no place in them for a view of either the future or the past, they exist mutely in the present. They are not, as long chains even existent themselves as a ‘brute’ fact, or as (brute) conductors of information. They cannot be as their information content and its outcomes are contingent, not given, and as soon as the long double helix is cut off from its chemical home falls apart and ceases to be functional. Highly contingent from the get go.
Evolution has to imply the immaterial, it has to conjure an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ from the get-go, in a fundamentally incoherent, internally inconsistent move that makes the idea of evolution a risible concoction that cannot explain itself in its own terms.
Similarly non-credible is the oft mouthed claim that science is conducted on the basis of ‘methodological naturalism’. That is, for the day in day out work of the scientist no assumption needs to be made in regards to a Creator-God for the science to be done.
Hang on, though. Not quite. We here treat the path made by positivism: positivism cannot explain itself in its own terms, and so collapses in a smoking pile, as does methodological naturalism. As soon as naturalism is qualified, indeed as soon as it is uttered, it makes inevitable immaterial references that are outside its bounds.
What references?
To the subject as independent of the object and the object being a thing shared by all subjects, for starters. That the perception of the object is a real event and not merely a configuration in the brain (which would make any utterances about this mere reports on the brain’s configuration with no necessary or reliable connection with the object specifically, and the world outside the subject in general).
Naturalism itself is a particular idea about the world and the subject, it is not a ‘real’ thing. Thus, methodological naturalism is a cloak for metaphysical naturalism, which trades on the credit of Christian theology, specifically that brought by the doctrine of Creation (objective knowable external world and communicable reliability of subjects in their regard for the external world). And it, of course is not explained by naturalism (except in a reductive sense), but refers back to those non-material ideas for its get-go. If those ideas are just molecular configurations (also a non-material idea), then how do they give us any information (another non-material thing) about the real world (if there is such a thing)?
