Chapter IX: Natural Philosophy | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “[Aristotle] divided early Greek thinkers into theologi,who saw the world as controlled by   

        impetuous supernatural beings, and physici (naturalists), who tried instead to explain an apparently

        disordered world in terms of simpler and impersonal principles.  He said the Milesians were the

        first physici.”

        – Anthony Gottlieb^I

        “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at

        the bottom of it too?”

        – Douglas Adams^II

        Natural philosophy (or naturalism) is the understanding that our explanations of the world ought to be carnal, non-teleological, and above all, secular.  Natural philosophy is, historically, thought of as a stepping stone to modern science because it is the last explicitly philosophical school of thought that preceded modern science before it (for better or worse) became seen essentially as separate or above “mere” philosophy.  But in truth, natural philosophy is the commitment to making resource to natural arguments rather than supernatural nor dualist ones, and is fully incorporated into modern science as a part of philosophy of science.  It is the recognition that when people make claims, they're necessarily making claims about the world and so should not be allowed to make recourse to other-worldy explanations.  It is the epistemological recognition of ontology, and the taking of physical reality seriously as all that there is.^III  This then makes the importance of empirical evidence all the more obvious: once you recognize that we're all always arguing about how the world is, it becomes obvious that one should actually check their arguments against the world using the sense organs, the technology that extends them, and statistical analyses of these recorded data (all to make sure you aren't just making things up!).^IV

        Supernatural explanations are magical, superstitious, seldom in direct view: frankly, imaginary.  The world of myth might be an exciting place to hide wisdom, but to take it literally is foolhardy; its predictions will not tend to come true because it is unhinged from the empirical reality that we actually live in, and which our claims ultimately end up being about.^V  A special but common case of supernaturalism is dualism: the idea that the physical world, the cosmos, or nature itself is not the only place there is (and perhaps not even the most important or powerful force in the determination of things).  Dualism holds that one may have nature and supernature: two different realms, one of which is largely invisible (except when misunderstood anomalies are associated with it as miracles) but can have a huge effect on the other (nature, on the other hand, does not seem allowed to interact back).  Descartes flirted with mind-body dualism as he struggled to square how the physical body housed and gave rise to conscious experience (centuries later, we still struggle with the hard problem of consciousness far more than not).^VI  Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to him to argue that there cannot be dualism because the moment the two realms interact, they become one object that you could just as easily call nature (that is, dualism is internally incoherent).^VII  This is correct.  If we take the view that there exists a supernature, we will fail to study the nature of phenomena thought to be associated with it.  If scientists took the revealed truth of The Holy Bible that Earth was only thousands of years old,^VIII then the findings which suggest it is billions of years old would be ignored or never looked for in the first place.  The tendency to hold onto a belief in supernature or dualism by always making recourse to it when it comes to current-day scientific mysteries is called the god-of-the-gaps fallacy (or, more generally, the philosophy of the gaps fallacy).^IX  It is not only foolish because it discourages actual discovery, but because such a person is nearly ensuring they are staking their belief in supernature in claims that will be falsified in favor of a natural alternative, later.

        Due to a propensity in human nature, many thinkers (particularly in past centuries) held, if not supernatural or dualist views, at least overtly teleological views (teleology is the view that “everything happens for a reason” in a human-sense, it is a world-view that misinterprets the cosmos as serving some purpose or story, like those of our myths).  This is of course wrong: there is nothing so anthropomorphic about the cosmos, let alone particularly cosmically special about humans in this sense.^X  Others make the mistake of nevertheless “supernaturalizing” nature in the form of pantheism (the view that all of nature, alive and inert, is actually imbued with spirits and therefore to be worshiped as divine).  As someone who certainly reveres nature, I will quickly put that view to bed with science fiction author Douglas Adams' quote, “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”^XI  It is of course empirically unjustified to immediately undermine one's alleged reverence for nature with worship of an imagined supernature in its place.  I lament the opposite extreme view of all of this as well, when thinkers say things like, “the universe is random,” or that, “life is ultimately purposeless.”  The universe is a cosmos that follows austere, regular laws and for many of us, the purpose in discovering them is purpose enough!  The fact is, we are human beings: meaning-seeking, and meaning-finding creatures who evolved in part to do just that.  There isn't something less real about that just because these are not experiences or emotions shared by some divine deity-like universe.  Humans are a real part of the universe and so are the societies they create through interactions—just because certain facets of reality are only meaningful in this domain does not make them unreal anymore than chemistry is “unreal” because certain parts of the universe involve only non-chemical, purely physical processes (though one must be very careful here not to assume an irreducibly emergent world-view).^XII  As Sagan said, “if we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”^XIII

        Among the earliest known naturalists were the early-ancient Greeks of Ionia.^XIV  Of course, they did not make much in the way of contributions to the body of scientific knowledge (our understanding of ontology).^XV  Their explanations were in hindsight naive and willynilly.  But their proposals were natural mechanisms, rather than the imposition of gods or random chance.  As Sagan argues, the epistemology of the scientific method is much more important than the resultant body of knowledge, both because the provisional body of knowledge is far more subject to change and because one can re-derive it from proper use of epistemology: one can either, “give a man a fish or teach a man to fish,” as the saying goes.^XVI  You will find in the course of your studies, generally, that processes are more powerful and more important than stases.^XVII

        As mentioned before, the great later natural philosophers were so peerlessly successful in their philosophy of the world (because they focused their philosophy on the world) than all others in history, that their project evolved into modern science.  But modern scientists do not tend to appreciate this; they barely pay lip service.  Alongside educating laypeople into scientists, this book is intended to get scientists in touch with their proper roots, and to better understand their project and its foundations.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 4).

II. See The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Mariner Books) (2006 / 2008) (pp. 7 / dedication). For some reason, Dawkins has placed this in single quotes, leaving me unsure if it is a direct quote or a paraphrase of Adams.

III. This is sometimes called physicalism, previously philosophical materialism (not to be confused with Marxist notions of “materialism”).

IV. See the “Empiricism chapter”.

V. See the “Pseudo-Science And Anti-Science” appendix as well as the “Baselines And Null Hypotheses” chapter.

VI. See The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 21-23) and the "Sophistry" chapter in The Sophistructure (Or To Take Away The World) by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2020 - present) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/08/chapter-1-sophistry-sophistructure-0th.html#FN5A).

VII. See The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 21-23); The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 114, 116, 120, 125); and the "Sophistry" chapter in The Sophistructure by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/08/chapter-1-sophistry-sophistructure-0th.html#FN5A).

VIII. See the “Objectivity” chapter.

IX. See The God Delusion by Dawkins (pp. 151) and “A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-profusion-of-place-part-i-of-unity.html#FN70B).

X. As Nobel-winning particle physicist Steven Weinberg has argued, there is a subtle sense in which, while not quite ontologically accurate, teleology is a useful epistemological tool: in evolutionary biology, we do find (for the most natural of reasons) goal-seeking behaviors that may be predicted due to the selfish gene's eye view of organisms (look forward to the “Biology”, “Psychology”, and “Sociology” chapters the “Ontology” volume; and see To Explain The World by Weinberg, pp. 265-266). Likewise, as Dawkins always argues, billions of years of trial-and-error evolution before we showed up on the scene leaves the profound illusion of top-down “design” on the biological universe (but in truth, natural selection is a perfectly natural, physical process with no interposition of design), see The God Delusion by Dawkins (pp. 24, 103, 146-147, 188) and The Selfish Gene by Dawkins (pp. 15-17, 308, 336-337, 423-424).

XI. See this quotation at the top of the present chapter, and footnote II.

XII. See the “Reductionism And Emergence” chapter and The God Delusion by Dawkins (pp. 151-152).

XIII. See “Man In His Arrogance – A Great Speech By Carl Sagan” uploaded by Kiwis Journey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrL0BXsO40) (3:46 – 3:55).

XIV. For more on the history of science's origins in ancient Greece, see Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 180-200) and “Part I: Greek Physics” and “Part II: Greek Astronomy” in To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 1-100).

XV. See the “The Archetypes: The Milesians” chapter in The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (especially pp. 19).

XVI. See “Carl Sagan's Last Interview With Charlie Rose (Full Interview)” uploaded by YouTube user bailesie (PBS) (at least 3:55 – 4:08); though I am familiar with the interview, I was directed back to it as a source of this sentiment by “A Day To Remember Carl Sagan” by Sheril Kirshenbaum (Wired) (2011) (https://www.wired.com/2011/05/a-day-to-remember-carl-sagan/#:~:text=%22Science%20is%20more%20than%20a,fine%20understanding%20of%20human%20fallibility) (which is nothing more than a direct quote from the Charlie Rose interview some fifteen years prior).

XVII. I mean by this the plural of “stasis”: a static, non-dynamic, or inert object.