First of all,
If science cannot be used to answer your question, you are asking the wrong questions.

"Why is moo?" is a stupid question that science cannot answer, however I'm sure many people could explore this matter using philosophical, artistic or other methods. Similarly "Who am I" "Is there a god" "When will yellow?".

Here is just one example of this:
"We get some details about the activation of certain areas of the brain during mental activity but this does not give us any idea of the nature of thought production."

Or to put it another way:
"We get some details about the noise a cow makes, but this does not give us any idea of "Why is moo?"."

If you stop asking stupid questions, you wont need to resort to stupid methodologies to try and get answers.

Second,
If, as you argue, there exists some part of this world that will never be able to be detected by any means, then its relevance to the world is exactly the same as thought it didn't exist!

You seem to want to define reality, not as what is real, but some combination of the real and unreal, which we will never know exists. I suppose you suggest we have faith in this second aspect of your "reality". Now I see where you're heading with this...

David F,
My goodness, no wonder you are cross with me. Where do I start? The virgin birth is a story with profound consequences invented by the writer of Luke. It is often the case that fiction is more profound than nonfiction, that is why we are all addicted to stories. The trinity is bedrock Christian dogma. It tells us that god is not described by an undifferentiated monotheism but consists of historical truth projected into the future. The transferability of sins is not on my radar at all.

I think that the most common problem in understanding what Christians believe is that we all wear the glasses of natural science and we have lost the ability to see poetically, narratively and that limits us tremendously. That is the essence of my article. Science has become a limiting dogma of its own.

By "pushing evolution too far" I mean that we think it will explain all biological phenomena including the complexity of the human family. Under extreme Darwinism all culture will be eventually be explained as an advantageous adaptation. That will never happen!

I recently read Paul Ham's 1914, a history of the roots of WWI. I was surprised at how important social Darwinism was in Germany and how it was a major contributor to the push for war. Some said that it was Germany'd duty to eliminate "lower" races so that evolution to a higher state could be aided. Pushing Darwin too far?

with best wishes
Peter

Sells
So-called social Darwinism is not Darwinism of any kind because
a) Darwin never advocated the elimination of the weak etc., and
b) is/ought dichotomy. Evolutionary theory only purports to explain what happened and happens, not what should happen.

"By "pushing evolution too far" I mean that we think it will explain all biological phenomena including the complexity of the human family. Under extreme Darwinism all culture will be eventually be explained as an advantageous adaptation. That will never happen!"

Man has never been able to bridge the gap between mind and matter: to reduce all complex human behaviour to ultimate material causes. However science has certainly pushed back the boundaries, and we have gone from magical god-stories about nature, including human nature, to a much better understanding based in science. Progress in the physical sciences has been accompanied by progress in our scientific understanding of man and society, even if not to the same degree of rationality or predictive competence.

During all this, there have always been those who said of any particular achievement "That will never happen!" and been proved wrong. (In last week's news, scientists are working on a cure for the common cold, HIV and Hep C - all some kind of RNA code-deciphering mechanism. Thank God the job of making it happen was in the hands of evolutionists and not priests and theologians eh?)

Evolutionary theory does indeed seek to explain mental as well as physical characteristics as the results of evolution. That "they will never succeed!" is indeed an excellent null hypothesis. But it behoves the theists to at least understand the theories they criticise. For example, one theory of evolutionary psychology is that religion is a mental adaptation resulting from sexual selection - differential sexual and reproductive success. Have you considered that?

Craig Minns,

Thanks for David Deutsch’s Constructor Theory (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7439v2.pdf ), that I have not known about. Deutsch is a very readable author and populariser. This theory seems to be aimed at dealing with epistemological enigmas that arise from quantum physics. Am I right?

My question concerns your sentence:

“If there is a conceivable way that something could be possible [the product of an interaction], then it must be assumed to be real unless it is already known to be impossible through experiment.”.

Is it a quote from Deutsch’s article, or a consequence from it, or your construction? To me it sounds much like Max Tegmark (c.f. his “Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”) or at least related to it.

David F, I wonder if you could explain why you are so concerned about the dogmatic axioms of Peter's faith?

To my way of thinking the "truth" or otherwise of these axioms is not a very interesting question anymore, but what they tell us about some important aspects of being human is fascinating. They are part of a long struggle to understand the nature of our complex species and to explain the obvious qualitative difference between us and other animals. As well, they represent some attempts to provide a framework to define some limits on our endless capacity to justify counter-productive (anti-social) behaviours by deriving an ethos of individual responsibility to cognitively bias decision-making.

From those beginnings have sprung all of the great science and philosophy that you are able to draw on in seeking to disparage.

I wonder if any of those who are so eloquent in doing similarly, here and more broadly, have really considered the nature and source of their own cognitive biases?

Peter, JKJ, et al, evolution is nothing special. It is simply a fairly well understood and limited case of self-organisation through recursive iteration. The same systemic principle underlies everything we see.

Hi George, that is my own formulation, but is intrinsic to the ontological model of the "constructor" which is at the heart of Deutsch's model. It must be remembered too that Deutsch is an information theorist by long professional affiliation and is one of the most influential thinkers in that field.

I'm not sure of the nature of the relationship between Tegmark and Deutsch but you're quite right to say that their ideas overlap.