the referent of 'naturalism' is 'what is subject to study by the natural sciences', whereas materialism is the belief that only material objects and forces are real. — Wayfarer

I wonder still if the definitions are not essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Aren't natural sciences dealing only with things that are empirical; and all that is empirical is material? Maybe math is the exception, but I can't think of another one.

But why didn't it simply culminate in wreckage, 'greater entropy'? Why did it give rise to the exquisite order of nature? 'Just happened' doesn't strike me as any kind of hypothesis. — Wayfarer

I'm with you on that one: The undeniable order in the universe strongly points to an order-giver.

I think an objector might say that "while improbable, this current configuration of the universe could have happened at random, and maybe countless of different random configurations failed before that one happened". Now maybe this hypothesis is not possible if, as you say, there can be no 'before' prior to the big bang. I just don't know much about this.

Your 2-step argument is a good summary. It is however based on a lot of presuppositions that objectors will demand to defend. To name a few:
1. The universe has a beginning, to deduce that a first cause or causes exist.
2. This beginning has a single first cause, and not many.
3. 'Nothing can come from nothing', to deduce that the first cause itself has no beginning.
4. 'No effect can be greater than the sum of its causes', to deduce that the first cause is the greatest of all.
5. Time has a beginning, so that the first cause caused it to existence and therefore transcends it.
6. The first cause has no end. I think we can deduce this from the premises 4 or 5, but I am not sure.

[...]Aren't natural sciences dealing only with things that are empirical; and all that is empirical is material?[...] — Samuel Lacrampe

Empiricism—arguably, much like Cynicism and Skepticism—no longer means in today’s popular culture what it initially meant. Empiricism—what the natural sciences are founded on—is rooted in experience. One nowadays has to invoke different terms—such as “experiential” or “experientialism”—to evoke the same semantics that gave rise to the notion of natural sciences. Empiricism as initially intended, then, addresses experiential knowns (as in, knowledge by acquaintance)—including those regarding matter—but is in no way limited to matter as a topic of interest.

You will find this in empiricists such as Lock and Hume, among others—although I haven’t yet read the works of Francis Bacon (an earlier empiricist who is credited as the father of the scientific method).

Aren't natural sciences dealing only with things that are empirical; and all that is empirical is material? Maybe math is the exception, but I can't think of another one. — Samuel Lacrampe

Math is a pretty major one, isn't it? Science couldn't get going without maths and the rules of inference, and the like - so maths is prior to the sciences. In other words, for there to be science, we must first know how to count, compare, and quantify. Sure there can be evolutionary accounts of how humans developed the capacity for maths, but the Law of Identity is not a product of evolution, even if our ability to grasp it is.

Actually the fact that maths or number seems to be non-material bothers a lot of modern philosophers. There have been elaborate arguments developed to account for this fact in a way that doesn't violate physicalist explanations. On the other hand, there are always some mathematical Platonists, i.e. those who believe that number is real but not material. But once you admit that there can be anything real that is not material, then you've admitted materialism is false or at least incomplete.

What actually is meant by 'empirical' is simply 'something tangible' i.e. something that can be touched, felt, measured, either by the senses or by scientific instruments, which are extensions to the senses. There is no reality beyond that, or, if there is, we can't know it, so it ought to be disregarded, as, according to empiricist dogma, 'knowledge is derived from sensory experience'. It is generally the view that the science is the only valid form of knowledge, but it doesn't take into account other forms of knowledge, in my opinion.

The undeniable order in the universe strongly points to an order-giver.

I think an objector might say that "while improbable, this current configuration of the universe could have happened at random, and maybe countless of different random configurations failed before that one happened". — Samuel Lacrampe

That is one of the main motivations behind the so-called 'multiverse' speculation - the idea that the Universe we know, is one of countless 'bubble universes' that never come into contact with one another. There's a lot of controversy around such arguments, but I can't see them being resolved any time soon. If you read online magazines like Aeon, NPR Cosmos and Culture, and Quanta, there are quite a few discussions of these ideas on them.

t's funny then, that meaning becomes a process in which the observer never observed (the tree growing through each year, making each ring) only when the observer observes the effect (the multiple tree rings). — Harry Hindu

You don't have to have been alive in the Jurassic age to know there were dinosaurs. But then, humans know such things, because we're capable of such knowledge. Dinosaurs never knew they were dinosaurs.

God is conventionally considered a spiritual, non-material being, because a material being has limitations, whereas God does not. — Samuel Lacrampe

A finite material being has limitations; but it does not follow that an infinite material being would have limitations. The limitation of a finite material being is its physical boundary and all the attendant limitations due to the forces that act upon it by virtue of that boundary; but an infinite material being would have no physical boundaries, and hence no forces acting upon it, by definition.

You don't have to have been alive in the Jurassic age to know there were dinosaurs. But then, humans know such things, because we're capable of such knowledge. Dinosaurs never knew they were dinosaurs. — Wayfarer

Right. But how do we come to know such things? What does it mean to find the bones of some dead animal, that we've never seen, buried in ancient rock?

It's a huge question - the interplay between observation and hypothesis. The formulation of evolution and the age of the earth are textbook cases of scientific discovery. What it meant was that the world was far more ancient than had been previously thought, and that there were extinct species that lived hundreds of millions of years ago - something which prior generations didn't have a theory for, and therefore couldn't have explained.

But what I was commenting on was the role that the mind of the observing scientist plays in the understanding. I think that normally, science believes that the observing mind is not a part of the picture - that the evidence, ancient rocks, etc, exist in their own right, 'speak for themselves', as it were. Whereas, what I'm saying is that whatever evidence there is, even the most apparently concrete, exists in an interpretive matrix and gains its meaning from that. And that matrix is not wholly objective, it is not simply given, but is also 'constructed' in the mind of the observer - which is something that comes out strongly in philosophy of science, such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi, etc.

Sorry to have dropped out from the conversation. But frankly, your argument, which started from some puzzling and provocative premises, has unfolded into something rather vague, slippery and tepid.

Here is one illustration that shows why I find your argumentation unconvincing:

The energy from the fire (property 1) causes an energy increase in the water (property 1). Then the energy increase in the water (property 1), combined with the potential of water molecules to boil at 100C (property 2), causes the water to boil (property 2 actualized). — Samuel Lacrampe

So the move here is to point to a transient property, such as "boiling," and say that it always existed in potentia, and needed only a suitable cause to be actualized. This clever get-out-of-jail clause can paper over any difficulty with properties that appear to be new in effects. But why not use the same move on every property? Well, then it would be hard to link back to the original idea, that of invariant property transfer from cause to effect. For that you have appealed to energy, matter and other more-or-less conserved quantities, chosen ad hoc for each particular case.

- The first cause possesses all properties from all effects, and to an equal or greater degree.
- If all that exists is material (matter and energy), then all properties from all effects are material things.
∴ The first cause possessed all the matter and energy that currently exists in the world, to an equal or greater degree. — Samuel Lacrampe

The key here is that you take a physicalist view of the world as a common ground with your presumably physicalist audience, and try to extract from it an evocative metaphor. This is a dubious endeavor at best, because the metaphor will never be adequate to the actual meat of the physical theories from which it is extracted. And if you try to use it to reach conclusions with physical, empirical implications, you will most likely run into trouble, as you did in this case.

Indeed, it is inaccurate to say that the early post-Big Bang universe (the closest thing we have to the "first cause") "possessed all the ... energy that currently exists in the world, to an equal or greater degree." The issue with energy at macro-scale becomes complicated when you get to General Relativity and non-flat, expanding spacetime. In some interpretations it seems that energy is conserved only in local interactions, but not globally. With careful analysis you can recover a globally conserved quantity, but it is no longer just energy, and it is "conserved" only in a special sense that requires a lot of exposition to explain (like I said, it is complicated). It would be hard to translate all this into a simple metaphor.

I wonder still if the definitions are not essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Aren't natural sciences dealing only with things that are empirical; and all that is empirical is material? — Samuel Lacrampe

Yes, I like this approach as well. I think the key to naturalism/materialism/physicalism is not a commitment to a particular ontology, but a commitment to empiricist epistemology.

It's a huge question - the interplay between observation and hypothesis. The formulation of evolution and the age of the earth are textbook cases of scientific discovery. What it meant was that the world was far more ancient than had been previously thought, and that there were extinct species that lived hundreds of millions of years ago - something which prior generations didn't have a theory for, and therefore couldn't have explained. — Wayfarer

Great. So then we agree that what something means has to do with the causal relationship between what we see (the effect) and the cause of what we see.

But what I was commenting on was the role that the mind of the observing scientist plays in the understanding. I think that normally, science believes that the observing mind is not a part of the picture - that the evidence, ancient rocks, etc, exist in their own right, 'speak for themselves', as it were. Whereas, what I'm saying is that whatever evidence there is, even the most apparently concrete, exists in an interpretive matrix and gains its meaning from that. And that matrix is not wholly objective, it is not simply given, but is also 'constructed' in the mind of the observer - which is something that comes out strongly in philosophy of science, such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi, etc. — Wayfarer

Of course the science believes that the observing mind is part of the picture. You haven't read any books on biology, and how the eyes function and interact with light, have you? Nor have you read anything about QM which implies that our own observations have an effect on what we are observing?

I don't understand how meaning isn't objective being that we all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favor of a more objective one - one where we all have the same meanings for the same observations - where we all test the hypotheses of others' to find if we find the same causes to what we observe.

The evidence exists objectively. It is the interpretation of the evidence which makes us right or wrong in understanding the meaning (the causal relationships) of what we observe.

I'm with you on that one: The undeniable order in the universe strongly points to an order-giver.

I think an objector might say that "while improbable, this current configuration of the universe could have happened at random, and maybe countless of different random configurations failed before that one happened". Now maybe this hypothesis is not possible if, as you say, there can be no 'before' prior to the big bang. I just don't know much about this. — Samuel Lacrampe

This objector would not say this. What does it mean to say that this [organization of the universe] is improbable? Probability is meaningful either in the context of a statistics built up from multiple observations, or in the context of a stochastic model (which in turn is based on observations). Neither of these contexts exist in the case of the universe. One could speculate that some random mechanism is responsible for the particular shape of the universe that we see (and some speculative cosmologies suggest something of the sort), but an atheist need not be committed to this view. And, as you say, this hypothesis does require for there to be something prior to or outside of the known (post-Big Bang) universe - but the option of a pre-Big Bang history is still open (hence the speculative cosmologies that I mentioned).

So there is no basis for saying that this configuration of the universe is improbable, any more than any other configuration. And in any event, nothing points to a magic order-giver.

I don't understand how meaning isn't objective being that we all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favor of a more objective one - one where we all have the same meanings for the same observations - where we all test the hypotheses of others' to find if we find the same causes to what we observe. — Harry Hindu

I wonder if you could point us to the scientific evidence for this 'instinct'.

Isn't it just the social instinct to be aligned with peers?

So the move here is to point to a transient property, such as "boiling," and say that it always existed in potentia, and needed only a suitable cause to be actualized. This clever get-out-of-jail clause can paper over any difficulty with properties that appear to be new in effects. But why not use the same move on every property? Well, then it would be hard to link back to the original idea, that of invariant property transfer from cause to effect. For that you have appealed to energy, matter and other more-or-less conserved quantities, chosen ad hoc for each particular case. — SophistiCat

That's an interesting point. Here are thought experiments to show that the claims are not arbitrary:
1. Keeping the same source (fire), and replacing the receiver from water to another liquid (say oil), it follows that the energy increase will be the same for both receivers. Therefore the energy effect is independent of the receiver, and the property must come from the source.
2. Keeping the same source (fire), and replacing the receiver from water to another liquid (say oil), it follows that the property of boiling will not be the same for both liquids (different boiling points). Therefore the boiling effect is dependent of the receiver, and the property must come from the receiver.

I don't understand how meaning isn't objective being that we all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favor of a more objective one - one where we all have the same meanings for the same observations - where we all test the hypotheses of others' to find if we find the same causes to what we observe. — Harry Hindu

I wonder if you could point us to the scientific evidence for this 'instinct'. — mcdoodle

The scientific evidence is plain to see. Look right in front of you at what you are reading as virtually every member on this forum, in every thread, make numerous attempts to share their beliefs and positions as they attempt to get others to agree with them.

The scientific evidence is plain to see. Look right in front of you at what you are reading as virtually every member on this forum, in every thread, make numerous attempts to share their beliefs and positions as they attempt to get others to agree with them. — Harry Hindu

I quite agree belief and position-sharing is what I read. I'm amazed you would suggest that this being 'plain to see' is 'scientific evidence' for an 'instinct' of any kind. I would expect papers, hypotheses and evidence. You're an advocate for naturalism, surely that's what you'd expect too?

So you say that empiricism encompasses all experiential things, which includes but is not limited to material things. Could you provide an example of an experiential thing which is not a material thing? Note: I think Aristotle was considered an empiricist because he claimed that experiences precedes our knowledge of universals, and he also believed in forms or essences which are not material things. However, the topic of essences in not part of the natural sciences.

Science couldn't get going without maths and the rules of inference, and the like - so maths is prior to the sciences. — Wayfarer

I agree with this. Science presupposes logic, and math is the logic of numbers.

there are always some mathematical Platonists, i.e. those who believe that number is real but not material. — Wayfarer

That's me. We cannot conceive a universe where 2+2≠4. Therefore math is part of eternal truth.

What actually is meant by 'empirical' is simply 'something tangible' i.e. something that can be touched, felt, measured, either by the senses or by scientific instruments, which are extensions to the senses. — Wayfarer

That is why I ask if the natural sciences can deal with anything that is not material, because it seems that all that can be touched, felt or measured is either matter or energy. This would make naturalism and materialism equivalent terms.

'multiverse' speculation - the idea that the Universe we know, is one of countless 'bubble universes' that never come into contact with one another. — Wayfarer

At first glance, I see only two logical possibilities in that multiverse hypothesis:
1. The universes are connected in some way. Thus we can think of the whole as one big system, which would be equivalent to our view of our universe, where the laws of physics might be more diverse, but the laws of logic would be the same. Therefore the argument from first cause would still apply to the system.
2. The universes are not connected in any way. In which case, Occam's razor would deem this as an unnecessary hypothesis and shave it off.

Good point. But by limitations, I meant that God would not be above all things if he was a material being. As all matter and energy is subjected to the spatial and temporal laws, so too would be a being made of matter and energy, regardless of the amount.

Another argument for fun: If an infinite material being existed, then as you said, no material boundaries would exist outside of that being. But boundaries exist: I occupy a space and time and I am not part of that being. Therefore an infinite material being does not exist.

Are you saying that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to the early post-Big Bang universe? I thought they were called laws because they applied to all cases (in physics).

So you say that empiricism encompasses all experiential things, which includes but is not limited to material things. Could you provide an example of an experiential thing which is not a material thing? — Samuel Lacrampe

To be clear, my statements addressed what empiricism once was upheld to be. Plainly stated, empiricism is/was the stance that knowledge develops from experience and is thereby a posteriori. Of itself, it has nothing to do with materiality.

I’m not now sure if your question intends historic examples taken from former empiricists. If so, as an overview, Hume was not a materialist. Neither was George Berkeley, another well-known empiricist. Locke was a Christian, which I take to entail that he was not a materialist either.

Rather than provide specific examples from former empiricists (I haven’t read the three just mentioned in a while, so I’d be a bit rusty) I’ll give this observation: The general question of which experiential thing is not itself a material thing places the cart before the horse if one is addressing this question from a metaphysical point of view: to the physicalist all things are material/physical things. REM dreams, sensations, expectations, intentions, imagined unicorns, the non-reasoned apprehension of (or awareness of) abstractions in adults which cannot be represented by particulars without at best diminishing the given abstraction (e.g., animal … encapsulating everything from sponges to blue whales, etc.)—to list only a few things experiential—are then all part and parcel of matter in relation to matter to the physicalist. Hence, to the physicalist, there is nothing of experience which is not material/physical—this by the very definition of physicalism.

If, however, the question intended commonsense notions of material objects, I’ll specify the experience of happiness. It is an experiential thing which is not of itself a representation of any particular material thing or set of such. (I’m limiting it to this example in case disagreements ensue.)

[edit: corrected a laughable typo about horses and carts ... if anyone noticed]

First, to be clear, by 'configuration' I meant the narrow range of settings (such as the gravitational constant G) that allow for life to be possible. I am assuming this statement to be true, as I am no expert on the necessary ingredients for life. Let's just buy into it for now.

Now if I understand correctly, [the probability of an outcome] = [the number of desired outcomes] / [all possible outcomes]. In this case, the number of desired outcomes, that is, the configuration with all settings that allow for life to be possible, is close to 1 (assuming a really narrow range of settings). And the number of all possible outcomes is the number of combination of all possible settings. It appears to me that this number is infinite, if each setting has logically an infinite possibility of values. This results in a very low probability of our configuration to occur. Thoughts?

I quite agree belief and position-sharing is what I read. I'm amazed you would suggest that this being 'plain to see' is 'scientific evidence' for an 'instinct' of any kind. I would expect papers, hypotheses and evidence. You're an advocate for naturalism, surely that's what you'd expect too? — mcdoodle

I'm amazed that you would agree but then be amazed at what I'm suggesting, which is what you agreed with.

Why do you need papers describing what I just wrote? Making observations and integrating what you see with the rest of what you know to form hypotheses and theories in order to make predictions is the basic process of "science", not providing links to papers. I provided a hypothesis and evidence. What more do you want?

You said 'We all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favour of an objective one...'

I don't accept this.

What is the scientufic, and/or naturalist, case for this instinct. On what evidence does it rest?

You make a good point that empiricism is classified as an epistemology, whereas materialism is classified as a metaphysics, and so they are not synonymous. As such, I was mistaken in saying that all that is empirical is material.

Back to the original question, I wonder if all things that fit under the umbrella of natural science must be material. I am now leaning towards no, by thinking about your example of experiencing happiness: The statement "studies show that those who live in this particular way tend to be more happy" is a valid scientific statement, and does not necessarily lead to materialism.

That's an interesting point. Here are thought experiments to show that the claims are not arbitrary — Samuel Lacrampe

I don't know what you think you are getting out of this line. Your initial premise has been reduced to well-known conservation laws (i.e. if you care to generalize from the examples that have been considered so far; otherwise you don't even have that). I don't think it gets you anything interesting.

Are you saying that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to the early post-Big Bang universe? I thought they were called laws because they applied to all cases (in physics). — Samuel Lacrampe

No, I am saying that it's more complicated than you suppose and can't be adequately summed up by a simple aphorism. In General Relativity energy of a macroscopic volume isn't even well-defined. Thermodynamics still works - but locally. It's when you try to integrate over volume that you run into trouble.

Laws, by the way, are formulated within a particular theoretical framework, which usually has some limited scope of application. Classical laws of thermodynamics, strictly speaking, work in classical non-relativistic physics. They do generalize to quantum mechanics and relativity, but with some caveats and complications. For example, in Relativity energy (or rather that entity to which energy generalizes) of a finite volume very annoyingly becomes tangled up with the choice of coordinates - a big red flag for anything that is supposed to be a genuine physical quantity and not just a modeling artefact. That's not to say that conservation laws are dead, but the picture becomes a good deal more complicated.

First, to be clear, by 'configuration' I meant the narrow range of settings (such as the gravitational constant G) that allow for life to be possible. I am assuming this statement to be true, as I am no expert on the necessary ingredients for life. Let's just buy into it for now.

Now if I understand correctly, [the probability of an outcome] = [the number of desired outcomes] / [all possible outcomes]. In this case, the number of desired outcomes, that is, the configuration with all settings that allow for life to be possible, is close to 1 (assuming a really narrow range of settings). And the number of all possible outcomes is the number of combination of all possible settings. It appears to me that this number is infinite, if each setting has logically an infinite possibility of values. This results in a very low probability of our configuration to occur. Thoughts? — Samuel Lacrampe

Your reasoning depends on the following assumptions:

1. Physical laws are a priori fixed, with the exception of a few free parameters (fundamental constants) that can vary within finite limits.
2. The actual values of those constants are set via some stochastic process that is somehow prior to or outside of the universe, i.e. it is not itself physical (because we count anything physical as part of the physical universe), even though it functions like a physical process and has a physical outcome.
3. The probability distribution in that stochastic process is more-or-less uniform, so that we can assume that a narrow range of values has a small probability.

These assumptions seem to be completely unjustified, and, in the case of (2), perhaps even incoherent. Why should an atheist be committed to them?

An alternative to (2)-(3) could be not a non-physical universe-generating stochastic process but ignorance: we don't know why the values of fundamental constants are what they are; we have no reason to a priori favor one assignment of values over another; therefore, we assign ignorance priors: a uniform distribution of epistemic probability. But ignorance is not a theory but a state of knowledge. All that this formulation says is: "We don't know why the universe is the way it is; we have no rational warrant to propose a theory; for all we know, it could be different."

I'm amazed that you would agree but then be amazed at what I'm suggesting, which is what you agreed with.

Why do you need papers describing what I just wrote? Making observations and integrating what you see with the rest of what you know to form hypotheses and theories in order to make predictions is the basic process of "science", not providing links to papers. I provided a hypothesis and evidence. What more do you want? — Harry Hindu

↪Harry Hindu
You said 'We all instinctively seek to eliminate our subjective view in favour of an objective one...'

I don't accept this.

What is the scientufic, and/or naturalist, case for this instinct. On what evidence does it rest? — mcdoodle

What are you, a broken record? If you ask the same question, I'm going to supply the same answer. Do you really need a "scientist" to tell you that it's instinctive for animals to have sex, or can you observe this for yourself? I described the basic process of "science" which, like philosophy, anyone can do. You don't have to be a professional scientist or philosopher to do science and philosophy. Observing a shared behavior of all members of a species would imply that this behavior is instinctive. Look around you at all the people that attempt to legitimize their ideas and beliefs by getting others to agree with them. Pointing to the number of people who believe as they do is often used as evidence that what they believe is true. It's illogical, but still a behavior that we all engage in. Just look at this forum.

Observing a shared behavior of all members of a species would imply that this behavior is instinctive. — Harry Hindu

Well, I believe you've used this phrase 'would imply' before. It seems to me unsatisfactory in an explanation. I remain, as you say, a broken record. I don't think what you call an instinct is in this case an instinct. Your explanation for this supposed instinct is that you believe you have observed a certain behaviour, therefore it must be universal and an instinct. That seems a tad weak to me.