On Thu, 11 May 2006 10:57:51 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<cbrown at michiganlegal.org> writes:
> Marxism fights intellectually for materialism, as opposed to
> idealism,
> especially in social science or historical science - historical
> _materialism_. Natural science has had a history of "ne pas avoir
> besoin de
> l' hypothe de Dieu" ( spelling), i.e. atheism in its direct subject
> matter.
> In other words, scientists might be believers in their private
> lives, but
> God is not permitted as part of the explanation of a natural
> phenomenon that
> is the subject of scientific work qua scientific work. So , natural
> science
> is a sort of "natural" source of thinking and a worldview that
> bolsters
> atheism in social science , social practice and politics.
Charles,
As you probably know, the proponents of ID (intelligent design), Johnson, Behe, Dembski, Calvert, et al, directly challenge that presumption, contending that mainstream science is illegitmately biased in favor of naturalist and materialist explanations of phenomena. In other words they charge mainstream scientists with dismissing out of hand, possible supernatural explanations for such things as the origins of life and consciousness. My friend, Tom Clark, has articulated a response to the ID folk at: http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm#whysceince
As he puts it:
"Monistic naturalism is, therefore, simply the result of sticking with science as one’s preferred route to knowledge about the ultimate constituents of the world. God, traditionally conceived of as a non-physical, spiritual being set apart or above nature in some respect, is logically barred from being incorporated into a scientific understanding of the world. Science as it’s practiced can’t get us to God, since God is exactly that which escapes being pinned down as one of many facts or entities within a unified understanding of existence. Put another way, if science as its currently practiced were successful in proving the existence of God, that god could no longer have the supernatural characteristics traditionally attributed to it. In its pursuit of comprehensive explanations, science tends toward ontological unification, not dualism."
As far as historical materialism is concerned. I tend to think of it as a theory, or perhaps better still, a meta-theory of history, and so, is something more than just a philosophy of history. In that sense, I would disagree with the positions of the later Engels and of Plekhanov who contended that historical materialism represented the application of dialectical materialism to history. It seems to me that the materialist conception of history is something that can stand on its own, scientifically, whether or not one embraces diamat. In terms of epistemological or ontological assumptions, I think that all it requires is the type of methodological naturalism which science does not presume but which it inevitably leads to.
>
> One area of natural science I see a big problem with is that which
> the
> bourgeoisie have engineered into production of Weapons of Mass
> Destruction,
> nuclear weapons in the first place. Revolutions in natural science
> become
> more and more dangerous because of the bourgeois dominance of
> technological
> actualization of science, and the bourgeoisie's world historic
> bellicosity.
>
> Charles
>
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