Preaching alleged gods that have as much supporting evidence as leprechauns does not make one look intelligent.
Actually, this is an example of
Logical Positivism, that Nick444 was rightly complaining about. I agree with Nick on this. My complaint with Nick was that he was assuming that Positivism was my philosophy as well.
Bigg's assumption here is that no ideas are valid unless they are supported by material evidence. That might sound like what I was saying above, but no, there is an important distiction. The distinction is that I view science as one of man's most useful intellectual achievements. Science should be judged by everyone including its practitioners not on how valid it might be as a world view (scientism), but on how useful it is (pragmatism).
So when it comes to useful explanations of natural phenenomenon, I would side with Bigg where he insists that those explanations are supported by material evidence. I also support science's working assumption that all natural phenomemon can be ultimately explained through naturalistic explanations. That is a pragmatic working assumption, not a world view. Much like when your accountant has a working assumption that arithmetic will allow him to get an accurate accounting of your finances, he does so not because he thinks it is a world view. He does it because so far it is known to work.
But when it comes to one's complete epistemology (how we know things) about universal truth, I side with Nick in saying that scientific materialism is not a comprehensive route to universal truth. The support of that comes from the observation that revolutions in scientific thought, where powerful theories are replaced by even more powerful theories, seem to produce new theories that have no resemblance to the ones they replaced. Scientists are fully aware of this and say , "so what. the new one works better." This is why science is not scientism. It is simple pragmatism. But it is obvious that although the new theories are more powerful than the old ones, they cannot be converging on universal truth.
Where I argue with Bigg, therefore, is on the idea that all ideas, thoughts, philosophies, beliefs, must be supported by real world material evidence. That is a kind of positivist fundamentalism, or scientism. The problem I stated above is the reason why most people abandoned the notion a while ago. The revolutions of Modern Physics in the early part of the 20th century humbled most everyone who thought that way. In fact, there is nothing more powerful than Quantum Mechanics when it comes to explaining sub-atomic phenomemon. However, most scientists do not believe it is actually the truth about sub-atomic phenomenon. If it wasn't for Quantum Mechanics, you would be reading this on a computer that would be the size of a football field. But that doesn't change the fact that most scientist believe that Quantum Mechanics is probably not the truth.
We already know that Newton's Laws are not the truth, but at speeds much less than the speed of light, they are "good enough" at doing what they are supposed to do, which is to make predictions. Although Relativity has replaced Newtonian Mechanics, we still use NM to put men on the moon. Relativity yields Newtonian Mechanics at speeds much below the speed of light, and gives us better answers at speeds approaching the speed of light. So Relativity is more useful and more accurate under more conditions, but we don't think it is any closer to a universal truth than Newton was. This is why science is no more a world view than arithmetic is. It is simply an astonishingly useful methodology.
To say that science doesn't work is sheer ignorance. But no more ignorant than saying that it is the only path to universal truth.
