Popper, mostly

This is how I’ve always seen the god-concept, as an invention of almost infinite flexibility and vagueness, allowing each and every believer to conceptualise the ur-concept in their own personal way, something like the concept of ‘table’ allows everyone to draw from it in their own way, so that they can fashion a particular table or tables to suit their own particular needs, and I know that this analogy has its limitations, tables being real things, particular instantiations of a general concept. Yet I think there is something similar going on with the god-concept – on first coming across it, we all probably tend to concretise it in our own way, usually as something near-fleshly and patriarchal, and with characteristics that are extensions of and improvements of our own. In any case, so far as the ur-concept is concerned, Sue may be right, it’s the same god (but then there are non-monotheistic religions…).

I’ve been reading lots of philosophy online, including Theodore Drange’s ‘Arguments from evil and non-belief’ and ‘Arguments from the Bible’ (a thankless task but maybe someone’s gotta do it), and an immodest but enthusiastic theist (Christian) philosopher Shandon Guthrie’s various attempts to refute the argument from evil and a new cosmological argument. Probably the most interesting essay I’ve encountered though has nothing to do with religion. Rafe Champion, very aptly named, has championed the work of Karl Popper against a neo-positivist critic, David Stove, who, along with various allies, has tried to accuse Popper of being a leading figure in the modern or post-modern retreat from science into relativism and pseudo-science, essentially because Popper, Stove claimed, negatively portrayed scientific endeavour in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Though I’m no great expert on Popper’s philosophy of science (or anything else) I have had a working acquaintance with it over the years, and I think Champion does a good job. I’ll confine my comments to the postscript of Champion’s article, in which he points out that the claim that Popper more or less initiated the anti-scientific silliness still prevalent in modern social science academia should be substantiated by concrete examples – has anyone developed an irrationalist or relativistic view of science on the basis of reading (and comprehending) Popper’s philosophy of science? As Champion writes: ‘I cannot understand how a person who has understood Popper's ideas on critical rationalism and the critical method in science could possibly move in that direction. Unless of course they repudiate the logic of Popper's position, for good reasons or bad, in which case they can hardly be said to be acting under his influence.’

Elsewhere Champion contends that Popper wasn’t primarily concerned with meaning (unlike the logical positivists, who were concerned to rule out ‘meaningless’ metaphysical statements), so he didn’t write that unfalsifiable claims were meaningless claims. He was concerned to distinguish between true scientific theories and pseudo-theories. Even this I may not have right – I may need to go to the source. A key to his interest was an attempt to understand what made science grow as a body of knowledge, as opposed to pseudo-science (and perhaps also philosophy). All of which indicates his profound, and surely justified, admiration for the scientific process. That in itself makes his ideas worthy of pursuit.