rationalskepticism.org

Mick wrote:

Animavore wrote:

Mick wrote:In the article linked by Shrunk, the author says Krauss stated that science discovered no gods were responsible for the laws of nature. That is false. Final causation and contingency are not even considered by science, let alone its methodological naturalism excludes any such theistic explanations in the first place.

You seem to be saying science hasn't discovered gods because scientists aren't looking for them.
Neither final causation nor contingency can be tested. And, in fact, the former makes no sense in light of evolution since there is no end product. I'm sure it was more plausible when the world was fixed and static but we're, most of us, well beyond that.
So where to look next?

Suppose it is true that final causation and contingency cannot be tested. Presumably, you think falsifiability is necessary. Thus, it follows that science cannot deal with that stuff, but that doesn't imply its non-presence.

Well, let's say that I am a zoologist and my supervisor assigns me to study wild elephant populations in South American forests. I spent twenty years on this project and report that I have found no evidence for elephants in South American forests, so I conclude that there is a very high probability that there are no wild elephant populations in South American forests.

"How can this be?" asks my supervisor, who firmly believes that there are wild elephants in South America. "Parts of South America are perfectly suite for elephants. In fact they seem designed for elephants." My supervisor says, "Just because you didn't find any elephants doesn't imply that they are not there."

I reply that I wasn't looking for elephants only, I was also looking for evidence for elephants, and their simply wasn't any.

"Nonsense," responds my supervisor, "I looked at this teleologicaly, and my conclusion is that one of the final causes of forests in South America has to be elephants."

That said, the abandonment on final causation was not in light of some rebuttal. You have no scientific basis for affirming that. A familiarity with the history science will tell you that much. This was a switch in models. That said, there were plenty of teleological understandings of evolution, and nothing about evolution entails mechanical philosophy alone.

A "mechanical philosophy" is exactly what brought about the theory of evolution. Darwin and others abandoned things like final causes as any form of explanation. There does not need to be a metaphysical final cause where there is no intended goal or designated final outcome.

Now, you could say that I cannot prove that there is no intended goal or designated final outcome for evolution, but that would be not be my burden. It would be sufficient for me to point out that there is no evidence for it. If you want to say that there is an intended goal or a designated final outcome, but there is and can be no evidence for it, then all I can do is point and laugh when you begin to talk about what science can and cannot do.

My fictional supervisor says, as you seemed to do also, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." I say, "Bullshit." When a claim is made, but there is no, and has never been any evidence, then absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Do you have any evidence that evolution involves any kind of final cause, or are you just going to prattle on about "the stuff that science can't deal with"?