Natural Order and Science

[Harris]

If you're trying to use philosophy to demonstrate objective facts about reality, then you are going to fail. And fail hard. It has to be combined with the scientific method, or else you're off in an abstract simplified model of reality, with no confirmation that anything you "learn" from that model has any bearing on reality.

Exactly, that was my point while I was writing a response against the stupid statement of Mathilda, “I'm a professional scientist with the view that 95% of philosophy is pointless and irrelevant mental masturbation.”

In that response, I wrote:

“Philosophy was the original inquiry into the nature of the world.  (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc.)  It combined what we now call “science” with other aspects of reality, and asked all those questions about the origin of the universe, what it was made of, what it was all for, etc.”

Reducing reality to simple rules like, "everything needs a cause" is just making a massive unfounded assumption. "In my experience things have needed a cause" is what the person is actually saying, and is then trying to extrapolate that to all of reality, including reality itself. This is garbage, and it's why this kind of thing never produces any meaningful results. What use is it?

Do not forget about logic which has a power to transform philosophical ideas into real science. Logic provides a conceptual analysis, a critical attitude, a superior methodology, and the possibilities of deriving consequences of their fundamental presuppositions.

Is not Aristotle the one who used inductive-deductive method, used inductions from observations to infer general principles, deductions from those principles to check against further observations, and more cycles of induction and deduction to continue the advance of knowledge? For Aristotle, logic is the instrument by means of which we come to know ANYTHING. He was the first person who have introduced the idea of the unmoved mover, "that which moves without being moved" or prime mover.

Logic can accurately represent the true nature of reality. Beginning with simple descriptions of particular things, we can eventually assemble our information in order to achieve a comprehensive view of the world.

In modern times think about Boole, Frege, and Russell who have developed modern symbolic logic and succeeded in deriving all of mathematics from it (and set theory) and by the magic of same logic physicists have discovered indiscernible black holes.

Based on our observations and evidences that we have, is it logical to think that everything in the universe is:

Eternal or
Popped out of nothingness without any cause?