Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

So your defense against my assertion that materialism is an arbitrary philosophical assumption is to go to science, and you say science is defined by a belief in the material world view?  Circles are bad, man.   Circles. . . are bad.

WTF are you talking about?  Why even quote me?  Theres no reason for me to repeat myself a third time.  You're not going to get anything you didn't get the other two.  If you think that science is somehow in the business of providing circular reasoning...I don't have the patience to prove to you..as I keep saying, that science works and can be trusted.  But why, then, even ask to be shown any science, about anything, whatsoever?  

I've not said that science using circular reasoning.  I'm saying that YOU do.  I've not said science is invalid, I've said that your abuse of science as an explanation, despite your complete unwillingness to attempt to use it to support your philosophical position, is invalid.

Science is just the process of observation, categorization, experimentation, and so on.  It is the art of learning things in a particularly useful way.  But you are conflating the PROCESS of science, which is very useful, with the philosophical predilections of some (hypothetical and as-yet unquoted) scientists, which are not really any better guesses than anyone else's.  Science does not "arrive at" a material world view, nor is a particular belief about reality required-- though certainly some scientists, including many of the greats of the 20th century, held views that they were not capable of letting go when evidence showed their particular views about materiality to be incorrect.

If reality consists of nothing more than ideas, or fairies dancing in space, or the Mind of God, it may be that science will arrive eventually at that understanding. So no, I disagree that science and a materialist world view are necessarily connected at the hip-- though for some scientists they are.