Volcanic eruption, Ngauruhoe, New Zealand. Photo from National Geophysical Data Center (US).
It is my contention, however, that the old theology has been replaced by a metaphysics of philosophy and science that is equally fallacious and mistaken in character. Here are five of its basic tenets:
(1) The future is determined by the past.
(2) Every event had a sufficient determinant cause.
(3) Knowledge must be grounded in certainty.
(4) Scientific knowledge can in principle be made complete.
(5) Scientific knowledge and method can in principle be unified.
… I end this introductory chapter with a list of metaphysical propositions that are argued in the remainder of the book.
Some Metaphysical Propositions
(1) The fundamental laws of natural phenomena are essentially probabilistic
rather than deterministic in character.
(2) Our conception of matter must contain an intrinsic probabilistic event.
(3) Causality is probabilistic, not deterministic, in character. Consequently,
no inconsistency exists between randomness in nature and the existence
of valid causal laws.
(4) Certainty of knowledge – either in the sense of psychological
immediacy, in the sense of logical truth, or in the sense of complete precision
of measurements – is unachievable.
(5) The collection of past, present, and future scientific theories is
not converging to some bounded fixed result that will in the limit give
us complete knowledge of the universe.
(6) The sciences are characteristically pluralistic, rather than unified,
in language, subject matter, and method.
(7) Language learning and performance in their phonological, grammatical,
semantical, and prosodic aspects are intrinsically probabilistic in character.
(8) The theory of rationality is intrinsically probabilistic in character.”
Suppes, Patrick. Probabilistic Metaphysics, Basil Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1984 p. 2 & p. 10
