I'm sorry my friend, but...no. I'm open to a lot of ideas and directions that a discussion may take but this is just a non-starter, a laughable example of exactly the sort of benighted, willful ignorance that dooms fruitful discussion. This is the kind of statement you can only make if you haven't read philosophy written before 1859. I mean, of course, _The Origin of Species_ was a watershed to be sure, but there's certain philosophical freight even Darwin can't carry.

I think underneath this is a problem of false analogy. Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way, in a scaffold of proofs and deductive confidence towards an inevitable conclusion that, once reached, can be accepted on its own terms without understanding of the prior movements.

I'd suggest reading a bit further and broaden your engagement. As a mathematician, you might appreciate Pierre Duhem's views on religion and history, Whitehead's ideas on the history of science, and in particular I'd say check out Hans Jonas' "Is God a Mathematician?". All of those pass the 1859 smell test as well, so, bonus!

As an addendum, the reason why philosophy has been unsuccessful at producing answers is because it assumes human thought or language or existence as something fundamental. As Eliezer points out, rather than ask "do we have free will?", the productive perspective is to ask "what sort of algorithm does our brain run which makes it believe such a question is meaningful or answerable?" Have you read the Less Wrong series on rationality? It's a good exposition of the thinking process of someone like me.

Certainly the attempts prior to 1859 were brave, but it was quackery. Much like Erdos's comments on the collatz conjecture, we are not yet ready for such questions (although neuroscience will get us close in the next century).

This is a concise version of the fundamental category mistake Dawkins makes. In one sentence, we've dogmatically blown past thousands of years of deep reflection on the mind/body question. It's not as if the idea that mind were reducible to matter had never been broached before, or that the Mendelian breakthrough provided some evidence that was philosophically pertinent. And Certainly Origin of Species does not put a cap on that discussion any more than Dennett's Consciousness Explained does. It's very much a live question to this day, as it was a live question when Cicero and Lucretius engaged on the very same terms.

If the mind/body problem has not been settled now (and it certainly wasn't in 1859, that's more than anyone could possibly claim) then for that reason at least no one should take Dawkins seriously on this count, and fortunately very few serious thinkers do.

"although neuroscience will get us close in the next century"

This is first-rate eschatology, more cashing out of the infinite blank check of the Future of Science (let us pray). This is dogmatism, not science, not philosophy. It's hope.

This is very tricky, and my arguments above on religion don't appeal to my last few posts on "philosophy before 1859," but we digress. Thanks for the back-and-forth!

Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral realism isn't far from my mind).

Of course, it's not like Darwin invalidated all prior philosophy, but it did invalidated some beliefs, like Young Earth Creationism.

So here is what I believe to be the correct phrasing: "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded". Well, you can scrap "philosophical": it applies to any result.

"I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was"

"Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded"

These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must acknowledge this from an historical standpoint, and any objective examination of the ideas should quickly see Science's dependence on philosophical foundations.

I don't want to be unkind, but this is precisely the kind of historical and intellectual illiteracy I'm talking about. What you're stating here is truly dogmatic and emotive, and disconnected from anything resembling a healthy contextualization or understanding of the centuries of thinkers and writings that were poured into building the very worldview you take for granted.

You and I would have to go through some long discussion and/or remedial reading to get to the point where we could progress the argument reasonably, and I suspect you'd run out of patience and just wave your hand, make another high-handed dogmatic statement about The Sovereignty of Science and move on to something that made you less uncomfortable. I hope not, but my experience with discussions like this makes me suspect so.

About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I do recall that many scientific fields either spawned from philosophy, or answer what was once philosophical questions. As for philosophical foundations, well, there's Bayes, Occam's Razor, and of course the plain old scientific methodology. We indeed don't have to look very far.

Now about my assumptions:

In a trivial sense, there's only one reality (or world, or universe). Each of us looks at it from a different window, of course, but if it weren't the "same" reality, we wouldn't be interacting at all. Now the trick is to figure out what this reality is.

Relativism is bullshit. More precisely, for any given two contradictory models of reality, at least one of them contains mistakes. Yes/no questions are even easier: the correct answer is bound to be either "yes" or "no". Not neither, not both. For instance, for any definition of "God", there is a God, or there is none.

Bayesianism is most probably the best we'll ever have to understand reality. Note that it rules out the possibility of ever forming absolutely correct answers: for any yes/no question, I am bound to qualify my answer with probabilities, and that will not match reality itself. For instance, if reality says "yes", while I say "yes with probability 90%", I am wrong. Less wrong however than "yes with probability 65%".

Reductionist materialism is very probably correct. That is, there is no such thing as an indivisible mental entity. Minds are composed of parts (like neurons), and so are love potions (if there's such a thing). In principle, anything, whether it thinks or not, can be studied and ultimately understood in non-thinking terms. It may be beyond the grasp of our mere human brains, however.

Determinism is probably correct. Given current knowledge, it means that the universe probably follows some form of the Everett branches (the Copenhagen interpretation is just crazy).

Good stuff.

As far as reductionism is concerned, my problem with it, in a nutshell, is that at its core it is dogmatic and built on core metaphysical assumptions that a reasonable person doesn't have to accept. I suggest to you that your confidence in materialism/reductionism is inherited and only seems likely and intuitive to you because most moderns are steeped in materialist metaphors and abstract confidence in reductionism and the hope for prediction and control it provides. But that hope is really based on the triumphs of Newton, not the last hundred years, as your citation of Copenhagen and String, etc., demonstrates. At the very least it must be acknowledged that physics has not progressed as it was hoped 150 years ago, and our expectations for what we eventually can and can't know are being truncated or qualified into increasingly abstract and near-poetic models. Does the boson exists? Branes, strings? Will we ever get a GUT? Those are live questions and at the very least should cause the triumphal materialist a measure of humility.

Any number of philosophers in the last 100+ years have pointed out that reductionism is not the only possible model and has never been the only possible scientific model. In the modern era, from Leibniz on we've had basic philosophical systems and metaphors that would fit very nicely into modern physics, but would require a basic inversion of our idea that at the core reality is dead matter, rather than something like rudimentary/primitive mind. Spinoza, Husserl, Whitehead, Bergson are just the biggest names that advocated some version of this.

For some reason it's very difficult for us moderns to give up the basic dogma that reality must be dead matter, or mute energy or some paradoxical balance of the two (paradox?! in science?! that's mysticism!)

Regarding "dead matter", I'm not sure the term is useful. The wave function, which is supposed to be at the bottom of all things (according to current physics), isn't even close to what we intuitively call "dead matter". Its behaviour certainly is (conceptually) simple and deterministic, though.

I hadn't exactly Popper's falsification in mind. But even from a Bayesian perspective, most experiments that don't end up as predicted still deal huge blows to the underlying theories.

Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism.

Lastly, reductionism was actually not a hard sell at all, it had its advocates long before Darwin and in fact the advent of Darwin was really highly desired and favored by this camp. The fact that Wallace and Darwin were pursuing very similar agendas at the same time speaks to this. We had the notion of evolution and atomism since the pre-socratics, just no plausible scientific evidence to give it public political traction and philosophical (in the sense of epistemological) credibility.

So I guess I end up agreeing with you -- it was a hard public sell before Darwin, but reductionism's advocates had been around for thousands of years. Also see F.A. Lange's _History of Materialism_. That also may be of interest to you. Lange was a Kantian who had tremendous influence on other atheist thinkers, especially Nietzsche.

So, for now I must admit, that feels like a leap of faith. I am very confident, but my curiosity isn't satisfied yet.

Here what would answer one of my friends. He happen believe atheism is true, but more importantly, he's a literary person. So:

"To understand [such and such author]'s ideas and concepts, you have to impregnate yourself with their original thoughts. That is, you must read their original works. Secondary sources just won't do."

I tried to reply that I didn't need to read Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica to understand Newtonian physics, but he seems to think that philosophy is different. (But then, where to that "Philosophiæ" comes from? Oh yeah, he meant literary philosophy, of the kind that somehow cannot be true nor false.)

I think the root of the problem is something akin to dualism. Many people (including some atheists) postulate that between the laws of physics and the human soul, there is something that is not only unexplained (true), but actually unexplainable. In other words, "Poof Magic", though they won't ever use that ridiculous wording. So, below the "Poof Magic" threshold, we have the lowly matters that you can indeed explain. Above it, the very notion of truth is muddled.

As you may guess, "science" is placed below the threshold, and "philosophy" is placed above. The first is about facts we can check, about theories that can be improved or disproved. The second is more about schools of thought, which are neither right nor wrong, neither true nor false, they just "are" (this way, no one can claim his own school of thought is better than any other).

Another key difference between "science" and "philosophy" is the treatment of secondary sources. They can be wonderful for "science", but they are worthless for "philosophy". To understand a philosopher's ideas, you must "impregnate yourself with his thoughts", that is, read his original works. And of course you are not allowed to judge the veracity of those works.

Now here is the killer argument: theology is to be placed above the "Poof Magic" threshold. Therefore, (i) you have to read them all before you claim anything about them, and (ii) you cannot say they were false anyway, it's just a school of though, that is "by definition" no worse nor better than any other.

I have never defeated the killer argument. I need to get rid of the "Poof Magic" nonsense first, and the burden of proof is always on my shoulders. Even If I manage shake it, the real reason why people make the killer argument is because its comfortable. They can never be wrong with it, and it avoids arguments.

But, you know, if we disagree, at least one of us must be mistaken, right? Wouldn't it be interesting to know who?

Another nice argument is by Occam's razor, that the scientific choice of axioms has less complexity and is devoid of localization, whereas systems like Catholicism have strong focus on arbitrary notions like Jerusalem or sacristy. These arbitrary notions are explained on-the-nose by evolutionary thinking (our ancestors made up stories because of their psychology), whereas they are inexplicable in Catholic thinking. (Why did Jesus choose to come alive when did? He just picked a time and place at random.) Of course, Occam's razor is only an aesthetic choice that agrees with evidence, again a Bayesian argument. It's difficult to base one's life philosophy on an aesthetic choice, so naturally a religious upbringing overwhelms.

EDIT: I should point out that the Bayesian argument is locally uncontrollable. My mother claims to have had a sensory experience--when facing doubts about divorcing my father--complete with vivid sounds and imagery, of Jesus appearing to her and telling her she must stay with him. I admit if I had such sensory evidence, the scientific axioms would be hard to swallow, and the Catholic system would be a strong contender (Bayesionally speaking). Thence stems the problem of faith.

Chances are, both of you. Put another way, you are both right in ways you wouldn't suspect, and wrong in the same fashion. The unknown unknowns of epistemology, so to speak.

On a side note: Of _course_ _Dawkins_ would say that, being an evolutionary biologist... :)