In the continuing struggle with essentialist naturalism and fundamentalist Darwinism that the "Falsification" thread has become (since Tal never actually joined the battle here as he said he desired to do), I'd like to make some further points, and use something Will has said on another thread to refine and clarify some of my own perceptions, as Will has been moving in this same direction of late.
Will said, on the "There's something strange about 'the Mormon debater' thread, responding to more of Tal's metaphysical materialism (All italics are mine)
And thus Talmage once again reveals his seeming incapacity for three-dimensional thinking. He would have us believe that if we appeal to the existence and reliability of occult knowledge – the metaphysical, then we cannot simultaneously appeal to the empirical.
This, of course, is quite predictable – for once one makes the jump to absolute naturalism, then there can be no further accommodation of the metaphysical in the equations that seek to explain our existence. Needless to say, those who have experienced, firsthand, the concrete clarity of such occult transmissions, have come to recognize that everything in this world is, at its most fundamental level, transitory and therefore inherently unreliable – whereas the communications from beyond the veil speak of things as they really are and as they really will be.
Now, a recapitulation of my points to Larson regarding the alleged efficacy of neuroscience to determine the ultimate (important distinction) origins of consciousness in the physiology and biochemistry of the brain:
...science can say, "Individual existence and consciousness is a property of the physical organism" (and it is, of course, correct) but it cannot say anything, in any ultimate sense, about either existence or consciousness as such. This is important. Observing that individual existence and consciousness is a property of some other contingent condition (the mortal body, which dies and decomposes) tells us nothing regarding what other conditions might obtain in the universe under which individual existence and consciousness might exist, independent of and unconnected to the contingencies and associative phenomena we observe in mortality (the only phenomena science has the tools to comprehend and study).
The fact then, that individual existence and consciousness is a property of physical organisms neither conceptually nor logically sets any absolute limit on the ultimate nature of individual existence and consciousness. Any scientist who wishes to make statements about such should be clear when doing so that he is dabbling in philosophy and metaphysics, and has left science aside for the moment.
This is my point: science itself cannot make any such jump to metaphysical, or essentialist naturalism. Neither its tools, methodologies, or the features of the empirical world it is capacitated to study allow such leaps of inference. It is precisely the case that such leaps are not, strictly speaking,
logically inferential, grounded in the actual facts and evidence science, in its limited sphere provides, but
psychologically or philosohcally inferred; that is, the evidences of science is understood to be confirming preexisting worldview biases brought to the discipline of science by the scientist himself.
Metaphysical Naturalism will always be confirmed by the evidence of evolutionary biology, brain science, or physics so long as it is assumed that the material world that the methodologies and tools of science were developed to study and understand is the outer limit or extent of existence qua existence; so long as the material cosmos is understood to be the absolute boundary of perceptual reality.
But this cannot be inferred from the facts and evidence of the various sciences. It is, indeed, the closed, tautological loop of preassumption and preconception confirmed by the severe perceptual limitations of science itself, limitations themselves conditioned by and necessarily derived from the inherent perceptual limitations of the human beings who have created it so as to better understand the world of immediate sense perception of which they are a part.
Yet, there is no necessary or logical reason to assume that this world, or reference frame, of perception and experience is the only one. Science, for example, can tell us where thoughts, perceptions, and feelings originate
in the brain. But does this tell us anything about the origin of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings as these
things in themselves? Obviously not, unless one assumes,
a priori that these phenomena have no essential existence beyond the functioning of the physical brain itself, in which case, the perception that thoughts or consciousness
originate in a specific part of the brain will confirm the unverifiable and unfalsifiable assumption that in finding the region of the brain in which a mental state has its first empirically observable manifestation, we have found the the thing in itself: thought, consciousness, mind, existence.
Hence, very much as secularists claim about spiritual experience, the claims of metaphysical materialism are shown to be utterly circular, self reinforcing philosophical claims that are not, as proposed, cogent inferences or facts derived from scientific study, but philosophical axioms
assumed to be supported by scientific knowledge.
The pretense of science as more than a methodology for working with the immediate empirical world, and as an oracle for discerning the greater meanings, origins, and nature of existence, is shown to be exactly this, a pretense.
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and this can be true even in the natural and hard sciences.