This is a way of preregistering the validation. I consider the validations better than the average psychology and sociology study, which replicates under 50% of the time, but maybe not as good as the average economics study, which replicates around 60%. My justification for saying so is from the “unprejudiced stereotype” literature, which replicates extremely well in the otherwise dismal field of Social Psychology, which as a whole replicates under 40% of the time.

A language of science that only produces valid inferences is not possible. 

• Verification does not pass the Verification Principle. 

• Much can only be known by what it is not. 

• Truth is often defined against what is false.

Scientific Demarcation by Falsification, Karl Popper

There is an area of causal inquiry that allows for logical deduction - culpability. The tracing back from effects to a person or persons who are the cause is often a logical process that forms the basis of legal and historical inquiry. When considering this kind of causality, the degree of responsibility, blame, or praise is determined by a person's degree of freedom and their intentions or negligence. The intention or inattention is the cause. A cause-and-effect relation of persons is necessary when determining responsibility, blame, justice, and, by extension, grace and love. 

The logical (ie. a priori) element in cause and effect has to do with the intention of a person. The fundamental presupposition of legal/historical causality is, of course, the person - the moral agent. A person is the locus of a cause. If we cannot find a human or perhaps animal cause, then we must blame or praise a divine one, ultimately getting back to the Logos, God. Therefore, some destructive event that is completely outside of human responsibility is called an "Act of God." 

Once we are aware of the personification and remove it, we are left with the banal historical fact that "people have used guns to kill people." It's those people who are the problem. Removing intent entirely, the shortcut "guns kill people" has been essentially flattened to "occasionally a death is correlated with an object of the group commonly called 'gun'." 

Where did cause and effect go?

The concern of modern science is to determine cause-and-effect as a relation of things rather than persons. In doing so, it borrowed the paradigm of culpability and so routinely personifies the thing as being causal. Each statement of cause is invoking a thing as a tiny god, and then afterward, denying that the thing is in fact of minuscule divinity. For the theist, this procedure is at most a harmless shortcut, and not even that for Leibniz's Monadology. By whatever circuitous route, which might include angels, demons, and monads, all order ultimately flows from the Logos, God -- and God is indeed intentional. For the 'secularist', this is an utter embarrassment. David Hume emphatically points his skeptical finger and reluctantly calls out the shortcut - induction is a habit of belief. Without appealing to the intention of the Logos, the whole scientific enterprise is illogical. Philosophically, the effect of this on 'secular' science is brutal. 

One of the most strident atheists in the world is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Ironically, one of the things he is best known for is introducing the concept of "selfish genes" to the evolutionary literature. Genes are strands of DNA code that code for a certain protein or trait. DNA is not in and of itself a living thing as far as we know. It has no intent, but in the operation of a cell, a gene provides a recipe that cell mechanisms put to use. Dawkins, of course, knows this, but personifies the gene to efficiently get across his overarching idea of the locus of natural selection. He is so aware of the shortcut that he knows any scientist will deny the intent when seeking to understand the idea; thus, we have science by irony. In Selfish Genes, the ironic intentional shortcut is on neon display. 

If we allow ourselves the license of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do?

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: p. 88 

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene explained - youtube.com

The literature on evolutionary theory, in particular, is filled with this kind of intent and design language, which brings an even bigger irony and absurdity - we understand the gene by declaring it a person, but the human, the actual person, is a mere vessel or mechanism of the gene. Frankly, Dawkins made even a few 'secular' scientists flinch with how unabashedly this ironic procedure was presented.  

The Two Languages of Science (2020) by Yanai, I., & Lercher, M. - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 

Dawkins' intentional language is sometimes misrepresented as being merely anthropomorphic. We have every reason to believe that any animal with a central nervous system and senses enough to detect others takes an intentional stance. What is truly anthropomorphic is then denying the intention and replacing it with abstruse language concealing a different kind of intent. Is there any other animal that does this without being deceptive? Is there any other animal that is so deceived? 

That's right, deceived. The verb 'cause' and any approximate synonym is intentional: will, bring about, lead, generate, spawn, create, produce, purpose, incite, instigate, determine, begin, motivate, etc. The most that a denier of intention can say about a 'cause' is that it is a metaphor borrowed from personalism. Hume's skepticism allows no other option because all that connects an observed cause to an effect is our habits, jumps of extrapolation, and preconceived bias. 

The most that can be said of the abstruse supposedly metaphor-free language used in science is that it might shift the intending cause from the lifeless thing to the Logos or at least some higher-order intermediary of intent, such as perhaps the Wave Function, General Relativity, Nature, or the Universe. This is not necessarily so, as seen in the contrasting Night Science and Day Science that Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher (2020) defend as informal and formal science language: 

On the one hand, Yanai and Lercher have made their point well - Night Science, such as Dawkins' "selfish genes," can be translated into the more precise Day Science language of testable hypotheses. On the other hand, as the bolded causal words show, metaphysically nothing has changed, at least not with these examples. Except for Aristotle invoking "Nature", perhaps as a product of the Logos, both night and day statements are invoking tiny gods. Apart from their use in forming hypotheses, the acceptability of causal verbs as Day Science language is a kind of scientific euphemism treadmill that, thankfully, moves more slowly than the Politically Correct version.

The Euphemism Treadmill (The "Unalive" Effect) (2025) - youtube.com

The evidence is in. These are all sound statements of knowledge if one can:

• believe in tiny gods; or

• deny the tiny gods by unexamined habit (ala David Hume); or

• deny the tiny gods after accepting that scientific causality is an ironic endeavor; or

• believe in some aggregate relationship of monads in harmony with God (ala Leibniz); or

• believe in some integration of me spoken by the Sumerian Triad or the Christian Trinity; or

• see this kind of causal language as a shortcut pointing back to the underlying cause of everything - the Logos, God. 

The first three options are objectively ungrounded and unacceptable on their face. With very slight qualifications, the last three options are equivalent and can ground all of the patterns seen in the hard sciences.

Of course, there is one more legitimate option, but it is limited to entities with unironic intentional self-reference. Humans are the most obvious case, but any creature that can be said to have a mind able to intend, however dim, qualifies as well. This is the very ground that qualifies the social sciences as legitimate sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Economics, etc. Monads, aggregates of monads, and integrations of me might also qualify.

So what of Aristotle's totalizing generality, Nature? 

Nature, according to Aristotle, is an inner principle of change and being at rest (Physics 2.1, 192b20–23). This means that when an entity moves or is at rest according to its nature, reference to its nature may serve as an explanation of the event. We have to describe how—to what extent, through what other processes, and due to what agency—the preconditions for the process of change or of being at rest are present, but once we have provided an account of these preconditions, we have given a complete account of the process. The nature of the entity is in and of itself sufficient to induce and to explain the process once the relevant circumstances do not preempt it.

- "Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy" (2023) by Istvan Bodnar - plato.stanford.edu 

Thereby Aristotle reasons four required causes in increasing hierarchy: matter, form, efficient, and ultimate. Matter of a suitable nature can be given a suitable form by efficient causes towards the ultimate intending agent. Internally or externally, all four causes in the chain of causation are required for an explanation. Having (inadequately) dispensed with the Logos after rejecting the "Heraclitean doctrine" of the unity of opposites (Physics 1.2) and failing to concede that the Problem of the One and the Many is in fact a real problem, Aristotle had to conceive of the Unmoved Mover to make his Physics work. Needing an ultimate cause for all motion, it must be the Unmoved Mover or an intending product of the Mover that Aristotle is using when talking of Nature in total.

But maybe not. Aristotle's method is not that of experimental design as used in modern science. It is observation, analogy, and metaphor. He is using what is commonly known to explain the unknowns of Nature. 

Plainly... in the science of Nature, as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. 

The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not ‘knowable relatively to us’ and ‘knowable’ without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. 

Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. Much the same thing happens in the relation of the name to the formula. A name, e.g. ‘round’, means vaguely a sort of whole: its definition analyses this into its particular senses. Similarly a child begins by calling all men ‘father’, and all women ‘mother’, but later on distinguishes each of them. 

- Aristotle Physics Book 1.1 

The very nature of using a generality is to treat it as an agent - a god - who has messages - an angel. The generality of all Nature is treated by Aristotle as a hugely influential angel, regardless of whether he conceived of the Unmoved Mover or not. And the angel Nature abhors a vacuum, the meaning of which is absolutely clear - vacuums suck.

Are we against tiny gods?

A seven-day creationist reading the Bible and everything else as literally as they can will have no problem with the Hard Sciences. Most of those sciences are meant to be read literally. The content presented this way - physical laws, chemical reactions, anatomy, and esoteric mathematics - is entirely compatible with a high view of theism - an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God. 

I've known several engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who have entertained seven-day creationism. I've even known PhD university professors who specialize in biology and medicine who have settled on such a view. Of course, given the complete and total integration of Evolutionary Theory into Biology, they are swimming against the current - perhaps kicking against the bricks - and must be selective on when and where they divulge those beliefs. 

Evolutionary theory is routinely and unabashedly written as ironic science. Regardless of whether it is popular or scientific literature, a literal reading of an article or book using Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian theory routinely reads as a perverse form of creationism invoking tiny gods who design biologic function or pick winners and losers. That is, the literal reading offends both moral sensibilities and scientific sensibilities.

• "The main job of your lungs is gas exchange. They pull fresh air in when you breathe, pass oxygen into your blood for your body to use as energy, and take out carbon dioxide waste so you can breathe it out."

- A boss god gave your lungs a job.

• "Birds migrate in order to find more favorable food sources and weather."

- Attributes an intentional plan or journey motivation to a behavioral trait.

That last quote is from An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology, 3rd edition. The authors fully acknowledge (page 3) that the ironic science jargon is there for the sake of the reader:

There is no doubt that loose terminology can indicate imprecise thinking and half-formulated ideas. But it is equally easy to conceal woolly arguments behind an obfuscating screen of scientific jargon. We have used a simple direct style in order to make our arguments clear and not because behavioural ecology is woolly subject. 

Krebs and Davies quite ably defend this and simultaneously put behavioural ecology in its place by quoting George Orwell's parody translation of Ecclesiastes 9:11:

For his part, Charles Darwin, the person most responsible for getting evolutionary theory going as a legitimate discipline in Biology, claims he doesn't see the problem:

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one...A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.”

- Origin of Species (1872), Chapter 15. Recapitulation and Conclusion.

Darwin here is being coy. 

Most people and most Christians through the ages have had as their avocation the production of food - hunting, gathering, farming, shepherding and the like. By and large, raping, pillaging, and plundering were done on the side. Theistic culture - Sumerian culture, Judaism, Christianity, etc. - brought order to human relationships, suppressing the competitive urges inbuilt in mankind for the greater good of the family, tribe, and increasingly urban mankind. The stories in the Old Testament are stories of the special selection of Abraham and his seed in a field of belief that was being corrupted from a communion in a common theistic culture towards ideas of base natural selection and might makes right (Genesis 15:16).

Even Islam - which is commonly thought to be more violent and vengeful than its cousins - has a Mohammad who, at great personal and family cost, turns the other cheek again and again until a threshold of iniquity was met. He advocates the moderation of many things - including moderating ever-present slavery - to help tether a tribal culture that could and did easily go to extremes. Nature and natural selection divorced from god and destiny offend this moderation.

The intentions in ironic science don't just stoke the perennial Problem of Evil (see Job); it questions all moral sentiment everywhere. Natural selection is merely a statement of the tendency of winners in the competition of every against all - "Survival of the fittest." Coming into the 20th century after Darwinism gained a foothold, personalism as a broad moral sentiment began leaching out of the social fabric. Nearly all progressive movements actively advocated eugenics within their fascisms and socialisms, all the while grouping identities and extinguishing persons (Leonard, 2005). On the other end, "Might makes right" and "survival of the fittest" mobsters and robber barons saw being on top as the only goal worth pursuing, regardless of the human cost: "Nothing personal, it's just business."

The Godfather (1972) - business not personal - youtube.com

Rarely stated outright, the demonstrated capacity of the ironic science of Nature and natural selection to extinguish all morality is what has driven so many People of the Book against Evolutionary Theory. Besides the expansion of examples for the perennial Problem of Evil, everything else is just cherrypicking facts.

Going back to the source, Charles Darwin was more careful, staying consistently in the Aristotelian form of explanation. He continually gives Nature, natural selection, and general law intention, which is fine, as he wrote most of his works as a Christian or at least a theist. For an atheist polemicizing against the theistic frame in the same way, this kind of writing not only invokes tiny gods, but produces a perverse kind of idolatry of Nature. Consider for yourself the following examples from Darwin's Origin of Species, 6th edition (1872, 1st ed. 1859) from the point of view of both theistic and atheistic frames:

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends. - Ch. 4

Mere chance … alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species. - Ch. 4. 

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. 

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalized productions from another land.

But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art. 

Thus, as I believe, natural selection will tend in the long run to reduce any part of the organisation, as soon as it becomes, through changed habits, superfluous, without by any means causing some other part to be largely developed in a corresponding degree. And conversely, that natural selection may perfectly well succeed in largely developing an organ without requiring as a necessary compensation the reduction of some adjoining part.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 

Arbitrary Science

An ancient Sumerian wouldn't have major reservations with intentional evolutionary statements. Time is certainly not an issue. Taken literally, the Sumerian Kings List (SKL) has mankind going back well over 250,000 years! The life of the major gods goes back long before that. Perhaps unique among all ancient theistic cultures, the Sumerians have no obvious problem with millions, or even billions, of years in their timescale.

The focus on the Problem of Nature and Problem of Evil is of no great concern. The dAynamic destruction like competition that we expect of natural selection abounds in ancient times. It is the very thing that the mythos says the lesser gods/sukkals/angels of civilization were put in place to moderate. In the increasingly less tribal, more urban environment, they may have seen the concept of natural selection as a step up. One might interpret the Sumerian myths of the formation of mankind - which are diverse only if taken literally - that the making of mankind is a kind of moderation of these evolutionary forces. These myths do not make out mankind as being so far above the animals that Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory would pose any great threat.

The concern of the ancient Sumerian would be to place statements of science under the correct god or sukkal/angel in the hierarchy of gods that existed at the pleasure of the Sumerian Triad. The god of blood and heart is Nu-dim-mud, "Prince creator of life-blood", which is the common name/epithet for Enki/Ea. Enlil, "Lord Spirit/Wind/Breath", is obviously a god breathing life, and therefore has a strong association with the lungs. The god of the wild animals, at least the wild animals that surround Mesopotamia, is Šakkan. Several gods have a relationship with the birds, Inanna for instance, and the annuna gods are often metaphorically designated as birds. And on and on.

This is no different than the division of things, processes, and tendencies into the different disciplines of science - the intentional language of ironic science is used in all of them. Most of these disciplines are arbitrarily defined fields of inquiry, formed by intuition, funding, politics, and old beliefs. Meteorology, for instance, is not the study of meteors, but of weather. 

Some of these fields overlap greatly and others not at all. Whenever something new arises or crosses over disciplines, a new subdiscipline is named, resulting in families of disciplines. This is just like a Sumerian god's placement in family tracing back ultimately to An, Enlil, and Ki in ancient Sumer.

The authority ploy of appealing to a specialized scientific discipline, or to a noted master in that discipline who has all the authoritative answers, is no different in principle from an ancient Sumerian appealing to the authority of one of their gods. Philosophically, we have known this all along. Appeals to authority of person or consensus:

• Logical Fallacy

• Woozle Effect - Evidence by citation

An appeal to authority is only justified when the evident basis of the authority is superior to your own and superior in general. For instance, the Hard Sciences have a high standard 

Consider the major disciplines in Biology:

• Soft Science: Medicine, 

• Neuroscience, Biotechnology

• Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, 

• Botany, Zoology, Marine Biology

• Physiology, Anatomy, Microbiology, Cellular Biology

• Hard Science: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Genetics

Arbitrary All the Way Down?

Arbitrariness is in every term of science that is not defined by science for science.

Example: Big five personality characteristics empirically established

vs. Enneagrams, Jungian Archetypes, Myers-Briggs etc. Intuitively established

>>Why does a Zebra have its stripes?

Mammals invariant with variation

Primates

Humans without exception

Why shouldn't philosophers and scientists lie?

An argument against objective morality that defeats itself (2020) by Jeffrey Kaplan - youtube.com