What are the reasons against its legitimacy and what for?
Good post, kind of hard to understand Theology without some understanding of this subject.I want to thank PuerAzaelis for creating this thread. Most appreciated. He's really addressing the elephant in the room here.
The following is not directed at the OP, but rather everyone on the board in-general:
Knowledge of metaphysics is always necessary, and it doesn't matter if you're a believer or not. Doesn't matter if you're pro-science, because you're still soaking in metaphysics regardless (you probably just don't know it).
Just because your guidance counselor didn't out & out tell you it was necessary, doesn't mean you can safely ignore it. Time constraints probably edged it out, or it might have been considered a redundant optional course to drop if you were part of some specialized or accelerated learning program of some sort.
Why? Probably because the administration just assumed your regular professors would cover it. And I'm almost certain they didn't.
So ignorance of metaphysics can be a huge blind-spot. Choosing to hide in a lab all-day, and ignore all the other buildings on campus, may come back to bite you in the end. Some science degrees required studying metaphysics as part of a separate course in philosophy and some didn't. Depending on the college.
General: Metaphysics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In specialized fields of science: Metaphysics of Science | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
^ If you've never studied this at the introductory level, then do yourself a favor and learn something new for a change.
Part of the reason for the question is that I am interested in medieval Scholasticism, which was quite friendly to metaphysics. Since Descartes however it has not been in vogue and I am wondering if that is because science is anti-metaphysics, in which case an atheistic philosophy would also have to be anti-metaphysics.
That's the relevance of the question to this particular forum. Does atheism even admit the possibility of a metaphysics or is that incoherent?
From the article Paulomycin cited:
In the 1930s, the Logical Empiricists proposed an empiricist, positivist program. They held that experience is our only source of nondefinitional knowledge (hence Logical Empiricism) and that the task of philosophy is logical analysis; that is, analysis of the logical features of and relations between sentences (hence Logical Empiricism). According to the Logical Empiricists, all the empirical propositions we believe can be reduced to so-called protocol sentences, which are direct renderings of our perceptual experience, or “the given.” Only if we know how a sentence could in principle be verified—that is, which possible observations would result in our accepting it as true—can we say that the sentence is meaningful. This so-called verifiability criterion of meaning has one purpose in particular, namely, to exclude metaphysical speculation from the realm of meaningful discourse. For example, the metaphysical sentence “every thing has an immaterial substance” cannot be empirically verified; hence, according to the verifiability criterion of meaning, it is meaningless. A radical antimetaphysical stance was one of the key tenets of Logical Empiricism.
Do all atheistic world views require this philosophy?
And if we treat scientism as a symptom of the age of fundamentalisms we could also say that theistic worldviews that are dependent on biblical exclusivity - which I also view as a fundamentalism - are also hostile to metaphysics.
So there is ambiguity against metaphysics from both sides of the spectrum of world views.
Scientific exclusivity - no metaphysics.
Biblical exclusivity - no metaphysics.
Ah, you are talking about the study of all that exists.this means the study of all beings precisely insofar as they are real, which means actually existent.
This is like God creating the rock too heavy for him to lift, etc...God willed Himself to no longer exist. Atheism has thus become true.
I prefer physics to metaphysics.
You're projecting here.Surprise, you're forcing physics as your metaphysical position. You're soaking in it.
You're projecting here.