It is rare that anyone but Peirce sees reality as he did.

As you mention, Christianity is real according to his ontology, because it can be defined. It is that simple.

The example I often use to help getting the "intuitive nature" of this. Imagine that we travel to the future and are on a team who's in charge of studying the odd behavior of a group of chimps, who seem to have long conversations. On top of that, sometimes they get together in significantly large groups, and perform what appears to be "structured songs", where the "talk" gets syncrhonized. They look at the sky, and raise their arms.

It is possible using Peirce's semiotic (theory of meaning) to crack the code of their language (just like the same principle cracked the code of German enigma code). But a cool question is:
Should we consider the fact that they seem to "prey", as an important phenotype, a novel one which appeared in this group of chimps? Should we find out that they indeed believe in something, how can we document the whole thing without considering that this something is real?

Instead of saying "it is not", Peirce allows for asking "what is it". He leaves all paths of inquiries open, including theology, and provide with tools (semiotic) to express any work in a scientific langage (scientific because his contribution passed in the meticulous hands of science now). The question is not if what they believe in is true or false, but rather in defining the exact nature of their beliefs.

But no, to answer your question, lots of great philosophical legacy from turn of 20th century, is merely surviving. Peirce has been considerably distored by his successors, who found semiotic too complex, and some of his thinking too abstract. It got salvaged by science mostly.

The only physicist that I know, who's very strong with Peirce is Lee Smolin (and you can feel it).

Popper was not an instrumentalist, neither is any scientist nowadays, Instrumentalism is bad science. Geocentricism was a bad scientific theory & is false, Newtonian Physics was a good scientific theory & has been superseded by a better & more complete one. Geocentricism was never useful & never made any predictions, whereas Newtonian Physics was & still is useful in the right domain of applicability.

You made three arguments in this article, all of which are wrong:

1. Naturalism is preferred since it's true. The poetic part is the bit that accepts it's OK to talk about things in certain ways because they are useful.

2. No scientist is closed to supernatural answers, they don't use them because they are extremely bad & likely false theories.

3. I also disagree with your final argument, the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. I refer you to wikipedia since many good philosophers have refuted it already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism#Responses

Segue: Many people disagree with S. Carroll. Including S. Carroll himself. Just because someone foists that contradictions are not contradictory doesn't make it so. It's easy to be immune (or claim immunity) when you're all over the illusory map. When it comes to Carroll’s causal paradigm, we find him describing http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-real-as-baseball/ free will to be as real as baseball, and in such moves he simultaneously seeks the fulfillment of three wishes. [1] To remain within the causally closed paradigm afforded by physics, the “real”, the fundamentally impersonal (terms which in fact “….refer to the fundamental furniture of the universe. At this level of discourse he is a realist…”), and [2] to retain the intellectual right to employ terms of causality with respect to personal causation (the useful but not real, a “nominalist discussion about concepts, not a realist discussion of what is true about nature….” [and hence not true of human nature], and [3] it’s a bit blurry, but the third wish seems to fall along the lines of retaining the intellectual right to refute both emergentism and reductionism, forcing him into places between his realism and his nominalism. It’s real, but not really, and, it’s useful, but not true of reality’s fundamental nature, which ipso facto includes humanity’s fundamental nature, causally and otherwise. And so on. Therefore: regarding this: “…..we are collections of vibrating quantum fields held together in persistent patterns by feeding off of ambient free energy according to impersonal and uncaring laws of nature, and we are also human beings who make choices and care about what happens to ourselves and others…”, well, of course many people disagree with S. Carroll. Including S. Carroll himself. Just because someone foists that contradictions are not contradictory doesn't make it so. It's easy to be immune (or claim immunity) when you're all over the illusory map.

Quote:

Emergence of Complex Structures:

To explain the relationship between the elements of the Core Theory and the macroscopic world, Carroll employs a broad notion of emergence. This concept traditionally refers to the ways in which higher level properties (e.g., those of water) emerge from the combination of more elementary constituents (e.g., hydrogen and oxygen). He claims that as time passes and entropy increases,

“…..the configuration of matter in the universe takes on different forms, enabling the emergence of different higher-level ways of talking. The appearance of something like “purpose” simply comes down to the question: “Is purpose a useful concept when developing an effective theory of this part of reality in this particular domain of applicability?””

“Consciousness” and “understanding” are concepts “we invent in order to give ourselves more useful and efficient descriptions of the world.” These concepts are not illusions, but accepting their reality does not mean a rejection of the laws of physics. All such concepts “are part of a higher-level vocabulary we use to talk about the emergent behavior of the underlying physical system, [they are] not something separate from the physical system.” This general mode of explanation allows the poetic naturalist to argue that

“…..we are collections of vibrating quantum fields held together in persistent patterns by feeding off of ambient free energy according to impersonal and uncaring laws of nature, and we are also human beings who make choices and care about what happens to ourselves and others.”

For poetic naturalism, the reality of concepts like consciousness, causality, and organism is only linguistic; they perform functions in particular narratives. The discussion is thus a nominalist discussion about concepts, not a realist discussion of what is true about nature. Yet, when Carroll turns to fermions, bosons, and the quantum wave function, he does think that these terms refer to the fundamental furniture of the universe. At this level of discourse, he is a realist; whereas in other areas he is a nominalist.

End quote.

Many people disagree with S. Carroll. Including S. Carroll himself. Just because someone foists that contradictions are not contradictory doesn't make it so. It's easy to be immune (or claim immunity) when you're all over the illusory map.

Regarding the emergence of causality and regarding “Downward Causation” (which some may refer to as Top Down Causation) Sean Carroll (rightly) rejects such a notion and with it the idea of emergentism in his essay at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/08/01/downward-causation/

A copy/paste follows, but first, while reading it be sure to define all do-ing / verb-ing / think-ing / reason-ing / love-ing / cause-ing / causation / see-ing / talk-ing / care-ing according to S. Carroll,

“…..we are collections of vibrating quantum fields held together in persistent patterns by feeding off of ambient free energy according to impersonal and uncaring laws of nature, and we are also human beings who make choices and care about what happens to ourselves and others.”

And according to A. Ginn,

“……at the lowest level of reality, the fermions that make up our bodies are subject to only the four fundamental forces of nature. There is no room for *you* to control their behavior.”

And according to Wiki:

“Fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions in physical systems that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four conventionally accepted fundamental interactions — gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Each one is understood as the dynamics of a field. The gravitational force is modeled as a continuous classical field. The other three are each modeled as discrete quantum fields, and exhibit a measurable unit or elementary particle. The two nuclear interactions produce strong forces at minuscule, subatomic distances. The strong nuclear interaction is responsible for the binding of atomic nuclei. The weak nuclear interaction also acts on the nucleus, mediating radioactive decay. Electromagnetism and gravity produce significant forces at macroscopic scales where the effects can be seen directly in everyday life. Electrical and magnetic fields tend to cancel each other out when large collections of objects are considered, so over the largest distances (on the scale of planets and galaxies), gravity tends to be the dominant force.”

Regarding this: “…..we are collections of vibrating quantum fields held together in persistent patterns by feeding off of ambient free energy according to impersonal and uncaring laws of nature, and we are also human beings who make choices and care about what happens to ourselves and others…”, well, of course many people disagree with S. Carroll. Including S. Carroll himself. Just because someone foists that contradictions are not contradictory doesn't make it so. It's easy to be immune (or claim immunity) when you're all over the illusory map.

So then, with reality defined, here’s the copy/paste:

Reading about emergence and reductionism and free will and determinism has led me to finally confront a concept I had vaguely heard about but never really looked into before: downward causation, a term that came to prominence in the 1970’s. (Some other views: here, here, here.) I think it’s a misguided/unhelpful notion, but this is way outside my area and I’m happy to admit that I might be missing something.

Physicists are well aware that there are different vocabularies/models/theories that we can use to describe the same underlying reality. Sometimes you might want to talk about.............

(well, it's far too much for a com-box.... see the link above for the entire essay by S. Carroll. Various segues etc...)

See previous reply, in which I defined both "natural" and "evidence."

If you believe plastic plants exist, then you already believe in something unnatural. The same goes for two-headed calves. A cow naturally has one head; so one born with two heads is, as you might say, outside "the common course of nature."

That's why I asked what =you= meant by "natural" and by "evidence." If you are starting from a different definition of "natural," then you will have a different concept of "non-natural" and "supernatural" (they are not the same thing). Instead, you ask me to set up definitions, then you come back and say that's not what you mean.

Hence, some numbers are called "natural" because they derive from the nature of quantity. Other numbers are artifacts (irrational, transcendent, imaginary, transfinite, etc,...) Although it must be admitted that if there is an apple on the table and another apple on the table, there are not three things on the table: an apple, another apple, and the quantity "two" which we abstract from them. If we arrange this apple, that apple, and another apple on the table, we do not see five things: an apple, an apple, an apple, the quantity "three", and the pattern "triangle."

Now the only things that actually exist physically are the apples, so where are "three" and "triangle"?

Sometimes I think "naturalism" is just shade for "materialism." (Or "physicalism" as it was later called.)

"It was your question: Do you even have evidence that anything non-natural exists? You must have had something in mind and I'd rather not spend time in a "that's-not-what-I-meant" dialogue."

I do not have something in mind. I accept naturalism as a reasonable metaphysical position. I cannot really conceive of what something non-natural would be.

The idea here is to distinguish between those who believe something non-natural exists. If you are distinguishing that which is "artificial" from that which is natural. Presumably by "artificial" you would mean something like a plastic plant or someone's who has taken steroids is "artificial" and not natural. But this doesn't seem to be the distinction at play here in terms of naturalism and theism (or supernaturalism, or some kind of dualism). Obviously a naturalist and a theist will believe plastic plants exist. What, in your view distinguishes naturalism from non-naturalism? Presumably the existence of something non-natural?

Given this context what is something non-natural or supernatural, and what evidence (on any of the definitions above) is there for it existing?

Postscript to previous reply:
By weird coincidence:
https://thomism.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/evidence-and-metaphysics/

It was your question: Do you even have evidence that anything non-natural exists? You must have had something in mind and I'd rather not spend time in a "that's-not-what-I-meant" dialogue.

Natural: from natus, birth. That which a thing possesses "by its nature." For example, some men are naturally strong. Others may become strong through art: i.e., by exercising and so forth. This would be artificial rather than natural. Teddy Roosevelt was not naturally strong, but made himself so by art; Demosthenes was not naturally a great orator, but became one by artful practice.

Evidence: from evidentia, "obviousness; vividness; quality of being manifest/evident; distinction." That which makes a thing clear or evident. There are two ways of making a thing evident.

a) Evidentia potissimus (i.e., "most powerful") is a logical presentation in valid syllogisms. Most mathematical things are made evident by this sort.

b) Evidentia naturalis (i.e., "natural") is evidence by experience; e.g., eyewitness observation. Unlike the first kind, natural evidence is subject to reversal. So one may say "All swans are white" by natural evidence because every observed swan has white feathers. But a trip to Australia reverses this by producing a black swan.

Nicholaus of Autrecourt did not call this "falsification," but he clearly had it pinned. Hence, natural evidence is always tentative, with one exception. The exception, he said, was one's own existence, which is known by direct experience but cannot be denied coherently. (Who exactly would be denying it?) This anticipated Descartes by a couple of centuries, along with Popper. Plus ça change and all that.