ALB: “Engels isn’t

ALB:
“Engels isn’t criticising Dietzgen in the quotes you give. If anything, Dietzgen would have criticised Engels’s approach which assumes that the so-called “laws of dialectics” actually exist in nature and can be discovered. Dietzgen’s argument was that what science is essentially doing is describing what we observe in nature (or, rather, in the world of experience) and that therefore the “laws of nature” are our decriptions of what we observe, with a view to predicting future experiences so as to better survive.”
I agree, and I don’t think I said he was. But, Engels is making a general point about a priori dogmatics (into which trap Dietzgen has fallen) — even though he (Engels ) is guilty of advancing plenty of his own dogmatic theses:
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2002.htm
However, Dietzgen is actually going further than you say here — indeed, as you pointed out earlier:
“In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.
No amount of evidence can show this to be the case (indeed, current theory tells us it can’t be the case).
“The theory of relativity does not refute Dietzgen’s theory of the nature of science. As a more accurate, and so more useful, description than previous ones of the same phenomena it was an example of what Dietzgen meant science was and how it progressed (by better and more useful descriptions).”
In fact, it shows that everything can’t be inter-connected. So, it does refute what Dietzgen has said  as well as others who have said more or less the same sort of thing — for example:
“Another parallel between Hermeticism and Hegel is the doctrine of internal relations. For the Hermeticists, the cosmos is not a loosely connected, or to use Hegelian language, externally related set of particulars. Rather, everything in the cosmos is internally related, bound up with everything else…. This principle is most clearly expressed in the so-called Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which begins with the famous lines ‘As above, so below.’ This maxim became the central tenet of Western occultism, for it laid the basis for a doctrine of the unity of the cosmos through sympathies and correspondences between its various levels. The most important implication of this doctrine is the idea that man is the microcosm, in which the whole of the macrocosm is reflected.
 “…The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.” [Glenn Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition  (2001), p.13. Bold emphases added.]
 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm
 This is indeed a feature of all mystical systems of thought, whose adepts were asserting such things before any evidence became available. So, Dietzgen more closely resembles these mystics than he does scientists. Indeed, he pinched this idea from Hegel and the German naturphilosophers — who in turn lifted it from Jakob Boehme and Plotinus, among others.
And thanks for the Pannekoek reference, but I have a copy of the book you mention, and have read it. In fact there is very little I haven’t read and studied about this theory over the last thirty odd years of researching this topic. And I thnk he is wrong about Lenin (but we can duiscuss this another time) — not that I want to defend Lenin’s version of dialectical materialsm, which is every bit as poor as Dietzgen’s and Engels’ versions
 “You say we don’t need a “philosophical theory of the universe”, but surely we need a “philosophy of science” or, if you prefer, a theory of science? You must have one, even if only implicitly. What is it?”
No, I don’t have a theory of science, and nor do I want one — and nor do we need one. As I pointed out, all such theories are non-sensical — and I can prove it. [See the link I posted earlier.]