?
Funny, I thought I just said that…? 
I would still like engagement on an example I brought up earlier as a comparison to your proverbial arrowhead. What about the highly mathematical honeycomb with all its hexagonal cellular units? (And of course beyond this we can find highly geometrical rock formations (crystal structures, no less) that we know were formed by “mere physical processes” - but let’s stick with the honeybees for a moment. We who cohabitate this planet with them have more-or-less labeled ourselves as the sole representatives of “intelligence” on this planet (with all due respect to the late D.Adams’ mice and dolphins). So bees don’t make the cut. But would this be readily apparent to our visiting space alien whose only souvenirs so far are the disputed arrow-head and the honeycomb? As the alien continues to explore, “it” will no doubt quickly encounter plentiful evidence of human engineering versatility in contrast with an insect’s instinct-driven uniformity of fabrication.
But still, what if “intelligence” in our alien’s mind is more represented by “a perfectional uniformity” than all the ugly large-scale havoc of haphazard architectures that obviously showcase a failure to settle on any optimal design? On that note, the beautifully compact, prolific, and biodegradable honeycomb might well attract our visitor’s admirations much more than the stony sky-scraper monstrosity towering above?
The main difficulty I see here is that we don’t know what guiding methodologies (premises or postulates if you will) might be in operation for other species around the cosmos. Would they share in our general “bigger = more impressive” axiom? Or our “long-term physical survival of species is of paramount importance” assumption? Would what we generally think of as kindness or cruelty be similarly evaluated as such by others? Until these questions have answers, we are fatally crippled in even recognizing whether their decisions should be credited as intelligence.
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I was reacting to your comment
Did I misunderstand what you are saying here? You seem to be saying that God cannot direct a natural process to create a desired outcome.
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I don’t understand why this subject is being discussed under the label “methodological naturalism”, since it isn’t about MN. MN and science don’t exclude intelligent agents as causal factors, and intelligent design arguments aren’t rejected because they invoke intelligent agents. They are rejected for a range of reasons, depending on the argument: for invoking entities or processes for which there is no independent evidence (disembodies minds, intelligent agents in the Cambrian), for failing to make predictions, for being just plain bad arguments.
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What is it about then?
Or an arachnid. We have had a garden spider build its web across a glider on our front porch, and I marvel at the engineering and design with the suspension strands and radial strands being placed just right. Puts a honeycomb to shame.
It seems mostly to be about intelligent agency.
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I think @Daniel_Fisher started this thread to discuss the legitimacy of methodological naturalism. I believe he suspects that it is an insincere gesture toward keeping an open mind toward the possibility of divine origins while in fact only allowing natural causes to be discussed or investigated.
I think you ask a good question though. Wouldn’t it be cleaner just to acknowledge that science is indeed about investigating the natural world to understand and predict causal relationships. It isn’t that scientists are looking to explain everything about people and culture in a way that ignores religion. Rather science just is about the natural world. Those who feel accepting the Bible commits one to certain empirical claims feel compelled to defend them against the determined efforts of godless scientists to exclude any place for God.
Okay - I grant you the apparent engineering superiority of your arachnid’s project. However if I’m not mistaken it was mostly (entirely?) a solo venture.
So to stick up for my “team Bee” for a moment, when it comes to social cooperation and apparently impressive communication skills, I think they are still in the running at least. I may be biased as the last thing I ate was something with a bit of honey that I had a hand in collecting.
But in either case, we don’t credit any of these creatures with the same sort of intelligence that we give ourselves credit for. But trying to define “intelligence” in some detached sense that we (or SETI) may hope has universal application seems a hopeless errand to me. Even allowing ourselves the arrogant privilege of thinking ourselves a standard model of what intelligence should generally look like, even with that, it still proves to be a nebulous and ill-defined concept at least in a general philosophical sense.
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My problem with this framing, and with ‘methodological naturalism’, is the lack of a clear, consistent definition of ‘natural’.
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This, to me, is the mic-drop, season-ending, walk-off, stake-through-the-heart problem with the entire conversation. Stripped of all the not-very-convincing verbiage about explanation and intelligence and knowledge, the root of the discussion is a presumed distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural,’ and a view of what this means for gods. As a Christian, I found this deeply problematic, and fought hard against the implication that natural explanation eroded god’s majesty or power or whatever. Such a god is a joke. I concluded that discussions of MN, like this one, were never about science or its underpinnings but about the curious need for so many believers to have a god that does magic. These therefore are not questions for scientists, or even for philosophers, but for sociologists.
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I had written: “Wouldn’t it be cleaner just to acknowledge that science is indeed about investigating the natural world to understand and predict causal relationships. It isn’t that scientists are looking to explain everything about people and culture in a way that ignores religion. Rather science just is about the natural world.”
As I’m using it here I’m thinking of the natural world as opposed to say history, music, literature and the arts generally. I understand that is still murky because one can certainly look at patterns in human culture under the microscope (so to speak) and examine similarities and differences in world religions. But while scientific rigor and peer review can be brought to many fields I think of science as primarily being focussed on the natural world - apart from designs of man. (But yes even that is vexed since there is almost nothing about life on this earth which shows no influence from our presence.)
He also can create a universe 6,000 years old that bears every impression to us of being much, much older. I doubt you would deny that he could do so… rather, I imagine you’d say you have reason to doubt that he did do so, no?
If You and I are at a poker game, and I notice that every time you dealt, you ended up with a royal straight, 12 times in a row…
I would of course acknowledge that God is not so limited that He couldn’t tweak the natural process of randomness that He created so as to produce exactly that result.
Simultaneously, I would maintain that I had reason to doubt that natural processes, however coaxed by God, could adequately explain what I was seeing.
I’m not trying to be obtuse, but I’m afraid I’m not really seeing the point you’re making. If I do understand you, perhaps this is another appropriate analogy…?
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
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He could just as easily create the entire universe last Thursday, but I know He didn’t because of what the Bible tells us about His nature. It isn’t a doubt about His ability. It is a certainty about His nature.
But what if you had a source, say the Bible for instance, that says God does coax natural processes, could that change your doubt? See “God sends the rain to the just and unjust.” I just don’t see how you could have any doubt at all about a process that God controls. Help me out here. To me it is God’s control that results in the design that you find so remarkable. And let me hasten to add, a control that leaves no trace detectable to humans.
We have a yellow garden spider next to our front door. She’s been so much fun to watch, especially when I caught her building her web again. So neat. Her geometrical web very much looks intelligently designed. We only know it wasn’t “intelligence” because we’ve seen spiders build webs, and we know spiders don’t have brains.
It’s also ridiculously fun to catch stink bugs in the house and flick them into her web. You should try it. 
Sure, good observation, and insightful question. God is in control of all things, of course.
But consider this…
I imagine that God could so control and even “coax” the molecules in the fertilized egg of an elephant, and do so in a way that no actual natural laws were in any way violated… just a very large number of very serendipitous mutations… not one of which, by itself, was all that extraordinary… and the elephant gave birth to a baby giraffe.
At this point, to me, this goes beyond God “coaxing” a natural process in a way indistinguishable from the regular flow of natural processes… and results in us recognizing a very obvious and intentional (and detectable) intelligent and purposeful agency at work.
I have (using little grasshoppers) It is so cool to see the spider tension the radial spokes of the web with her legs, and detect the insects by the vibrations sent down the spokes. It is also interesting to see how the insects often struggle a few seconds then freeze to hopefully not attract the spider by their movement. Then… it’s a wrap!
It is also fun to watch my printer at work. I earlier printed a few pages from Henry V. Those words very much look intelligently designed, but I know it wasn’t “intelligence” because I’ve seen my printer print those pages, and I know my printer doesn’t have a brain.
Seriously, though, not a good illustration for those of us that suspect that an intelligence was necessary to design a spider specifically with the innate ability to accomplish such feats. Otherwise this sounds like saying that anything a 3D printer creates can’t be intelligently designed, since 3D printers don’t possess intelligence…
Thanks for getting us back on topic. Still, while methodological naturalism is fine, philosophical naturalism is the problem with most Christians. Interesting that around here, philosophical intelligent design is a given among the theists, but methodological intelligent design runs into problems.