“Methodological naturalism” is a subject that causes a lot of confusion in discussions about science and faith. It is particularly difficult to address it as a Christian because it is all too easy to end up giving people the impression that you are advocating a position that you are not.
The question is, should miracles be considered a legitimate explanation for scientific observations? If, as a Christian, I answer the question “no,” then many of my fellow believers will think that I am advocating deism at best, and at worst outright atheism.
However, if I answer the question “yes,” then I am faced with other problems. For starters, miracles are not reproducible, being one-off events initiated by God, and this being the case, it is difficult if not impossible to apply consistent rigorous standards of quality control to how we study them. Secondly, there may be a perfectly adequate natural explanation for them. It is always possible that God was using that natural mechanism of course, but if, in appealing to miracles, I gave the impression that a natural explanation did not exist when in actual fact one did, I would be communicating inaccurate information. Thirdly, there is a danger of miracles becoming a get-out-of-jail-free card allowing people to dismiss any scientific finding that they don’t like. Young earthists do this, for example, by inventing accelerated nuclear decay to explain radiometric dating results, and besides the fact that that would require a miracle because nuclear decay rates simply don’t change naturally, certainly not to the extent that they need, they then need to invoke a second miracle on top of that to explain where all the resulting heat could have gone. Basically, at that point it’s degenerated deep into the territory of making things up and inventing your own alternative reality.
So in a nutshell, I personally don’t explicitly advocate for methodological naturalism in science myself. But I do advocate for reproducibility, satisfactory standards of rigour and quality control, factual accuracy, and not making things up.
I see science as seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena. We don’t find natural explanations unless we look for them. And God has blessed the scientific enterprise: we have vaccines, antibiotics, and the like.
Craig Keener’s book Miracles Today is a textbook example for how this can partially be done. One example of a woman who was healed with impeccable documentation, had skeptics proposing she faked being a paralytic for 20 years.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
12
Metrology. Beyond it is rationality alone. ID is not in the same category as the multiverse. What demarcation problem? As Popper said. And yes, of course, methodological naturalism is a given because of philosophical naturalism. As the empirical is a subset of the metaphysical and shapes it.
Honesty - it seeks to test hypotheses rather than prove them.
Objectivity - it gives results as written procedures anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they want or believe.
The only restriction on subject is the applicability of these methodological ideals. They are not, for example, applicable to claims which are not falsifiable. This restricts it to the mathematical space-time structure of the universe because this is where there are things capable of measurement.
Yes, according to the above explanation the “natural” is measurable because of its mathematical space-time structure.
And the methodological restriction is necessary to science because as @beaglelady said, “We don’t find natural explanations unless we look for them.”
I think my two methodological ideas covers these 5 things described.
No. Metaphysics is the philosophical study of the nature of reality.
I am not such a one. I only believe in the spiritual because I find it impossible to believe that the mathematical description (which as a physicist I identify with physical reality) is the limit of reality itself. At least… that is the first of my reasons for belief.
Objectivity from a philosophically opposing world view is problematic given what Stephen Hawking and a number of other highly respected proponents of the nonchristian interpretation have very clearly outlined…“there is no room for God in Science”. They have decided this and are not interested in the alternative…they only seek to maintain allegiance to that principle.
I have had an atheist make the statement, if there is a God and you find out in the afterlife, come back and let me know and ill change my mind. They seek that which they cannot have…magic. Jesus very specifically addressed this claim.
Consequently your claim of objectivity is in trouble. You are following individuals who openly and very publicly deny God. You then use their interpretation to create a Christian model. Unfortunately, that has significant theological implications, particularly given that salvation does not come via any mechanism related to science. The Bible very specifically identifies we are saved by grace through faith…not science or men’s interpretations. The bible interprets itself…it is easy to make sense of and yet it is manipulated by proponents of Darwinian views that are openly in denial of God.
Even Graham Oppy makes the claim that Christians only come to the table with words and sentences…their preconceived ideas make it difficult, if not impossible for Christians to think objectively. Trouble is, has this man taken a look in the mirror lately…“pot calling the kettle black” comes to mind!
The failure in Oppy’s view is that he makes no mention of the ability of individuals to make fundamental change in their worldview. Preconceived ideas cannot be attributed to that shift in position. I am supposing he simply makes the argument such individuals, in the event they make the change for God, are being brainwashed!
oh by the way…if science focuses one’s attention to the physical earth and universe around us…observable things, how then do TEists manage to align their theological beliefs with only spiritual interpretations of Biblical narratives? To me that would seem to be very problematic.
metaphysics is philosophical. I really appreciate the intentional misquote of my post in which this was originally claimed btw. Great effort in honesty and objectivity. I just love the way words and phrases are taken out of context in order to apparently discredit the author.
I like the idea you put forward of science being an umbrella term that often encapsulates different ideas but doesn’t necessarily need all of them or a 1-line definition.
The challenge is edge cases, and what frustrates me is the fact that definitions of science are often done with an agenda (like trying to exclude ID), without realizing that this can undermine the relationship of science with truth and thus trust in science.
Unfortunately what can happen is scientists, who often make poor philosophers [Einstein’s quote], start making philosophical claims about science, and don’t realize their venturing into a territory where they aren’t an expert.
One of the challenges to Oppy’s point (that you quoted, I’m surprised he’s say something like that because I’d considered him a very good philosopher and that quote made him sound sloppy) is Plantinga’s EAAN, which Thomas Nagal talked a bit about. If Naturalism is true, we can’t trust that the thoughts that bring us to believe in naturalism because the mind’s belief in things like induction, the past, would be epistemically flawed.
If naturalism is true, all “thoughts” are explainable in terms of physical matter/natural laws which are not selected for whether they are true (at least true about metaphysical propositions like that one). I used to dismiss the EAAN at first but it was because I didn’t understand the technicalities of it. It’s not saying we can’t be confident in the laws of nature or observation under naturalism. Instead I find it most compelling in terms of a Bayesian MLE argument referring to our trust it metaphysical (and I’d argue moral) propositions.
Regardless, as you said, it cuts both ways. The naturalist comes to the table with naturalistic assumptions and blinders. The ability to “change” one’s mind isn’t really much of an option under naturalism either in my view.
Very good points. I liked your question should miracles be considered a legitimate explanation for scientific observations
I’d argue absolutely. NDEs, prayer studies, etc are all examples of possible experiments one could use to challenge (and perhaps even falsify) one’s belief in metaphysical naturalism. These are experiments that do not need to assume methodological naturalism either (in fact, I’d argue they cannot in order to be worthwhile).
The issue is even if NDE experiments or prayer studies came up inconclusive (as they can), this doesn’t necessarily falsify theism or Christianity. God could have a (very) good reason to not answer prayers or other things subjected to try and prove/disprove his existence (see Matthew 4:7).
Part of the issue is we don’t have a perfect definition of Miracle, Natural vs Supernatural, etc. Hume once tried to argue that a miracle was (by his own definition) the least likely event. Funny how some naturalistic explanations for observed data can fall more in line with a “miracle” than supernatural ones. I’m of the opinion that Hume’s overall argument against miracles is not that great, though I do like Hume a lot and this particular argument did lead to Bayesian statistics thanks to Rev Bayes and Hume being friends.
A legitimate explanation can take any form, and science (scientists) has no reason to ignore arguments that maximize the conditional probability of observed data. Sure it may not be repeatable, but naturalistic explanations for the past are not either so we are kind of stuck.
I have a bit of controversial belief that New Atheist types and ID people both undermine public trust in science. Then again, if ID is considered unscientific, yet it turned out to be true, the naturalism presupposed by science would mean a “true” explanation would not be the scientific one. Indeed many philosophers of science don’t think science can claim to have any special access to truth because it is difficult to justify its premises in a non-circular manner.
I fully agree that critiques of ID are often expressed in ways that are unhelpful. It’s a big bugbear of mine—when it’s dismissed as “religion, not science” or “introducing religious presuppositions into science,” or with appeals to the First Amendment or Kitzmiller v Dover. The US Constitution may have a lot of value in the eyes of many, but it is not a part of the Bible (or of any other sacred scripture), it is not the ultimate authority on what is real and what isn’t, and in fact for those of us on the other side of The Pond™, it is completely irrelevant.
Having said that, there is a tendency for many ID proponents to respond to the theory of evolution in particular with misleading or inaccurate claims. One example is irreducible complexity: as far as I have been able to establish, their most well known examples of IC such as the bacterial flagellum have been shown not to be irreducibly complex after all. There are also times when I get the impression that I’m reading tabloid rhetoric and name calling rather than scholarly analysis. I see this for example in their tendency to use the word “Darwinism” to describe what they are attacking: this is what is known as a weasel word, because while at first glance it sounds like it means something specific, in practice it is so ambiguous that it is quite possible to say that you reject “Darwinism” while accepting the universal common ancestry of humans, animals, and all life on Earth.
ID proponents need to tone down the rhetoric, come clean on exactly what aspects of the theory of evolution they are rejecting, and make sure that the claims they are making in support of their positions are accurate. ID critics, on the other hand, need to focus on the question of whether or not ID proponents are getting their facts straight, and leave objections based on politics or religion out of it.
There is no room for God in the work of science because God is not falsifiable or measurable. To push a claim for a God as part of the work of science is to push a god I would never believe in – frankly one reduced to being little more that the tool of power for those doing so.
The understanding that there is no room for God in the work of science is not in any way non-Christian because it is about science not reality – that would take the additional presupposition of naturalism. Are you naturalist, then – equating science with reality itself? More likely you are just equating your cult theology with reality and trying to put it over everything else including science. But worldwide Christianity has no more interest in the domination of your theology than does science.
This is the “logic” of the anti-science cult of creationism equating anything which does not agree to the fantasy they have created with an opposition to God. But the only real opposition here, is to this anti-science cult and their efforts to use God as tool of power over other people.
Atheists have their opposition-mongers and they frankly have more in common with the creationist opposition-mongers, much like Hitler and Stalin, who signed a nonaggression pact to divide the world between them. The enemies of virtue (whether honesty or peace) are the enemies of mankind and the future – the stubborn paranoia of these ideologues on both sides can only destroy.
Science can only speak to what is measurable. Theistic Evolution is not science – OBVIOUSLY. No more than creationism is science. BUT theistic evolution is at least compatible with with the conclusions of science instead of inventing a fantasy world contradicting reality altogether.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
23
He’d better do. Especially if He’s going to condemn us for declining His one time offer at participating outlets only (terms and conditions may vary).
And depending on who you ask, metaphysics is the science of what is unobservable, even that which is unobservable by nature.
Years ago I had some fun poking around with the atheists at the internet infidels forum. There it was common to see it written how metaphysics is meaningless, to which I gave them a meaningful introduction to metaphysics by saying how there are only three possible statements to explain the universe: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause.