Someone who uses histiographic methods to evaluate testimony is not doing science, they are doing history. Keener never claims his conclusions are scientific. Claims to truth can be warranted without being established scientifically. But that is the realm of philosophy and epistemology, not science.
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Keener speaks intelligently to the issue:
“What if we expand our definition of science to hypothesize about intelligent causes? Surely any real God should be able to act as a cause no less than any human person does. In this case, science might even help quantify probabilities that a particular event is a divine act.”
“Rather than dismissing the possibility of miracles, science when defined most narrowly simply excludes them from its sphere of discussion.”
Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World by Craig S. Keener.
(emphasis mine)
Then you are moving beyond the established limits of science into metaphysics, which Keener is tacitly acknowledging. Science can certainly provide knowledge and methodologies that may prove useful in metaphyscial discussions. But he is correct that science in terms of the scientific method excludes miracles from its sphere of discussion.
Also Keener is a New Testament scholar and not trained in the methodologies or principles of any hard science. So why would we go to him as an expert on what counts as science? He doesn’t do science, he does theology and Bible interpretation.
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Most narrowly defined… he is a trained historian
Historians don’t use the scientific method.
I’m a trained linguist. I understand scientific research methodologies applied to linguistics. We come up with hypotheses and test them. We gather empirical data. We come up with models to explain phenomena. But linguisitics is not a hard science. Every attempt I know of to try to represent human language and communication as abstractions that can be manipulated via formulas or to reduce complex acts of communication to variables that can be controled and experimented on falls short at many levels of describing what is actually happening when humans communicate. That doesn’t make linguistics useless or pseudoscientific. It just means it’s not hard science; it’s subjective and speculative in ways that hard science is not.
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and they may still be methodologically objective without excluding the supernatural
when hard science excludes the supernatural apriori, it is starting to look like a subjective spirit
I am still fundamentally puzzled by how a theistic evolutionist thinks they are not being subjective by excluding the supernatural from any consideration of how life and the universe began.
What the heck is a subjective spirit, some kind of convenient demon you invented for the pupose of this discussion? Again, we are not saying scientists have to presume that God doesn’t exist or that what can be described by science comprises all of reality. We are saying the toolkit of science is not equipped to study God. That’s not an opinion, it’s a statement of fact based on the established principles of science.
I don’t see how it is possible, presuming the God of the Bible, who is relational and a Person, not an impersonal force we can objectifty. Relationships can only be experienced and described subjectively. God is not someone we interact with as an object.
Who says they are excluding the supernatural from any consideration of how life and the universe began? Theistic evolutionists and anyone else for that matter are perfectly free to use all the epistemic tools available to them when considering how life and the universe began. They are not limited to scientific knowledge as the only and ultimate source of knowledge. They can take into account divine revelation in the Bible and their own personal communication and relationship with God as sources of knowledge if they want to. They just can’t call every consideration of how life and the universe began scientific.
It is not being “subjective” to define science as a specific set of things and designate things that fall outside the bounds of the established set as “not science.” That is just categorizing.
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Of course theistic evolution is subjective. The point is to endorse BOTH science which is objective and Christianity which is necessarily subjective. The difference from creationism isn’t that theistic evolution isn’t subjective. The difference is the compatibility with the findings of science. It acknowledges the objectivity of science but also sees that there is more to life than the objectivity of science. The fact is that life requires subjective participation and thus the objective observation of science alone is inadequate for the living of our lives. Thus we indulge in the subjective while accepting the objectivity of science as a useful but limited tool.
But it is not an arbitrary categorization. It is according to a proven methodology for a history of successful scientific investigation. They are rules required for the progress and success of scientific inquiry to enable the writing of procedures which give the same result no matter what you want or believe. Otherwise “science” just become a label plastered on something that might as well be just the philosophy or theology of another cult.
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I thought it a nice play on words for something that is subjective… like an ideology.
Not sure I can unravel all that is going on in there… but I do like how Peter reached a conclusion where he could say, “therefore know for certain.” (Acts 2:36)
So let me see if I got this right: things can be considered “not science” and still be knowledge.
And as science excludes the supernatural apriori, it becomes pseudo-knowledge at the boundaries of where God acts in the world.
Of course.
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Here is an excellent discussion of the meaning of science, the scientific method(s), and related topics.
It’s from a lecture series on paleontology that I’m enjoying now. The instructor is Thomas Richard Holtz, University of Maryland
What is “Science”? How do we use our observations and analyses to test hypotheses about the fossil world? Just move the timer to 15:00
Of course! There are other valid ways of knowing that do not rely on empiricism and logic to arrive at truth. “Objective truth” or “absolute truth” is a theoretical subset of truth that can be known, and I’m not convinced humans are ever truly objective or have access to absolute truth unfiltered by their embodied, experiential perspective.
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Like a mediocre singer on a talent show, we have our moments where we hit a note or two.
Or as I like to say, there is what pure reason can and cannot tell you about the world.
And Peter in Acts, or John in his first epistle, probably said it best when they put the testimony of Scripture, their eyewitness testimony, and the self-evident testimony of the Spirit along side of one another like a cord of three strands.
As automobile construction excludes the supernatural apriori, does that mean it becomes pseudo-knowledge at the boundaries of where God acts in the world?
To that I just say whatever. Who cares what names you want to call it and what rhetoric you want to spew at it. Science works. And I would very much rather name calling and trash talk than let people distort science into something invaded by cultish nonsense so it doesn’t work anymore.
I don’t exclude the supernatural – at least not from everything. But I don’t see the need for it in many activities in life. But if you want a say a prayer over your microwave to keep working… God bless you. But I am not interested in doctors and car mechanics who are just going to offer to say prayer over me or my car – sorry, no thank you. After all, I can get my neighbor’s 3 year old to say a prayer over my car for free and I don’t see why that should be any less effective.
When God heals a person and medical science will only accept a natural explanation, this would be an example where the science is psuedo-investigative 
Believe me, I’d rather call it methodological objectivism and avoid any semblance to cultish nonsense whether it be bad religion, bad science or naturalism.
Why should anyone care about your supernatural “investigative” babble? What we pay the medical science doctors to do is find the natural explanations so they can apply the proper medical procedures. But if you want to come up with God explanations for your car and body troubles, you go right ahead. It just means the professionals will have more time for helping me and others with their problems.
Like I said, your name calling and empty rhetoric mean no more to me than noise pollution.
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