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To: BroJoeK

Truly time for you to move on!

You do not have the authority to re-define science. Science will forever be objective gathering and evaluation of the empirical evidence; and never will “methodological naturalism” be accepted as a substitute for science by an honest-to-goodness scientist.

Propagandize somewhere else.


113 posted on 05/20/2013 5:35:36 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: editor-surveyor
editor-surveyor: "You do not have the authority to re-define science.
Science will forever be objective gathering and evaluation of the empirical evidence; and never will “methodological naturalism” be accepted as a substitute for science by an honest-to-goodness scientist."

I have not "redefined science", FRiend, but you seem to want to.
Your words here suggest that you misunderstand what the term "methodological naturalism" means.
Possibly even, you confuse or conflate it with related terms like, "philosiphical-ontological-methaphysical naturalism"?

They are not the same thing.
Methodological Naturalism of science is simply the working assumption of "natural explanations for natural processes".
It excludes supernatural explanations as being non-scientific.

By that definition, once you leave the natural world, and propose supernatural causes, then your ideas are no longer "scientific".

Of course, you might even be correct, and science have it all wrong, but that doesn't make your ideas "scientific".
So give them another name -- i.e., metaphysics, or, who knows, "super-science"? -- so that everyone understands you've left the realm of the natural world, and are dealing in a whole different set of assumptions and methodological rules.
And your rules might even be correct, but, by definition, they are not "science".

Just so we're clear: there's nothing in the assumptions of "methodological naturalism" which prevent any scientist from believing God created the Universe, life and us.
But science only deals with the "how" it happened, and only in terms of "natural explanations for natural processes."

That's "methodological naturalism".

116 posted on 05/22/2013 2:12:08 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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