Replies

mmmmm. I find myself in your shoes when you object to dividing evolution into "microevolution" and "macroevolution". You maintain that there should not be any separation because they are both contiguous subsets of the same thing. I will turn your own arguments back on you in this case. Methodological naturalism is simply applied philosophical naturalism. There should not be any real separation because they are both continguous subsets of the same thing.

You may not be able to study the "supernatural" but you can rule out natural causes. The more certain you are that all natural causes have been ruled out then the more certain you can be that the supernatural hypothesis is the correct one. Can one ever be 100% sure of the supernatural hypotheses? Probably not, but the same is true of natural hypothesis. We just have confidence levels.

There is no fundamental scientific reason to exclude consideration of the supernatural hypothesis "a priori". It is a PHILOSOPHICAL decision appled to a METHODOLOGY, substantiating my contention that they ought not to be considered as separate and thus non-intersecting entites.

Methodological naturalism is simply applied philosophical naturalism.

Even many people who suspect philosophical naturalism maybe be empty or even false will admit that methodological naturalism is necessary for science. It's basically what science is about, the study of nature.

You may not be able to study the "supernatural" but you can rule out natural causes.

As a practical matter, it's never happened so far. "Natural causes" in the investigation of a death does not mean the same as "natural causes" as opposed to "unnatural causes." Maybe if God popped out from somewhere, said "Here I am!", and started doing sufficiently wonderful magic we could eliminate "natural" causes. Or maybe we would just be discovering more than we had known before about what "natural" includes.

Anyway, we don't have anything like that problem. Science has to do its job and will. People who think the world runs some other way are simply not interested in science and would be more honest to butt out rather than pretend they have the real facts.

There is no fundamental scientific reason to exclude consideration of the supernatural hypothesis "a priori". It is a PHILOSOPHICAL decision appled to a METHODOLOGY, substantiating my contention that they ought not to be considered as separate and thus non-intersecting entites.

And I've always said that the governing philosophical presuppositions of science are determined by the theoretical content of science, rather than the other way around. (Historically these presuppositions have always been modified to accommodate genuinely successful theories, as for instance with Newton's "occult" force of gravity. It violated the classical dictum of materialism: that force could only be transmitted by physical impacts between bodies.)

All you need is one important and manifestly successful scientific theory incorporating a "supernatural hypothesis" to change the ruling assumption of methodological naturalism. So go ahead and do "then a miracle happens" science. No one is stopping you. On the other hand no one will follow you in such pursuit either, unless and until you can show that it works. Ah, there's the rub.

There is no fundamental scientific reason to exclude consideration of the supernatural hypothesis "a priori".

Actually there is a reason to reject the supernatural. A supernatural explanation can be invoked to explain anything and thus has no content. Water freezes because Poseidon wants it to; ice melts because Poseidon wants it to. These putative explanations are rejected (in scientific inquiry) because they allow no predictions at all. The assumption of supernatural intervention implys the inability to predict anything.