But if the intelligence is natural, that would be insufficient to renew the culture and stop its inevitable decline into nihilism. You see, according to the Discovery Institute, the natural world gives us no objective criteria by which to judge actions as "right" or "wrong". So it inevitably all comes down to self-serving arguments by competing interest groups. The inevitable result: Hobbes' war of all against all.
No, the Discovery Institute will never abandon its quest to "destroy materialism". They're out to save the world from naturalistic science!
For more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.
What do these exciting developments mean for the social sciences that were built upon the foundation of materialism? This project brings together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore what the demise of materialism means for reviving the various disciplines.
Resources for those interested in understanding creationism as a capitulation to postmodernist subjectivism:
Has anyone tried to coin the phrase "natural design" as an alternative to "intelligent design"?
Methodological naturalism is simply the idea that the mode of inquiry typical of the physical sciences will provide theoretical understanding of world, to the extent that this sort of understanding can be achieved. “Stoljar, Daniel, "Physicalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Essentially, metaphysical naturalism denies the existence of any causation which is not “natural”. We might characterize it as a belief system based on physical causality. But to let the metaphysical naturalists speak for themselves (emphasis mine):
As a substantial view about the nature of reality, it is often called metaphysical naturalism, philosophical naturalism, or ontological naturalism to distinguish it from a related methodological principle. Methodological naturalism, by contrast, is the principle that science and history should presume that all causes are natural causes solely for the purpose of promoting successful investigation. The idea behind this principle is that natural causes can be investigated directly through scientific method, whereas supernatural causes cannot, and hence presuming that an event has a supernatural cause for methodological purposes halts further investigation. For instance, if a disease is caused by microbes, we can learn more about how microbes interact with the body and how the immune system can be activated to destroy them, or how the transmission of microbes can be contained. But if a disease is caused by demons, we can learn nothing more about how to stop it, as demons are said to be supernatural beings unconstrained by the laws of nature (unlike natural causes).
In utilizing methodological naturalism, science and history do not assume a priori that, as a matter of fact, supernatural causes don't really exist. There is no conceptual conflict between practicing science or history and believing in the supernatural. However, as several of our authors argue below (e.g., Augustine, Forrest, and Oppy), methodological naturalism would not be as stunningly successful as it has in fact been if metaphysical naturalism were false. Thus the de facto success of methodological naturalism provides strong empirical evidence that metaphysical naturalism is probably true. Keith Augustine, “Naturalism”
In coining the term “scientific materialism”, Alfred Whitehead makes the point why that reasoning is an illusion (emphasis mine).
As Whitehead himself explains, his "philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world."
Significantly, this view runs counter to more traditional views associated with material substance: "There persists," says Whitehead, "[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call 'scientific materialism.' Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived."
The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, integrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, "Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events."
The end result is that Whitehead concludes that "nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process." Irvine, A. D., "Alfred North Whitehead", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
Unfortunately, neither does religion. Indeed, according to may Christians here, right and wrong are based solely on the subjective whims of God.