Saturday, July 16, 2005

Methodological Naturalism

Here's the Wikipedia definition: "Methodological naturalism (MN) is the operational ground rule that, within natural science enquiry, one can only use natural explanations - i.e. one's explanations must not make reference to the existence of supernatural forces and entities. Note that methodological naturalism does not hold that such entities or forces do not exist, but merely that one cannot use them within a scientific explanation. Methodological naturalism is often considered to be an implied working rule of all scientific research and logically entails neither philisophical naturalism nor atheism, though some would argue that it implies such a connection."

I suppose we are going to need some clarifications of the terms "natural"and "supernatural."
The point about Lewontin's quote has to do with my question as to whether this is supposed to be an absolute principle or not, and whether the prinicple defines science or not. Some initial commitment to methodological naturalism seems to me to make perfect sense as part of science commitment to something like Ockham's Razor. But some people MN is an absolute and that it is definitive of science. Lewontin is an example, and plenty of people have argued that ID is a pseudoscience merely from its apparent supernaturalist commitments. I have a problem with that. Apart from that, I would just note that Dembski's The Design Revolution was written to answer a lot of the standard objections to ID. I'm not an ID expert and am a poor person to defend them on a lot of issues. Maybe others can do better.

On the other hand we do have, in ordinary life, situations where we have to decide whether there was design or not, and shouldn't we be using those principles in the investigation of nature. If I am playing cards, and one person gets 3 royal flushes in a row, I probably should have gone home a long time ago, because now I'm going to have to go home in my underwear. Even if the acceptance of design requires something on the order of the supernatural, I believe that there is some point at which enough is enough.

I remember one time I read a paper by old housemate and atheist philosopher Keith Parsons. It involved a strong commitment to methodological naturalism in the case of miracles. I told him, "This seems to imply that if I were God I couldn't persuade you no matter how many miracles I performed." And he said "No. If the stars the Virgo cluster were to spell out the words "Turn or Burn: This Means You Parsons," I'd turn. But I've read others who say they would not turn!

If by the "fact" of evolution you mean the gradual emergence of species, that's hard to doubt, I'll grant. Lots of scientists have thought that there is design in the universe, though they have often been shy about making it part of science. Can this conviction be made scientific?

11 comments:

Steve said...

I want to support Ahab's point above about public schools. Dr. Reppert: I'm glad you've posted this debate on your blog and certainly respect your opinion. But it would be so helpful if you could at least agree that while it it's great to have this kind of philosophical discussion among learned adults, it has no place in high school science class (where it is hard enough to teach the basics).
best regards, - Steve Esser

Victor Reppert said...

About science education; I always thought one thing a really good science teacher does is treat even such "noncontroversial" scientific issues like heliocentrism as controversial and try to get the student to discover for themselves the real grounds for the received positions. Anyway, I thought that we learn science best by learning to think for ourselves, and no by taking someone's word for something.

Some ten years ago I once talked to a biology classroom teacher about teaching evolution, and she told me that most of what you teach in the classroom was how to observe natural evolution in action, which would be conceded by even the most hard-core creationists as "microevolution."

Strangely enough, I think things are made worse by some high-profile evolutionists crossing the boundary from science to metaphysics by making Darwinism into a case for a "world without design." That is, instead of saying "Look, this is our paradigm, we have to use naturalistic methods, so if this was really supernatural we had to ignore that possibility because we are trying to do science here," they say "This is our theory, and we can do it all without God, so we should reject belief in God." If Dembski has overstepped his bounds and assigning metaphysical questions to science, what about Richard Dawkins?? But I am really not sure the science-metaphysics divide can be made as neatly as most people think it can.

I'm not convinced that science has to be committed to MN in order to be science. It seems that so long as you present theories that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by evidence, and you allow your claims to be tested, you are doing science.

The prayer study you mentioned disconfirms testable claims made about prayer. But one can continue to believe something that has faced disconfirmation. That is true of naturalistic theories as well as supernaturalist theories. You can always amend your theory to conform to the experimental data ad infinitum. Usually scientists defending a disconfirmed theory give up after it gets too bad, but there is no logical point at which it becomes necessary to give up. Failure to give up in the face of a piece of counter-evidence does not entail that your position is untestable. If that were so, then all of the scientists of history would be condemned as pseudoscientists.

Someone who believes that the Shroud of Turin is a miraculously imprinted image of the rising Christ suffers a disconfirmation if carbon-testing shows the Shroud to be from the thirteenth century. That doesn't mean you have to give up believing in the Shroud, but it does mean that the carbon-test contradicts what you should expect if the Shroud is the real McCoy.

One can make untestable supernatural claims, and one can make testable supernatural claims. You can also make untestable naturalistic claims.

Because the claims made by ID are of interest to the community at large, I can't see the harm in informing students about them, so long as it is made clear that at this stage in the game this is very much a minority report. Don't insult these kids' intelligences.

Victor Reppert said...

Ahab: You missed my point about the Shroud of Turin. I say that testability doesn't require that it be shown to be false, all we need is that it is probabilistically disconfirmable. And that can be done if carbon-dating shows that the Shroud came into being in the thirteenth century.

Victor Reppert said...

I don't know of any cases, but Dembski, if I understand correctly, thinks that the biology community is so biased in favor of Darwinism, and so many unfair tactics are used against the careers of, say, editors who even allow IDers to publish in their perr-reviewed journals, that their hope for fair and honest consideration of their position can only come from the upcoming generation. There are surely few issues about which so much is at stake. And Dembski also says that design theorists have written in several biology journals.

Dembski writes:

"IN the current intellecutal climate it is impossible to get a paper published in the peer-reviewed biological literature if that paper explicitly affirms intelligent design or explicitlyl denies Darwinian and other forms of natulraistic evolution. Doubting Darwinian orthodoxy is comparable to opposing the party line of a Stalinist regime. What would you do if you were in Stalin's Russia and wanted to argue that Trofim Lysenko was wrong? YOu might point out paradoxed and tensions in Lysenko's thoery of genetics, but you could not say taht Lysenko was fundamentally wrong or offer an alternative that cleraly contradicted Lysenko. That's the situation we're in. To get published in the peer-reviewed literature, design theorists have to tread very cautiously and can't be too up front about where their work is leading. Indeed, that's why I was able to get Cambridge University Press to publish The Design Inference but not No Free Lunch, which was much more explicit in its biological implications. "

Victor Reppert said...

But in reality there are plenty of people who consider the Shroud genuine who could be persuaded by good enough scientific evidence that it was not genuine. I think the testability problems that you pose for God could also be posed for any theory that is committed to unobservables, such as electrons. That's why Bas van Fraassen thinks that theories that commit to unobservables should be regarded as empirically adequate, but not true.

All theories, not just supernatural ones, are underdetermined by facts.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jenkinsm/071504.html

Victor Reppert said...

Maybe not, but do anti-design people sometimes play hardball against design theorists, making it hard for them to publish if their convictions are out in the open? Maybe Dembski has waxed hyperbolic here, but does he at least have a point? (OK, I'll drop the maybe).

Victor Reppert said...

I don't accept van Fraassen's arguments, and I don't think you do either. But if I accept your argument that supernatural hypotheses are untestable because you can detach the supernatural part of them and leave the testatble part, then you would have to say that all theories that commit to unobservables are untestable.

Victor Reppert said...

What do you mean by nature? If nature is what science studies, and the studies science engages in them lead to God, then God is part of nature. I have no problem with that at all.

Victor Reppert said...

Ahab: I've never said more than that I am sympathetic to basic idea of ID and that I think some arguments against it are bad. I think that there is no proof beforehand that science cannot address or even support intelligent design.

I also think that some academic hardball is being played against ID advocates which is going to backfire in the long run. We don't need the pseudoscience police.

Whether, say, the No Free Lunch theorems really demonstrate that we can detect irreducible design in nature is something I am in no position to defend.

Victor Reppert said...

I don't know of anyone who has been in a position to petition school boards about teaching their doctrines. I think that the IDers think it is early in the game; many now-respected scientific theories were scoffed at in their infancy. I suppose it is open to you to say, if you really believe in ID as science, if you keep plugging away at the science, we will accept your doctrine in the long run. It's not an either/or, they can do science and do the school boards at the same time.

I'll stay with what I said earlier, that some of the anti-ID academic hardball is a bad idea even on the assumption that the Darwinists are right.

And, the IDers are not trying to get the theological content into the schools, anymore than Dawkins has tried to get the atheology into the schools. Kant pointed out long ago that the argument from design, even if it works otherwise, establishes the existence of an Artificer but not necessarily an omnipotent, omniscient being.

Victor Reppert said...

What Dembski says about this is that we will have to wait for the next generation of scientists to make this assessment.