I did a podcast on whether or not naturalism has historically been of benefit to science. The *actual* interaction of naturalism with science is both drastically different and more interesting than what is presented in most science classes and books.
Podcast information available here.
It’s not clear what this is even about.
As far as I know, “naturalism” is a term that comes from philosophy. It isn’t a term that comes from science. Scientists do use the words “nature” and “natural”. But I don’t recall hearing a scientist use “naturalism” except in a discussion with philosophers.
Maybe you should be asking “Does philosophy need naturalism?”
Neil Rickert states,
While I certainly agree with you that naturalism is a philosophy, (an obscene philosophy at that), and that naturalism is certainly not ‘science’, perhaps, instead of asking JohnnyB, you should instead ask Judge Jones, who ruled against Intelligent Design being taught in Pennsylvania public schools, and who cited ‘expert testimony’, why he claimed that, “since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena…. Methodological naturalism is thus “a paradigm of science.” It is a “ground rule”,,, ?
Or perhaps you should instead ask Lewontin why he claimed that, “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.” ?
Or perhaps you should ask David Hume why he falsely claimed, in the 17th century, that the laws of nature were ‘natural’, and that a ‘miracle’ was therefore a violation of the laws of nature?
In fact, David Hume, in the same passage, goes on to attack Christianity since ‘a dead man’s coming to life would be a miracle” and therefore a violation of the laws of nature which he had falsely presupposed to be ‘natural’.
Yet, David Hume, as an atheist, (in the 1700s no less), simply had no right to presuppose that the laws of nature are ‘natural’ with no need of God to explain their existence. As Paul Davies explained,
And as Paul Davies further explained, “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”
And again in 2007 Paul Davies went on to state, ,,, the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe,,,”
Atheists, with their ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations, simply have no clue why there should even be universal laws that govern the universe in the first place:
Einstein himself stated, ““You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way”,,,
Likewise, Eugene Wigner also stated, “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.,,,”
Thus for David Hume, again an atheist, to self-servingly presuppose that the laws of nature are completely natural and that the laws of nature therefore preclude the possibility of any further miracles, (specifically Jesus rising from the dead), from even being possible. i.e. “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature;“, was a severely disingenuous and dishonest thing for him to do (especially in then 1700s shortly after the Newtonian revolution in science).
It is also interesting to note that Hume’s false atheistic assumption that the laws of nature are ‘natural’ has now been, (as far as humans themselves are concerned), falsified by advances in quantum mechanics.
Specifically, as Steven Weinberg, an atheist, explains, “In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. According to Eugene Wigner, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.”11
Thus the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans. We may in the end have to give up this goal,,,”
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
For instance, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.
Likewise, just a few days ago, ‘Wigner’s friend’ also received additional mathematical and experimental support,,,
Moreover, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse:
Thus in conclusion, JohnnyB is completely right, science certainly does not need the philosophical assumption of naturalism. In fact naturalism is, (to put it nicely), a parasitic philosophy that had nothing to do with the rise of modern science, and which currently prevents modern science from finding the true solution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that the false assumption of naturalism prevents scientists from ever looking to God as a coherent explanation for anything within science.
Of supplemental note:
Moreover,
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Serious scientists focus on answering scientific questions.
However, by making discoveries that shed light on nature, they indirectly (and in most cases unwittingly) strengthen the case for rational intentional conceptualization (RIC*) as the source of natural innovation.
Perhaps that explains, at least partially, why researchers many times write how unexpected and surprising their discoveries are.
This seems more obvious in modern biology research, where the increasing discovery of complex functionally specified information processing within the biological systems is practically becoming routine.
Biology is turning into the new queen of science, rendering mathematics and physics its servants.
(*) or Intentional Rational Conceptualization (IRC)
BA77 @2 & @3:
Very interesting commentaries.
Wow. Earth to Neil Rickert- naturalism is what mainstream science promotes. Ask Dawkins. Ask Coyne.
That is what the whole anti-ID movement is all about- promoting naturalism.
“Naturalism”, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
By my version, everything that exists has a nature – that which makes a thing itself and not something else – and is thereby part of the natural order. This would, naturally, include ghosts, souls and gods, for example, if such entities exist at all. On this understanding, there is no such thing as “supernatural”, only that which is currently unknown or there is nothing there to be known.
I would say that science, on the other hand, investigates the natural world, meaning that which can be observed to exist, however indirectly, or inferred to exist. To that extent it is naturalistic but it does not take the position that such is all there is. What, if anything, lies beyond is still an unanswered question.
Naturalism excludes telic processes for our origins. It is not natural vs supernatural, as seversky would have you believe. It’s blind and mindless vs telic processes.
Unfortunately blind and mindless process are incapable of producing life and its observed diversity. Naturalism fails from the start.
“that which can be observed to exist, however indirectly, or inferred to exist”
Interestingly, this puts you on the side of ID on this question.
Neil Rickert,
Have you been a commenter in any of the websites (besides UD) listed in the following link? Just curious.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/if-id-is-dead-why-are-some-obsessed-with-shutting-it-down/#comment-710267