At Facebook, Matthew Bell asks,
Given that science operations on methodological naturalism, i.e, ” a methodological principle within the context of scientific inquiry; i.e., all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events” how is it not the case that science has already made up its mind about what kinds of things and events exist before it even begins its work?
The two biggest problems are first, that one would have no way of knowing within the system when it had failed. (If you don’t believe that, check out this completely ridiculous New York Times article on religion.)
Second, any explanation that supports methodological naturalism, no matter how ridiculous, must be preferred to any better non-naturalist one. Case in point: Any fatuous explanation of religion (again, see the link above) must be preferred to an explanation that proposes the possibility of an encounter with the divine—no matter what the state of the evidence.
“Evolutionary psychology” is an entire pseudodiscipline that testifies to this problem. A showcase for crackpots, especially on the subject of religion.
The only good thing about it is that the practitioners deserve themselves.
All the so called outcomes that evolutionary psychology describe had to have happened on the African savannah when small groups of hunter/gatherers were wandering around. So how did these small independent groups form all these psychological characteristics by natural selection and mutation. And then what happened when they left Africa 40,000 to 60,000 years ago.
Pseudoscience at its best. Has anyone ever listened to Allen MacNeill’s course on Evolutionary Psychology.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mode.....B00435HBGO
OT: “Close to a Miracle”: Unexpected Candor on the Origin of Proteins – Michael Behe October 16, 2013
Excerpt: From ASBMB Today, the official magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology:
“Over all, what the field of protein evolution needs are some plausible, solid hypotheses to explain how random sequences of amino acids turned into the sophisticated entities that we recognize today as proteins.” (Until that happens, the phenomenon of the rise of proteins will remain, as Tawfik says, “something like close to a miracle.”)”
Well, duh!,,
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....77971.html
Methodological Naturalism MN is an arbitrary restriction on Science itself. I’ve often stated that MN is equal to full blown philosophical naturalism (PN). MN = PN and there’s no getting around it. Unless and until someone establishes scientifically that the Cosmos really is a completely closed system of natural cause and effect, which no one ever has, MN is arbitrary and completely gratuitous to the practice of Science.
While I see the problem with methodological naturalism, I don’t see why it’s a threat to ID. ID does not posit a non-natural designer.
Mapou, it isn’t a threat to ID only but to science in general because it gives the crackpot a unique advantage.
Mapou in #4
MN by itself isn’t a threat to ID. However, MN presupposes, without any scientific confirmation, that one of the main features of Nature is that it is a completely closed system of natural cause and effect. By definition, then, that means that if Nature actually is not a completely closed system of natural cause and effect, then restricting science to explanations that fall within the boundaries of MN will keep science blind to what may be the actual causal factors of whatever is under investigation. Put another way, if Nature itself doesn’t live within the restriction imposed by MN, why should Science?
Furthermore, if Nature doesn’t live within the restriction imposed by MN, and Science arbitrarily restricts itself to only what MN can deliver by way of explanation, then claiming what is found under the restriction is Science, or truth or explained is purely arbitrary.
Look at what MN actually means. Essentially it is saying that whether or not PN is actually true, for the sake of doing science we’ll pretend that it is. How does that help science gain a true picture of Nature if Nature does not actually live within that restriction?
OT: Stephen Meyer joins radio host Frank Turek to discuss Darwin’s Doubt – radio podcast – uploaded Oct. 16, 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wphnk-BN_4
Stephen Meyer has his next installment up addressing Charles Marshall’s review in Science of his book Darwin’s Doubt
Does Darwin’s Doubt Commit the God-of-the-Gaps Fallacy? – Stephen C. Meyer October 16, 2013
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....78001.html