It appears that the first usage of this term traces to the Christian philosopher Paul de Vries. He used the term orally at a conference in 1983. A few years later it appeared in print in the paper “Naturalism in the Natural Sciences,” Christian Scholar’s Review 15 (1986), 388-96. For de Vries, methodological naturalism says nothing about the existence of God, contrasted with metaphysical naturalism, which actively denies God’s existence. This bit of sleuthing is the work of Ron Numers.

Andrew Rowell over at ID in the UK has done a very good job of exposing the problems with having methodological naturalism as the exclusive methodology for the natural sciences:

The faith of the methodological naturalist.

The basic articles of faith for a methodological naturalist go something like this:

We have found excellent naturalistic explanations for many phenomenon in nature.

Therefore

we believe every phenomenon in nature will have a naturalistic explanation.

Therefore

we make it a strict rule that science is exclusively the study of possible naturalistic explanations for what can be observed in the universe.

Science is not the search for the truth about the origin, operation and destiny of the universe it is limited exclusively to purely naturalistic explanations of the origin, operation and destiny of the universe.

The methodological naturalist will choose a naturalistic explanation over a meta-nature explanation to be taught as the truth in science lessons even if it is not actually true. Read More ›

Dawkins’ barbed blanket dismissiveness comes up far too often in discussions of the design inference and related themes. Rarely, explicitly, most often by implication of a far too commonly seen no concessions, selectively hyperskeptical policy that objectors to design too often manifest. It is time to set this straight. First, we need to highlight fallacious, crooked yardstick thinking (as exposed by naturally straight and upright plumb-lines). And yes, that classical era work, the Bible, is telling: Notice, a pivotal point here, is self-evident truths. Things, similar to 2 + 3 = 5: Notoriously, Winston Smith in 1984 is put on the rack to break his mind to conform to The Party’s double-think. He is expected to think 2 + 2 Read More ›

Review: J. W. Thornton (2022): Simple mechanisms for the evolution of protein complexity https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t2706-main-topics-on-proteins-and-protein-synthesis#9622 Proteins are tiny models of biological complexity: specific interactions among their many amino acids cause proteins to fold into elaborate structures, assemble with other proteins into higher-order complexes, and change their functions and structures upon binding other molecules.  Comment: Merriam-Webster describes the word “elaborate” as: “planned or carried out with great care, to produce by labor,Synonyms: Adjective: complex, complicated, detailed, fancy, intricate, involved, sophisticated Its hard to overlook the teleological aspect of the word. We can all agree that proteins are well-described as elaborate: Nucleopores for example have been described recently as “a massive complex of roughly 1,000 proteins that helps channel DNA instructions to the rest of the cell” 12 These complex Read More ›

The twentieth century was drenched in blood. Totalitarian governments cruelly slaughtered over 100 million people and consigned tens of millions more to the camps, where their bodies were broken and their spirits crushed. As the years dragged by in that most miserable of centuries, time and again the world convulsed in the grip of a malignant evil that was unprecedented in its scope and brutality. Yet, for all its horror, as the century came to a close there were reasons for hope and even optimism. Memories of the Nazi horror were fading. The Soviet Union had collapsed not, as many had feared, in a paroxysm of fire and blood, but with a whimper. In China, Deng Xiaoping unleashed the power Read More ›

Notoriously, on the evening of October 30, 1938, many people missed the opening remarks for Orson Welles’ radio dramatisation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds. As History dot com recounts: Millions of Americans, as they were every night, huddled around their radios, but relatively few of them were listening to CBS when it was announced that Welles and his fellow cast members were presenting an original dramatization of the 1898 H.G. Wells science-fiction novel “The War of the Worlds.” Instead, most of the country was tuned in to NBC’s popular “Chase and Sanborn Hour,” which featured ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy . . . . disoriented listeners who stumbled onto the “Mercury Theatre on the Read More ›