Re: methodological naturalism - origin of the term?

From: Sarah Berel-Harrop (sec@hal-pc.org)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 11:45:33 EDT

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    Re: methodological naturalism - origin of the term?Re: Plantinaga, see
    http://www.id.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/plantinga/mn/home.html

    Another view, see:
    http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/naturalism.html

    Wilkins is very friendly and generally will provide
    references if you ask him. He can be found at
    talk.origins.

    Comment,
    Plantinaga states that MN holds that science cannot
    involve religious belief and commitment, following what
    Basil Willey calls "provisional atheism". I think this
    statement is strictly speaking untrue. You bring the
    commitments you have to whatever you do. What MN
    *does* is essentially that you procede in a manner
    calculated to produce results that are amenable to
    reverification by people who come to the same data
    set with different commitments. You are not saying,
    "God isn't a factor when I am doing MN". You are
    saying "when I am doing MN I will focus on empirical
    and not revelatory ways of knowing." If there is not
    a convention of doing MN in science, it introduces
    an extra element of subjectivity. Note, I do not hold
    that the subjectivity is not there. What MN does is
    that it holds down the subjective elements so that
    the observer coming after you does not have to
    understand your world-view to understand and
    try to verify or falsify what you did. Otherwise
    how do you avoid having Christian science, Jewish
    science, racist science, Hindu science, etc, etc.

    See also the opening to Dobzhansky's "Nothing
    in Biology Makes Sense except in light of evolution"

    ----- Original Message -----
      From: Howard J. Van Till
      To: Steve Bishop ; asa@calvin.edu
      Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 8:39 AM
      Subject: Re: methodological naturalism - origin of the term?

    >No. I don't know when this term got into the vocabulary. Al Plantinga has employed it for quite a while. Perhaps he could shed some light on its introduction. I'm quite sure it precedes Ruse's presentation at the 1993 AAAS symposium (at which I also gave a presentation).

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