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