Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

What is the nature of the limit on science placed by methodological
naturalism? Are we saying "science doesn't really work to address
such topics" or are we arbitrarily excluding them? If arbitrary, are
we merely drawing lines as to what falls under "science" versus some
other heading, or are we also making claims that the category
"science" is better than other categories, as creation science or ID
advocates do when they insist that their claims are scientific?

I see the essence of science as making observations, making
predictions or retrodictions, and then making more observations or
experiments to test those. This does not exclude the possibility of
supernatural agents, but they must be subject to experimentation.
"You shall not put God to the test" says something about the
theological advisability of such activity, but also God doesn't do
things that way. God doesn't work magically-it's not like Harry
Potter where saying the right words and waving a wand gives X result
for any competent wizard nor like horoscopes where everyone born
during a certain time supposedly has similar experience nor like the
legalistic folly that afflicts us all of thinking that if we do the
right things (bring sacrifices, go to church, read the Bible, etc.) it
earns God's favor and He'll do what we want. It's easy to test the
claim that horoscopes or psychics give information that is better
matched to the person it's supposed to match than to average, without
any previous commitment as to whether supernatural agents are
involved. Scientifically it's not easy to test the claims of
Christianity. One can gather, e.g., psychological data to show that
people are unlikely to behave as the apostles did to promote a claim
they know is untrue, but this is only indirect and essentially leads
to the conclusion that science doesn't provide a very satisfactory
answer. In theory one could take chemical apparatus in a time machine
and monitor the water at the wedding in Cana, but you would only have
more data supporting the taste test that showed that something strange
happened-it doesn't help in understanding the event.

Thus, I would see the claims of ID as not so much being science as
suggesting that science has failed to give an answer and providing an
alternative source of answers. That doesn't in and of itself indicate
anything wrong with ID; it just illustrates what I consider science
versus non-science. Where I see significant problems with ID are in
the expectation of finding gaps in science's ability to explain within
the course of evolution and in claims of science's failure when at
most it has not yet provided an answer (no guarantee that it will but
no guarentee that it won't) and often it has provided an answer.

Ironically, ENCODE results help illustrate the answer to
differentiation. Much DNA functions to affect other DNA rather than
to make proteins, as standard genes do. This is what the ENCODE
results demonstrate, and it poses no problem for evolution whatsoever.
 Turning these switches off and on leads to differentiation. Many
details of differentiation have been studied in various organisms.
Gradients in concentrations of particular substances created in the
fertilized egg provide directional cues to turn on or off the genes
that in turn guide general features of development in different parts
of the body. More detailed features may differentiate based on the
chain of genes affected by those genes, or they may reflect additional
gradients. A simple illustration of the complexity that can be
generated by interaction of a couple gradients is seen in The
Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells, where many complex color patterns
are shown to be producible by simple underlying physical processes.

One might concede that the present system of differentiation works
without needing intervention, but still suggest that the system
ultimately requires some intervention to exist in the first place.
However, this assumes that differentiation had to start complex.
Instead, what we see is rather simple differentiation in primitive
multicellular organisms (sponges, algae, etc.) and progressively more
complex differentiation. Making a sponge doesn't require very precise
coordination on most aspects of differentiation. A jellyfish is a bit
trickier, etc.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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