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

Gregory Arago wrote:

<< Let me then repeat that MN is a pseudo-philosophy, a justification for saying (natural) science can't study the supra-natural. Yet, as David O. wrote: "The divine logos is above, around, and under science, but it cannot be captured or owned by the scientific method." By 'supra-natural' I imply a meaning of 'above, around and under' science. The divine logos is something that human beings, even natural scientists, experience (imago Dei) in their daily lives, even while in the natural scientific laboratories. So why reduce it to the almost pejorative 'supernatural'??>>

OK, MN (Methodological Naturalism), taken to extremes, could be as you say, a pseudo-philosophy. For example, when popular scientists philosophize, it can be pretty atrocious.

Nevertheless, I would say, as a physicist and a practicing scientist who has wrestled with this central issue, it is not the assumption that the supernatural cannot exist or must not exist, that we find we must use MN. The reason is that the "supernatural", by its very name, is not something we can expect to reliably measure with "material".

First: nobody here who is Christian (as far as I know) would deny that the supernatural cannot exist. The problem is that we don't know how to measure it. As a result, science largely becomes the study of "stuff". "Stuff" is used to measure other "stuff". Is it reasonable for anyone to expect that our "stuff" should be able to measure the supernatural? I would say, “…only if the supernatural would submit to us and reveal itself”. What do you expect here?

Second, it is not in any way the case that we (physicists at least) don't want to look for this kind of stuff if we could. Most certainly, __any__ physicist (even an atheist who is physicist!) would be scrambling to build something that could link to the supernatural if he/she could, because that would yield interesting information about the world! Maybe people who rail against the supernatural are "sour grapes" about it, or maybe they are skeptical about it because it hasn't been "observed", but it is simply not the case that scientists purposefully deny it to preserve a philosophical supposition.

The most unpalatable philosophical positions tend to stem more from the fact that we __cannot__ measure the supernatural (at least to this point), but this is crossing the line. The facts are simply that we do not know how to measure the supernatural, so we don’t in practice do so.

It would seem that not much leaks between these two realms, and therefore, there is no way we can exploit that leakage to gain such a measurement. I suppose ID wants to claim indirect measurement; forensic evidence. However, even forensic science can only be reliably tested with "stuff". It uses practiced scientific tests to deduce knowable scenarios. A crime that was committed involves reproducible events (at least in principle); even a murder can be pieced together from the scene of the crime using reproducible equivalent examples, though the murdered individual cannot be brought back to life of course. Yet we're talking about the supernatural, where there are no such tests. It's our ignorance. We don't know how it works, so we cannot say anything about it. Maybe too many scientists talk arrogantly, so it comes across different from this, but the fact is, we don't have a clue. More likely, this reflects how different people respond in different ways to similar chal!
 lenges.

Finally, I think what you should seriously think about is what would happen if we could measure it? How much time would lapse before we did something horrifyingly stupid? I would wager that perhaps the reason we cannot access it (until we come before the pearly gates), is for our own good. Furthermore, even given the impossible odds that we didn’t do something utterly dumb and short sighted, what about the core issue in scripture about faith? If it is as commonplace as running a toaster, is there any need to “trust in the Lord” anymore?

Therefore, as a physicist and practicing scientist, I would see MN as a practical approach (a pragmatic way to do science). Moreover, even if there is a well defined pathway that we can all be satisfied about with evolution, Darwinism or whatever you insist on calling it, it means nothing about whether God was or was not involved. We can only (in principle), describe the _measurable_ part of the story; the rest of the story has to come from somewhere else.

by Grace we proceed,
Wayne (ASA)

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Received on Wed Jul 18 19:36:40 2007