@kelvin_M, @jrfarris, and @anon46279830, Welcome to the forum! Thanks for contributing. I’d like to focus first on @kelvin_M’s statement here, as it lends to expanding on @jrfarris’s introduction of the question of the table and being invited to it, and pertains to what @anon46279830 raises regarding Methodological Naturalism (MN):
I think Lewis’ metaphor here really gets at the limitations of science as the study of material causes of materially caused phenomena, and to a certain degree, as @swamidass pointed out in the earlier discussion in Methodological Naturalism, So Falsely Called, the agency of animal and human minds.
Regarding the inclusion of minds in science, here I disagree with @swamidass that what is involved is a Creator-creation distinction. Rather I think we could argue from the history of science that science focuses on material causes and known causes (traditionally, causae verae, prior to that term’s being equated with natural causes after Darwin). Since animal and human agency are undeniably known causes, they are included in scientific explanation regardless of the possibility that minds are immaterial. By contrast, divine and angelic minds are unknown causative agents, except to those who may have religious experience with them, but considered unknown from the point of view of natural science. Notice also, that the trend in scientific explanation and those philosophical explanations attempting to accord with science (@jrfarris might weigh in here) has been to reduce human and animal minds to purely material causes.
This raises real questions about Lewis’ claim as to which is the larger and more explanatory reality and @Ronald_Cram’s lucid point that:
In terms of history of science, that quote very well expresses the worldview Bacon and the Virtuossi of the seventeenth century and later were operating within: not all phenomena can be assumed to be explainable by natural processes or physical laws.
The question then hangs a good deal on scope: @swamidass, do you have an estimate of how pervasive it is among scientists to limit science to a subset of phenomena within our universe, recognizing that there are events within our universe which may genuinely not be natural? Or is it the reverse?
What I found studying the Victorian scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century was that–in contrast to the prior understanding of science that reigned from at least the time of Bacon through most of the nineteenth century and continued to be pervasive throughout that century–the Victorian scientific naturalists treated all perceivable reality as within the scope of science. This of course put them in direct conflict with the biblical accounts of miracles. When we consider the mind-body problem and special divine action (miracles), it would seem that their precedence continues.
Lewis’ metaphor whereby a it is a larger picture that makes sense of the smaller picture has weighty precedent in the history of science. By contrast with scientific naturalism, so many of the earlier natural philosophers recognized that the natural or created universe was not explainable simply in the natural terms that natural science sought to uncover. The fact, for example, that God’s created and did so from the point of view of knowing the future was central to Newton’s and Leibniz’ understanding of reality. Similarly, John Locke relied on the contingency of the material universe as unavoidable evidence of a Creator.
While I think we can talk about theology and revelation as separate from science without getting into too much controversy, as @kelvin_M points out, there is the issue of revelation that may be
In the New Testament, Jesus’ raising Lazarus and calming the storm result in the revelation of His identity as the Christ, just as for Bacon the miracle at Bensalem results in the receiving of the New Testament and letter from Bartholomew. What made receipt of the the revelation compelling was the evidential support of observable miracles within our physical universe, and their having apparently overridden the normal outcomes of natural processes left to themselves.
When it comes to philosophers and theologians having a “seat at the table,” it seems to me that the question of how a person accurately perceives the larger reality–which may include things like divine action or nonphysical minds–comes right up against the scientific commitment to explain all phenomena the scientist is presented with by means of methodological naturalism.