8 posts were split to a new topic: Garvey and Swamidass Hash Out A New View of Methodological Naturalism
I disagree mostly, but the details of how and why will have to wait until I have my coffee.
Axioms or First Principles, yes. As for reality being real, all we can do is kick a rock and hope for the best. 
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These seem easily answered to me - they all share a regularity of pattern that can be studied: by definition the CMB is not itself a unique event, because one finds its frequncy in relation to other radiation, repeats measurements, maps it and so on, the regularity enabling one to make deductions about the event that cause it.
Stochastic events, individually, can only be studied scientifically by the regularity of the probability distributions they generate. But of course, if one can find the processes governing the individual events, they become a separately tractable element of your science.
Eclipses are highly regular, which is why even the Babylonians had them pretty well sorted.
Unique phenomena (as I’ve said before) do not in themselves constitute science. A long thin object enters the solar system - first of all, the pattern of its reflection is necessary to say it is long and thin at all. As its trajectory is traced, people try to interpret the patterns - a rock? An photon-sail? If a similar object appeared in a years time from the same area, we know where to look for more patterns that might reveal more. If there were enough of them, even if they were spaceships or migrating angels, one could draw decent scientific conclusions - because scientific conclusions are descriptions of regularity.
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I think that its hormones more than genes that compels.
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Einstein thought QM was incomplete because it required “spooky action at a distance”. It seems fair to conclude that he used the adjective ‘spooky’ because of its supernatural connotations.
But non-locality is now an accepted fact of the consensus view of QM.
My point is that is an an error to attempt to define fixed concepts of ‘methodological naturalism’ or ‘methodological regularism’.
Instead, these concepts should be seen as emergent from and evolving with consensus scientific practice, as embodied in the relevant scientific community.
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As much as I think there is legitimacy to the distinctions I am making, I also very much agree with this @BruceS. This is a sociological view, which understands “science” as a community of discourse. In my view, the best understanding of science comes from a mix between the philosophy and the sociology of science.
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Excellent. Can somebody point me to that definition 
I have often been accused of naturalism (by creationists or ID proponents), and I have never been able to work out what that is supposed to imply.
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I’m using hypothesis informally. “God exists” is a hypothesis, as is “God created the universe”, for example. That’s the feeling I got from the brief quote. I haven’t read anything by Carroll beyond that, so I won’t say more!
How likely is a God that could create all those things?
Why restrict this to “God”? That’s just one possible supernatural entity among many. It doesn’t make much sense to say “the natural is anything but the supernatural” however. I might say “whatever exists in reality”.
You can’t define “natural”, so you certainly can’t define “supernatural.” The context for Josh, though, was the “creator/creation” divide, which means the divine. On the other thread (which seems to have acquired my name) I include angels. On previous occasions I’ve included ghosts in the analysis.
I just did!
I’ve oft wondered about this as well. It must have more to do more with background culture. 17/18th century “scientists” working within a theistic culture versus 21st century scientist working within a pluralistic culture. MN is now perceived as more dangerous than it was in the past. Plantinga blames the danger on an Aquinas vs. Ockham, realism/nominalism shift.
I hear this often in philosophy of science discussions. @jongarvey follows with the traditional Plantinga style reduction of MN to philosophical naturalism. I’m not saying Jon is making this argument, but he is explicating the “standard” Christian move in the literature that I’ve seen.
This is, in my estimation, closer to the way I would defend MN. Why couldn’t MN be more about one’s hesitancy to employ God’s special intervention in nature, something more akin to a methodological deism for those with religious sensitivities. It isn’t that MN leads me to reject God’s governance of the world or even His direct intervention in the world, but it sure does make me skeptical of assuming that every special and non-special event is the direct intervention of God (e.g., a special miracle as opposed to general miracle of preservation).
Perhaps, the attempt to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for MN is the problem. What if MN is more a reflection of certain intellectual virtues and character traits rather than a demarcation rule? Could we jettison the MN rule if we had well established virtues of investigation in play that both Christians and non-Christian scientists exhibit to better and worse degrees? I need to think and work more on this myself, but I throw it out as a suggestion.
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But then isn’t your methodology determining your theology of nature, which seems like the cart before the horse? “I follow this methodology because God only rarely intervenes in nature” is actually about metaphysical commitments, not methodological ones.
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MN tells us nothing about the frequency of Gods intervention in the world.
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It is the insistence on moving from epistemology to metaphysics that I worry about. Or, beginning with metaphysics at all.
Why couldn’t the metaphysics driving method also be cart before the horse scenario?
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Now I actually have had time to read the original article, which mentions methodological theism (MT), methodological naturalism (MN), and methodological regularism (MR). The article is utterly confused and plays right into the simplistic, scientistic view of the world propounded by Krauss and other New Atheists. For example, their description of MT is as follows:
But watch out: “Aha!” shouts the secularist. “You admit it! God interferes! How can we possibly do science if he gets in the way, even a little bit?!” Answer? Easy! Scientists know full well what to do with the occasional anomalous result: Cast out the data point as an outlier. Or re-run the experiment. Failing that, simply shrug your shoulders, scratch your head, say, “Hmmm, that was odd,” and go on. This happens in science. It’s not the least bit out of the ordinary. Science survives anyway. And remember: every theist believes true miracles are very, very rare.
So theism provides for a reasoned expectation that nature will behave regularly virtually all the time; certainly with enough regularity to allow science to succeed. In this expectation, theism actually outdoes naturalism; for naturalism knows no reason why nature should behave regularly. It just does, and no one can say why. Taking this advantage into account, methodological theism actually provides science a better undergirding than methodological naturalism.
Far from being innovative, MT defined this way is no different than how I thought MN fits into a typical Christian scientist’s framework. Belief in MN does not rule out the possibility of special miracles or other forms of divine intervention, unless you think (like Krauss) that science (with MN) is the only way of knowing about the world.
The author describes MR as follows:
Sure; and it isn’t complicated. I’ve hinted at it several times already here. We all know that science depends on nature behaving regularly and predictably virtually all the time. I suggest we settle on mere “methodological regularism” as science’s operating principle. It says what needs saying, and it knows enough to say no more than that, especially nothing more of a non-scientific nature. It’s simple, and it works — in fact it works so well, it seems to me that having introduced the principle here, at a point when I should go on elucidating and campaigning for it, I would do just as well to let it speak for itself.
If all that MR means is that nature behaves regularly and predictably all the time, then it is not clear how different it is from MN. This description of MR also does not answer the question of whether science can detect God’s action. If not, then it is mostly identical to how one should understand MN. It seems that there are people here who understands what the author means by MR apart from MN. Perhaps someone can clearly spell that out? It seems to be more of a semantics argument.
In other words, what Gilson wants to argue seems to be that MN should not be used to infer metaphysical naturalism, but he is couching his argument in the wrong terms.
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I think his issue with MN is semantics rather than anything else.
Naturalism is belief that there is nothing but nature, so Gilson seems to believe that if scientists work with MN than every single one of them believes in the same thing.
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It was a REALLY BIG cup of coffee … 
I think you are using “immaterial” in a strange way. Math is axiomatic, systematic, we derive it from nature and the most fundamental assumptions we can have. It is not spiritual, mystical, magical, supernatural or unknowable. I am a statistician, the very discipline which interprets data in science. We apply the scientific method with mathematical rigor to yield material interpretations.
Likewise, science is derived from first principles. We could, if we were very persistent (and very well funded), retrace the steps of scientific discovery all the way back to these first principles. Reality being real is one of those first principles, but we hardly ever encounter unreal things, so it’s rarely a problem.
That is not to say there is no human error influencing science, there is plenty, but that too is quite material.
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Yeah, rereading the article, I think you are correct in this. Gilson seems to be saying that it doesn’t really matter (outside of the ‘practically’ better metaphysical foundation of MT). But then I ask, to what end?
I assume the intended lay audience would not see the issue as merely semantic. MN is constitutive of philosophical naturalism/materialism and must not be conceded if you are a Christian practicing science. This is the position of Philip Johnson to Alvin Plantinga. Yet, many Christians that practice science, historical and contemporary (including many on this site), disagree. Why?
For the more historically inclined on this site, e.g., @jongarvey @Eddie, what was the debate like while something akin to MN was coming online in the 16/17/18th centuries? Was there a debate? I know that Bacon made much of pushing “final cause” out of scientific explanation on grounds related to MN. Did people push back on the MN, or was push back not needed due to the common Christian background assumptions of the day?
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MN preexists the Copernican Revolution in the division between Natural Philosophy and Theology. Theologians could do Natural Philosophy. Natural Philosophers could not do Theology. That is the roots of MN.
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