I don’t think anyone is making the argument that a person has to believe in naturalism as a world view to practise science.
It’s more a question of the metaphysical basis for MN. And whether the method can exist without any metaphysical foundation.
In other words, what kind of world would MN be the most successful in uncovering…
And what aspects of the world are highlighted in any description based on MN.
Its obvious to me that MN on its own introduces a bias towards natural explanations for phenomenon.
I don’t think that makes it unfit for scientific use. However, I do think the bias is real.
There is no metaphysical basis for MN. There is an epistemological basis for it in Christian theology. And a sociological basis for it in both modern science and the origin of modern science.
And, to be clear, many people do make that case, that I am effectively an atheist (in their mind) for affirming MN.
I find this very hard to swallow. Please show me how the bias traces specifically to MN, and not (for example) atheism? You are mistaking correlation with causation.
Funny, I’ve just been there myself. Last year I took my freshmen science seminar students through McGrath’s new book Enriching our Vision of Reality . He discusses critical realism a bit and introduced me to T.F. Torrance, who I spent the summer reading.
Does McGrath give a nice descriptive definition of the term that you could quote? My experience with the term comes from Karl Popper’s two volume set entitled, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). The term was never picked up in philosophical circles, but became something of a standard in certain theological contexts.
Sorry I’m in the Transatlantic late squad again on this.
I’m still not sure how this is not a metaphysical commitment - and a very strong one, in the sense of being weak scientism at heart.
If you are saying we know Christ best through scientific investigation of his empirical claims in the world, I say it’s a profound error. That’s not to say that those claims are unimportant - Christ encompasses all our epistemological “routes”, but the heart of knowledge of Christ is the conviction that comes by faith: we meet Christ, and are united to him in some entirely non-physical way that the heart understands, but logic struggles to explain.
On lesser matters too that matters - my trust in the Bible came, suddenly and dramatically, through a spiritual experience several years after the logical conclusion that it recorded reliable facts about the Lord I’d trusted in, etc. Love is the greatest epistemological “tool”, it seems to me, and naturalism cuts right across that.
The number of examples of naturalism’s imposing its “invisible” metaphysics on reality are legion, not least in seeking for natural explanations for religious conviction.
Yes, but one can’t claim in the same breath that a naturalistic, scientific approach is the most reliable epistemology, AND that the best approach is communal, relation etc.
Unless one wants to say that the best approach to knowing Christ, grasping the Incarnation or the Trinity, appreciating the communal nature of moral accountability, reckoning with the Powers and Prinicipalities of this world, interpreting mythic language, comprehending the prophetic word, etc are best accomplished by methodological naturalism, then one has to be drawing very clear boundaries around what (limited) part of human knowledge is best approached naturalistically.
Slightly tangential to that, but relevant, is that throughout human history a more relational, perhaps gestalt way of knowing the world has been far, far more important than anything we might now call “naturalism.” I’ve been discovering that over these last years in grasping how to the Bible writers, the temple function of creation is the core reality, rather than being a “secondary level” way of talking about the physical “reality.”
C S Lewis knew that too of course, as in the explanation by the star to scientistic Eustace, who said that in his world a star is a ball of burning gas: "Even in your world that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.
My emphasis is always going to be on what drives the metaphysics. What I like about the naturalistic approach is that it attempts to bracket as much of the metaphysics as possible. Another way to think about it in my own case is that I remain highly skeptical of metaphysics, even eloquent systems such as Thomism.
Of course. Faith is passively received. One does not need argument to come to Jesus – He calls and we respond.
And other supernatural systems have done great damage to Christianity (e.g., Thomism and the Reformation).
I’m not one to banish metaphysics, I think we need to be very careful with it as it can often run afoul of idolatry theologically and dogmatism philosophically.
In the state of nature, it is the best thing we have going for us. It is highly inaccurate in its ability to draw ultimate conclusions. Never-the-less, I would argue, it is the way that humans operate in the world.
But here is the switch. Our understanding of these comes through reading religious/philosophical/mythic texts. We actually read them “naturally” (this is a broadening of the term natural). I came to understand Biblical truths because I studied the Scriptures. Yes, I learned that the Holy Spirit was doing things, but I only learned about that in a natural way. I read off metaphysical truths about reality as I study Scripture, I believe them according to the work of Holy Spirit (in some sense naturally, because the HS is interacting with my natural faculties). However, the application of, what I’ll call “Revealed Metaphysics” to the world at large is insanely difficult. The possibilities are legion and often dangerous to theology as I stated but did not explain in my reference to the Reformation and Scholasticism of the 16th century.
This misses the point. Many people read scriptures and come away with responses ranging from faith to utter contempt. The key differentiator is Grace through the holy Spirit. Unless you believe that those who respond with faith after reading scripture are somehow better endowed in their “natural” capabilities than those who reject the message. What’s going on cannot be explained purely or completely in natural terms…
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swamidass
(S. Joshua Swamidass)
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That isn’t how I view methodological naturalism. If God acts in a way that affects nature then God is part of nature, by definition. Therefore, God can be included within methodological naturalism if God interacts with nature in an empirically detectable and testable fashion.
I agree. Science is a tool for figuring out how nature works when there is empirically testable evidence that is relevant to the question. Truth, with a capital T, is not something science is capable of determining. Science is tentative and defined by methodology. Science does not make ontological claims nor does it claim to have infallible truths.
You could certainly fashion experiments that test for the effects your family and friends have on the natural world.
Not as good of a definition as I’d like but here’s the most relevant quote:
In 1998, I discovered the form of ‘critical realism’ developed by the philosopher and social scientist Roy Bhaskar (1944-2014) and realized that this could provide a conceptual tool that affirmed the fundamental unity of the universe, while recognizing that it possesses different levels, each demanding a form of engagement determined by the distinctive character of the are of reality under investigation. This form of critical realism insist that the world must be regarded as differentiated and stratified. Each individual science deal with a different stratum of this reality, which in turn obliges it to develop and use methods of investigation adapted and appropriate to this stratum. For Bhaskar, the ‘nature of the object’ determines the ‘form of its possible science’. Scientism can thus be seen as a refusal to recognize that the universe is ‘stratified and differentiated’, so that a research method developed for one specific level or task is improperly declared to have universal applicability. (pg. 18)
In a later section on T. F. Torrance he writes:
Torrance argues that theology and the sciences share a common commitment to a realist epistemology, to which they respond in a manner appropriate to the nature of the reality. The precise nature of this approach cannot be set out in advance - and here Torrance’s implicit critique of the universalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment will be clear - but is determined by the engagement itself. (pg 53)
If we take “methodical naturalism” in an opposition to “scholastic metaphysics”, then at least some scientists - those who have made crucial discoveries - have stated the advantages of the latter over the limitations of the former.
That is a great article and definitely makes me want to read the book. However, I am not arguing for a materialistic metaphysics. My claim, that I think naturalists tend to keep in mind more carefully than theologians and philosophers, is that all metaphysics is suspect. It may be that quantum theory plays well with an Aristotelian metaphysics, until it doesn’t anymore. Big Bang Cosmology plays really well with a Christian/theistic metaphysics, until it does not anymore. Metaphysical systems must NOT be given a life of their own to manage/dictate/control the “naturalistic” work being done.
If I’m reading your article correctly, Heisenberg realized Aristotle works better after the physical discoveries were made. He still played by the rules of MN and realized afterward that the world is more bizarre than we first thought. Metaphysics, in my opinion, has a tendency to sanitize the oddness of the world, even as it often presents strange conundrums of its own. Our models, metaphysical or epistemological, are not reality.
But you appear to pass over the fact that Heisenberg invoked Aristotelian categories because naturalism’s methods and categories had already run out of the concepts necessary to go beyond classical physics. It had been pushed to its limits and its metaphysical assumptions found metaphysically wanting.