Not quite. Remember that science only became secular in the second half of the nineteenth century, and theistic science didn’t hinder the discoveries of Bacon, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Wallace - even Newton himself. They knew that believing God causes regularities as well as contingencies doesn’t stop one investigating the relationships between the regularities at all.
I cited the the same definition from Sean Carroll, but since he’s Evo-devo he didn’t count any more than the philosopher!
Whoever does it, the definition of science is a philosophical, not a scientific question… which takes us back to how those narrowly educated without philosophy wil do a decent job of it.
Over at BioLogos the very question of the definition of evolution came up. A working scientist liked one that, he acknowledged, wouldn’t cover some of evolutionary biology (so it was definition of something else, or not a definition at all), but thought it good enough to weed out pseudoscientists visiting the forum… making the so-called definition subject to the whim of (in this case) a few self-appointed arbiters on a website.
But the idea of autonomy amongst scientists isn’t quite as pure as you’d think - when I was in medicine, its parameters were as much decided on political and economic grounds as anything - because the government paid the bill. Not as rational as a philosopher of science doing it on logical grounds, I think.
That’s just one model which has been given a new lease of life by things like quantum theory. It appeals to me because Descartes’ removal of final causes from biology no longer rings true to me, and because information has become a key idea, and relates to formal causation.
Yet as I posted briefly at BioLogos today (and have a blog post in hand) the very foundation for modern science was a theology of nature, as one can read in history of science texts. Laws of nature, the perspicacity and intelligibility of the universe, the need for empirical study because of contingency, the non-agency of matter… all those assumptions were based on early modern theological choices, often in direct opposition to the existing, scholastic theology of nature.
Another factor is that as soon as you say “evolutionary creation”, you’re speaking about divine action of some sort, and had better have some rational basis for the term unless it’s just a slogan.