Mark,
I love science. I’m a member of the Society for Developmental Biology, and the International Society for Computational Biology, and have presented posters at the annual meetings of both, as well as at meetings such as Evolution Evolving (April 2019), held at Churchill College, Cambridge. Here’s a pdf of the poster Change Tan (U of Missouri) and I presented at that UK meeting:
enigmaessentialorfans032619.pdf (790.3 KB)
But science and MN are not the same thing. Science was underway for centuries before MN was widely adopted in the late 19th century, largely in the wake of the Darwinian Revolution. MN rules out intelligent causation, if that means causation via a mind irreducible to physics. Since such causation is an empirical possibility, MN prejudges reality, irrespective of the evidence. Bad news for the pursuit of truth.
As a consequence, MN disqualifies ID as a scientific project before the evidence has a chance to speak for itself. Even if I were not a theist, I would reject MN for that reason. Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, one of my favorite atheists (no joke – I listen to his podcasts every week), expressed the failure of MN this way, in terms that I can’t possibly improve on:
Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be – natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.
(S. Carroll, The Big Picture [New York: Dutton, 2016], p. 133)
I don’t want reality cut up by MN into bite-sized pieces for me, like a ribeye steak for a five-year old who is still learning to handle a fork. You shouldn’t either.