Well, I’m trying to make myself clear, but I don’t seem to be making too much progress. I do agree that outside of science there’s no problem. What I don’t understand is how it can be said that something is true in the context of science and false outside. That seems to be a contradiction to me.
Anyhow, allow me to repost something I posted yesterday that might help to clear things up as to what my concerns are.
I’m not sure, but to me methodological naturalism seems to be based on the premise that only natural causes are possible. So as I see it, what ends up happening is that scientists are forced, it seems either willingly or unwillingly, to make statements to the effect that either “we don’t know,”, or we haven’t yet found a natural explanation, but we expect to eventually. They are not allowed, I contend unjustifiably, to say that there’s also a possibility that it may be a cause outside of the natural realm even if it’s a reasonable and truthful statement to make.
I think this gives a false impression to the public in general, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that God is not an option, which to me whether intentional or unintentional is wrong at best and deceitful at worst. And it seems to me a case can be made that the media, and naturalistic scientists and academics exploit this to convince especially young people that God is “unscientific” with the connotation being it is just foolishness.
I understand the underlying principle of making an extensive search for natural causes, but at the same time this shouldn’t be to the point of going beyond the reasonable to what, I would say, is obviously way beyond those bounds. But I believe this is what happens when the underlying assumption of MN, that there are no other causes but natural causes, is adhered to.
So I see that it’s not only misleading to the public, but leads scientists to more or less waste countless hours of manpower and funding on chasing after pretty far fetched ideas when they could be focusing on more concrete ideas that will be beneficial to society. If it wasn’t for those downsides I frankly wouldn’t be bothered about it.