Welcome to Terrell Clemmons: Questions on Methodological Naturalism

SOME theists. Others think it is deeply flawed.

2 Likes

I didn’t say it was an atheist plot. I said I would not categorize it as a worldview. It defines boundaries for integrating (or not integrating) ideas derived from science and ideas derived from religion, and theists take different positions on how they integrate (or don’t integrate) ideas derived from the two different realms.

I also said don’t see how NOMA even applies to people who don’t have any beliefs derived from religion.

Is there anything in there that you object to?

Hmm, I’m not sure if that’s exactly what Scripture tells us. Scripture makes no mention of the academic disciplines of cosmology and biology. I think it could be better to say that Scripture talks about one being able to “see” something of God through his creation, but I think it’s a stretch to say that Scripture talks about cosmology and biology specifically.

2 Likes

He is far more representative of Christianity than you are.

Archaeologists and anthropologists deal with design questions all the time. So do police detectives, who do a lot of science.

2 Likes

There seems to be a strong distinction between NOMA as Gould articulated it, and how it came to be understood. I don’t know the history of how Gould’s articulation was missed, but I do know that perception is that NOMA meant something different than what these quotes show.

@terrellclemmons, what do I believe about this? I follow CS Lewis in Is Theology Poetry? Science is a dream, but theology is the waking world.

3 Likes

And none of them have done much of anything in science since getting those PhDs.

For successful academics, A PhD is just a waypoint, not an endpoint or ultimate credential. Dissertations are rarely treated as important contributions to academic disciplines.

The real measure of expertise is what one accomplishes after the PhD.

3 Likes

But from what I’ve seen over and over is that it’s not the question that scientists take issue with, it’s a (perceived) lack of a way to adjudicate the question in the “court” of science that is the problem. You have to have testable/falsifiable, repeatable, empirical, well-formed predictions or hypotheses for science to be able to say “yep, that’s right” or “nope, turns out that’s wrong”. I wouldn’t say this is exclusively an ID problem, but I think it’s what many mainstream scientist may see as a fatal flaw of ID.

1 Like

I studied NOMA (and specifically Gould’s Rock of Ages) a bit in my undergraduate History & Philosophy of Science course as an undergrad. I think it’s true that he often comes across more like a Michael Ruse where he’s not personally a believer but isn’t threatened by them as long as they “play nice”. I felt he was trying to say “no, Christians can be scientists too, and here’s a way to think about the separation of authority between science and faith that allows both sides to co-exist”.

The Devil’s in the details of course and the problem becomes that to create this happy truce NOMA tries to make a pretty hard wall between the magesteria, and many people like to move the wall around depending on what they’re trying to defend or who they’re trying to exclude or to just pretend it doesn’t exist. I think it can be a pretty useful idea generally, but maybe only very generally.

5 Likes

That has to be a metaphor… My doctoral adviser never would have said: “You don’t get enough sleep”. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

2 Likes

The word ‘algebra’ need not be seen nor mentioned in a class or a book on the subject to teach it, not unlike the biblical doctrine of the Trinity. :slightly_smiling_face:

Psalm 19:1 is pretty specific: Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

It applies in the same way exact way.

The concepts really go back to Hume’s Is/Ought problem, and the related Naturalistic fallacy. Each of us has our own sense of morality, and it isn’t defined by what is but by how we want the world to be. We also don’t define what is moral by what is natural. Just because something is natural does not mean it is good, or bad for that matter. I would even argue that our morality is subjective while science is objective.

Trying to get back to the topic, science can only tell us how the objective universe operates. It can’t tell us how we should treat each other, or anything about human rights. I believe that this is because morality is subjective which means science has no way of addressing it.

I meant to imply that in my post, but I appreciate the clarification.

2 Likes

That is the case sometimes. I think that is the complaint that T. aquaticus has, for example. I don’t reject your point. However…

I lost count of the number of times that TE evangelicals on BioLogos or in ASA forums said things like (I paraphrase): “Science deals with the factual side of nature, whereas questions of purpose, meaning, and value belong to theology or philosophy, so design inferences can’t be scientific, but only philosophical or theological stances taken toward nature.” If we were on BioLogos, five years ago, I could point to examples of this probably at least once a week; it was a kind of standard response TE response to ID claims. Another version of it was: "We can see design in nature, but only through “the eyes of faith” " – which meant that design was not an objective property of any natural object or system, observable or measurable with devices (like mass, crystalline structure, electrostatic charge, etc.), but only a subjective gloss on the phenomena, which an atheist would not apply, but which a Christian would. Scientists, when speaking as scientists, were not allowed to speak about “design” in physical, chemical, or biological systems or entities. They could do so only when they took off their scientist’s hat, and said that they were speaking just as a Christian, or just as a person, etc.

Do you see the point? The point was not specifically about methods of testing, etc. A “demarcation criterion” (or more than one) was being applied, to ensure that all design inferences were necessarily outside of science. That is very different from saying that so far design inferences have not provided adequate means for testing themselves. It is one thing to say that so far design arguments have not met the standards required, and other to say that in principle design arguments never could meet the standards, due to a strict and inflexible demarcation between science and faith, or science and theology, or whatever.

The TE argument to which I’m referring is that it’s wrong ever to look for evidence in design in the context of science, that all of ID is based on a huge category error. And Gould-like notions are called in by some TEs to justify this rejection. I’m not blaming Gould for that.

Of course, there is another wrinkle in this: TEs are not consistent on this point. Many of them will say that design arguments, in principle, don’t belong to science, but to theology or philosophy, which, one would think, would cause them to stop responding to ID arguments. But in fact, they respond to ID arguments all the time. They call them “bad science,” and try to show the scientific errors, as if, if those errors were not present, ID could be “good science.” But it’s inconsistent to say that ID arguments are “bad science” when one believes that in principle they aren’t science at all, and couldn’t ever be. And it’s also a waste of time; if ID arguments couldn’t possibly be scientific, then they couldn’t be either good or bad science, so why invest even a minute responding to them at all? So there is very muddy thinking when some TE leaders take both lines against ID simultaneously.

Anyhow, it is this line of argument among TE/EC leaders that rankles me, not the line of argument you are talking about.

I totally agree with that. Even Gould thought of NOMA as a generality, and recognized the hazy border between them.

2 Likes

I believe there is forensic evidence of the Perpetrator, and especially of a primary M.O. :slightly_smiling_face:

I agree! Unfortunately, those TEs who take a NOMA-like stand tend to treat the border as non-hazy, and the distinction between truths of science and truths of faith as obvious and easy. They will often quote or paraphrase Galileo: “religion teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”, as if there is no fuzzy borderland at all, and the object of each study is rigidly separated. Of course, that serves their agenda, but it’s not Gould.

And of course, it’s not clear that “design” automatically belongs in the realm of “purpose, values, and meaning” and has no bearing at all on “the way nature is.” It’s that methodological sleight-of-hand that I’m objecting to.

2 Likes

Scientists can speak about design with their scientist hat on if they want. The problem is that those claims will then be held to the standards of science, and ID hasn’t done particularly well in that arena. Thus far, design hasn’t gone beyond the subjective “it looks designed” stage. To use an analogy, you can’t complain about being discriminated against in major league baseball if you can’t throw, field, or hit.

I have run into a more nuanced version of that argument. The TE’s I have read claim that God is working through the laws of nature, so any design that may be happening is not detectable by science. That is why they balk at the idea of using science to detect God’s actions.

1 Like

If you’re doing science and not belief, you should be able to come up with a hypothesis and empirical predictions from it, as detectives do when questioning suspects.

Yes, they use that argument, too. But in employing it, they tend to downplay the possibility that God may work sometimes through the laws of nature, and sometimes not. Or rather, they freely grant that God works outside of the laws of nature in the Biblical miracles, but strongly resist the idea that God ever worked outside of the laws of nature in creation. But the ease with which they say, “I believe a man rose from the dead” doesn’t seem to fit with their ultra-skepticism when anyone suggests that God created anything by violating any natural laws. They take their scientist’s hat off with alacrity when affirming some stuff about Jesus, but not when talking about unobservable things that happened billions of years ago. They are almost certain God didn’t violate any natural laws back then. A curious division, in my view, and one whose explanation is more likely to be found in the psychology of these believers, than in any consistent philosophical view about natural causes, scientific methodology, etc.