There’s nothing wrong with any scientist proceeding on a hunch that a natural explanation of something can be found, and trying to find it.
My remarks were not meant to discourage any investigation of any kind, not even investigations into origins.
I was merely pointing out how certain verbal formulations can (perhaps unintentionally) slide from merely “methodological” naturalism to metaphysical naturalism.
Would it help if instead of an example regarding origins, I used an example from the Gospels?
Suppose someone wrote:
“Science does not yet know how Jesus rose from the dead.”
or
“Science cannot yet explain how Jesus walked on the water.”
The implicit assumption in the “yet” is that science will one day be able to give a natural-cause explanation for these things. But what if they did not have a natural cause? In that case, science wouldn’t have any hope of explaining them. So how can we justify adding the word “yet”?
If the “yet” is given its full force, the person making such statements is implying that these events had fully natural causes, i.e., did not involve any breaking of natural laws or supernatural disruption of the normal causal nexus.
This, to me, would go beyond mere methodological naturalism, into philosophical naturalism. It would be implying that all events, including those traditionally believed to have supernatural causes, have natural explanations; it would be implying that the universe is a causally closed natural system.
(Of course, if you want to say that the writer in the above examples is just being a bit sloppy or careless, and doesn’t mean “yet” with such strictness, then the conclusion can be avoided, but I don’t think it’s always the case that people are being sloppy.)
In any case, even if you don’t think that examples involving “yet” are good ones, I assume you would grant that some people who write about these issues do tend to slide from MN to PN.
I’m sure you’ve heard statements from time to time such as “Science has proved there are no miracles” – which could only be true if the methods of science could reveal all possible knowledge of the world, which itself could only be true if the natural realm covered all of reality without exception. That would be philosophical naturalism. (On the other hand, “I suspect that the action of the magnet is not a divine miracle, but follows regular laws, and I am going to try to find out those laws” would not commit one to philosophical naturalism.)