Welcome to Terrell Clemmons: Questions on Methodological Naturalism

Yes, biblical Christianity does make this claim.

(No offense taken, by the way.)

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More emphasis on the latter, though:
“…neither will they be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead.” Luke 16:31 Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'"

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Gould thought Pope Pius XII used NOMA, and I’m pretty sure the Pope is a theist.

I agree with Gould on this one as well:

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Fair enough. So, if I’m understanding you correctly, you identify as atheist because you don’t believe in any deities, and you perceive the world according to a more-or-less materialististic paradigm and live in a practical way as if materialism is true because you haven’t seen any evidence for non material reality, but you don’t go so far as to make the claim that only material reality exists and you’re open to the possibility that there might be evidence for some kind of non-material reality.

Is that a fair summation? (I’m not trying to offend, just trying to understand where you’re coming from based on what you’ve said.)

Does whether or not the Pope subscribes to NOMA have any bearing on what I said about it?

I think that is fair. Another way of putting it is that I am a pragmatic materialist. If there is a non-material realm I haven’t seen any evidence of it, and I live my life as if the material world is all that exists. At the same time, I don’t hold any absolute beliefs about the non-existence of the non-material or the non-existence of deities (that’s a lot of non’s).

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Even if that’s how Gould intended the notion, that is not always how it gets used. For many TE/EC folks, the idea that design questions lie outside of science is not merely descriptive (scientists today by habit don’t deal with design questions) but prescriptive (scientists must never deal with design questions, or they are betraying both science and religion by mixing the two).

The prescriptive use of the NOMA idea (even if it is euphemistically called something other than NOMA by TE/EC folks, e.g., by talking about MN versus PN in a way that amounts to conceding non-overlapping magisteria) amounts to this: If any Christian scientist like Behe ever dares to suggest that there is evidence in nature for design, he rightfully deserves to have his hands slapped by more “enlightened” Christian scientists like Ken Miller and Francis Collins, who in their profound grasp of epistemology (which they apparently have despite never having taken any courses in philosophy, not even philosophy of science) that scientists cannot and should not investigate such questions. It is this epistemological arrogance, coming from bench scientists without a clue regarding either philosophy or theology, and without any deep knowledge even the history of science itself, which rubs ID people the wrong way.

Steve Meyer has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge; Paul Nelson has a Ph.D. in philosophy of biology from Chicago; Jonathan Wells has a Ph.D. in developmental biology plus another Ph.D. in Religion from Yale, with a doctoral dissertation specifically on Darwinian thought and its relationship to theology. These are top universities, and these are graduate degrees in material related to the interface of philosophy, science, and theology. It gets a bit much when people who have spent their whole academic lives, from first year undergrad on, doing nothing but specialized sciences (people like Falk, Miller, Haarsma, Applegate, Denis Alexander, etc.) lecture people like Nelson, Wells, and Meyer on demarcation criteria regarding science and religion, and deciding that “design” belongs in the bin with “purpose, meaning, and value” rather than the bin which investigates nature empirically.

I’m not blaming Gould for the use that lesser minds make of his formulation, just airing a beef. :slight_smile:

I think it is interesting that theists arrive at NOMA all on their own. This indicates to me that NOMA isn’t some atheist plot.

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SOME theists. Others think it is deeply flawed.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.