I'd like to start with a quote. This is from the Discovery Institute's response to the
leaking of the Wedge Document, which revealed their agenda to overthrow "materialism" and
replace it with a "broadly theistic understanding of nature".
"Far from attacking science (as has been claimed) we are instead challenging scientific materialism
-- the simplistic philosophy or world-view that claims that all of reality can be reduced
to, or derived from, matter and energy alone. We believe that this is a defense of sound
science."
They provide their own definition of "scientific materialism": "the simplistic philosophy...
that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone." They
say this is bad science. There are some subtle differences between materialism and naturalism
that they seem to be confusing. Materialism is a statement about what exists, but by adding
the phrase scientific, which is a process of acquiring knowledge, they've changed the
meaning to a question of what answers science should be considering.
What they're actually attacking is scientific, or as its more usually called; methodological,
naturalism. I'd like to take a minute to explain what that phrase means, to contrast it to
philosophical naturalism, and at the end I have a challenge for anyone who agrees with
the Discovery Institute that it's not sound science.
So what is methodological naturalism?
In defining it, it's important to differentiate between philosophical naturalism and methodological
naturalism. Philosophical naturalism is the positive assertion that nothing exists outside
the natural world. This is an ontological position, that is, it deals with the nature
of reality and our ability to perceive it. Many atheists are philosophical naturalists,
and the only religious belief system I can think of that would be compatible with philosophical
naturalism would be a sort of loose pantheism, worship of nature itself, personifying the
universe. This is because naturalism would preclude the possibility of the supernatural
that is an integral part of most religions.
In contrast to philosophical naturalism, methodological naturalism is not a statement of ontology,
but epistemology. That is, it does not deal with ultimate truth, but merely our perception
of the world, how we can know what we know. One can be a deeply religious person and employ
methodological naturalism. It simply requires that we acknowledge that the supernatural
is invisible to us, that we are unable to perceive, test or interact with it. This is
compatible with most, but not all, religious belief.
Why should we even adopt such a view?
It's not because of some great point of logic. It's actually just a practical guideline,
based on our experience. There has never been a natural phenomenon that has been best explained
by supernatural forces. If, at any point, we discover positive evidence for a supernatural
force, methodological naturalism will be abandoned in favor of methodological supernaturalism.
But the history of science is essentially a history of overthrowing supernatural explanations,
showing them to be better explained by natural forces. We've discovered that disease is not
divinely inspired, that the motions of the planets are not divinely regulated, and that
the soul fleeing a body does not register on a gravimetric scale. Every instance where
we ascribed something to demons or angels, magic or fairies has turned out to have a
more profound natural explanation. So far, I can't think of any supernatural explanations
that have shown positive evidence of being true.
Now there's a dangerous problem here, and this is something the philosopher of science,
Karl Popper wrote about. The problem is induction. There's a danger that we rely on our past
experiences as a guide to the future. Just because we have never observed something doesn't
mean it doesn't exist. For this reason, Popper suggested falsifiability as the standard for
theories. It was a way to bypass the negative argument from induction. No explanation that
invokes a supernatural force, such as intelligent design creationism, could be falsifiable so
long as the supernatural remains invisible and undetectable, so you can see why it's
so important that they not accept this fact. It takes only a cursory glance at their literature
to see what the true agenda is: they want God to be part of the science curriculum.
Despite their protestations, they really want the direct intervention of supernatural beings
to be taught alongside the existing scientific explanations.
By contrast, modern evolutionary theory does not require supernatural forces, and each
of its predictions can be tested and replicated. It can be mathematically modeled, and simulations
in computers can approximate the actual outcomes quite well using only observed, natural forces
in the models. The positive assertions of evolutionary theory can be falsified, so it's
easy to say that evolution is scientific, and intelligent design creationism isn't.
This leads me to my challenge. This is not a challenge specifically for the Discovery
Institute, but for anyone who, like them, opposes the use of scientific naturalism.
You're welcome to email them about this challenge, to see if they have a response.
Here's the challenge: Can you cite an instance where the supernatural
proved to be the superior explanation to the natural, for a phenomenon in the natural world?
I'm looking for a case where the empirical evidence showed a supernatural explanation
to be the best match to the evidence? This is what they're saying is the case for intelligent
design creationism, surely there is a historical precedent for their belief that scientific
materialism is a defunct approach.
I'd like clear documentation and some well-published data on such a case. I won't limit it to cases
where a god or goddess was invoked. Psychic or afterlife explanations are also acceptable,
so long as they had no materialistic explanation.
I suspect no example will be advanced, because there has never been a time when a supernatural
explanation, like ID creationism, was found to be superior to a naturalistic, or materialistic
explanation. I recognize that this is again the inductive problem, that just because magic
has never worked before as an explanation doesn't mean it won't work just this once,
but does it really make sense to overthrow scientific materialism when it's the only
conceptual framework that seems to have produced the slightest advantage in our study of the
natural world?