Methodological Naturalism

Over a quite lunch today at Diethnes restaurant in Sydney (always a haunt when I'm in that city) I was reading an old review by Willem Drees in Zygon  (the journal, not the Dr Who characters) of Philip Clayton's "God and Contemporary Science". Although only a review, anything by Drees is worth reading, and this article was no exception. Plenty to think over, despite my being at odds with him over many of his views (that's like a gnat being at odds with an elephant over real estate, I know) but one thing caught my attention.

He mentioned the reliance of science on 'methodological naturalism'. This wasn't the main thrust of the review, and its a common enough claim in both philosophy and theology of science, but I wonder if it really holds the water claimed for it.

It sets out to eliminate reference to non-natural, or non-physical/material entities in explanations of relations in the material world. At one level this is unremarkable, as the project of science (knowledge of the material world) is that very thing. The phrase adds nothing particular to the understanding of the mission: the mission of science is to understand the  material world and to do this it seeks to understand the material world in terms of the material world. Gets us nowhere special!

However, it is more frequently extended to imply a certain ontological twinning, that is, that methodological naturalism works because naturalism is the only game in town. This view also tends to misconstrue general Christian understanding of the relation of God and his creation and the specific views of biblical creationists.

In setting its charter, MN has to refer to other than the naturalism that it seeks to rely upon; for instance, it holds that minds can have real knowledge about entities outside those minds, and that there are other minds that are interested in that knowledge; it also has to make reference to a framework of what knowledge is and how reliably it can be garnered by minds and through the senses. The reliability of its mission is not entailed in MN, but stands above it.

Moreover, MN is set within a frame of reference which is not, I think, naturalistic, but Christian-theistic; and inescapably so. That is because modern naturalism, and its pal practical atheism, is, in fact, a Christian heresy in my view. It, too, has its roots in the Christian world concept; despite protestations to the contrary and its evoking of the idea of an independent reality in the very term 'natural', when it really operates as 'methodological creationism'. By this I mean, its approach to the creation (the universe) as a place that operates with regularity, and in its own terms, at least at the level of our investigation, is an approach that derives, not from an atheistic/naturalist frame of reference, but from a Christian-theist one. This is not mere opinion, but a factuality of the history of modern science.

A pure naturalist position would have to contend with un-grounded randomness where anything can happen; but this would cripple scientific enquiry and put us back in the pagan nonsense of arbitrary gods doing all sorts of things for no sort of reason. Nor do we actually do science this way; we look for systematic relations and put aside any notion of the arbitrary as well as relying on all sorts of elements of methodological creationsim. This is not to say that non-material entities can be relied upon in materialist relations, but that our equipment for understanding, and the very systematic nature of the relations reaches to something beyond the material; otherwise we would have no hope of any worthwhile explanation of the material world if the only categories we had were within the material world.

Alvin Plantinga touches on this in his essays on Methodological Naturalism, although he goes in a different direction to mine.

God could have....

Occasionally I run into someone, or hear of someone (usually someone else, as it happens) who claims that God 'could have used evolution', or 'could have used long periods of time to do his creating'. They usually advertise these claims with the smug triumphalism that such speculation proves some point. I don't know what that point could be, of course, because there is no point at all made by idle speculation.

One may as well claim that God could stand on his head!

Lita Costner in a recent article in Creation magazine starts with quoting this sort of vain claim; to rebut it, of course; but I think that her rebuttal could go further.

The theological point that she makes is appropriate, with the implications for the very goodness of the creation being imperiled by the contradictory (you could say incoherent) presence of the last enemy in its basic makeup, but there are other considerations that bear on the question, in my view.

God's revelation is not only a representation of what he has done, but, because God is a unified being (but not a unity, being in three persons), that is, there is no separation of who he is, what he wills or thinks and what he does, as there is with us, his revelation is also a representation of him, when it addresses his acts or relationships.

So, to claim that God could act slowly through error-prone chance processes to produce something that is purpose rich on many levels seems absurd at best; but given that the revelation is all the other way: the creation occurred quickly in direct response to his will, and this as part of God's claim on our worship, representation of him who is love, it is more than absurd. One could say it refers to another god, if it makes any god-reference at all.

Could God have created over billions of years? Which 'god' in which 'world' would that be that you are referring to, now? Our God, who represents himself as his revelation sets out? I think not. He explains his relationship to his creation in completely different terms, predicated on fellowship, not distance.

The damage this does goes beyond events in the world, to the way the world is structured. There is an at least implicit ontology in the creation account; it tells us a lot about reality, how it is structured, and the concreteness with which it 'operates'. To set this aside evaporates the Bible's ontology that comes out of the structures in the creation account, and must invoke an alternative; but this time, not implicitly. The alternative has to be developed explicitly as it denies there is one from the will of God, as it denies that the creation account has concrete content that makes sense in the categories of this world: the world it relates to by referring to its categories, and therefore has no ontological content. Yet any alternative ends up conjuring up a different god and falls into idolatry by proposing a different kind of reality, from an ontology that is structured on other than the God who is, and who speaks.