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.
