Naturalism gets associated with science because natural explanations have such a good track record for explaining observed phenomena. To date, natural explanations have been determined for very, very many previously unknown areas, and supernatural explanations have been determined for none. When exploring another unknown area, the possibility of a natural explanation is the way to bet. Researchers bet that way routinely, and as a result the human race has benefitted with incredible advances in medicine, agriculture, electronics, materials science, and more. Supernatural explanations, on the other hand, have led nowhere.
Indeed, many supernatural explanations are rejected not because they are supernatural but because they cannot or do not lead anywhere. It is possible to come up with any number of possible explanations for anything -- lost socks could be caused by extradimensional vortices which our observations prevent from forming; hiccups could be caused by evil spirits inside us trying to escape; stock market fluctuations could be caused by the secret manipulations of powerful extraterrestrials. Scientists reject such claims on the grounds of parsimony. All of those claims are possible, but they require adding complicated entities which there is no adequate evidence for. To make matters worse, the nature of those entities effectively prevents investigation of them, and the impossibility of investigation prevents us from learning anything new about them. We cannot conclude that any of those explanations are wrong. But from a scientific standpoint, they are worse than wrong; they are useless.
1. Methodological naturalism leaves no room for appeals to the supernatural.
2. Science must follow the procedures of methodological naturalism to accomplish its aims.
Hence, the consensus seems to be that there is not, and cannot be (even in principle), any overlap between science and the supernatural.
To criticize the concept of MN is to criticize science itself. Through MN, material mechanisms have been discovered for natural phenomena. The conclusion to be drawn is that MN and science will continue to be useful in doing so. Therefore, naturalism-of-the-gaps is a valid assumption, since it is the only thing that has succeeded in increasing our understanding of the physical universe.
A supernaturalistic methodology, of course, need not rely upon a non-empirical means of discovery of phenomena, as long as it assigns on average a
higher prima facie probability to supernaturalistic explanations than it does to naturalistic ones. The methodological naturalist may object to this type of methodology on grounds that, in tending to seize upon supernatural forces and entities, the methodological supernaturalist is likely to posit far more entities in the universe than actually exist. This objection, however, only holds force if there is already good reason to believe that the universe is naturalistic - the methodological supernaturalist may just as easily say that the methodological naturalist, in lending too little prima facie possibility to the existence of supernatural forces and entities, will end up positing far fewer entities in the universe than actually exist. And it cannot be the case that the hypothesis that accounts for observations with fewer entities is always the more parsimonious one, otherwise naturalists should be far more hospitable to the suggestion by Wheeler and Feynman that there may be only one electron in the universe, which appears to be many because it zig-zags back and forth through time as well as space. A more pressing worry is whether such a supernaturalistic methodology would be a "science stopper"; say, for instance, some methodological supernaturalist appeals to the psychic powers of invisible dwarves as an explanation for why various atoms stick together - wouldn't this prevent any progress in chemistry from every being made, because it buries all interesting phenomena under the first stupid hypothesis one dreams up of? Not necessarily, I think. If the methodological supernaturalist remains devoted to empiricism as a means of collecting data, I would expect him to eventually end up with a whole pantheon of different dwarves that correspond to the different types of chemical bonds that can exist, and this could actually pave a path for fruitful future research and technological developments in the same way that a naturalistic understanding of chemical bonds does. Just because one posits a supernatural force as the explanation of a phenomenon, does not mean that one ceases to examine the phenomenon and refinine her explanations.
Good entry, man.
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At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel. ---Isaac Asimov
[This message has been edited by JIM, 11-13-2003]
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