Under the amateurish spell of Phillip Johnson, many of our correpondents here assert that metaphysical assumptions form the basis of any worldview, in particular that of scientific investigation. This is used in an attempt to convince themselves that scientific objectivity is a sham, and that 'naturalism' is a religion in the tattered costume of empirical evidential inquiry.
The not-quite-as-dramatic truth is that methodological naturalism is the only principle that allows for objectivity of any kind in the first place. Only by excluding all factors from our inquiry except those which can be verified and understood can we even begin to frame relevant hypotheses concerning natural phenomena. All scientific progress in the past three hundred years has been accomplished because of the 'constraint' of MN, not despite it.
Methodological naturalism does not assume that nothing exists except that which can be scientifically verified. What it assumes is that without scientific verification, a factor is meaningless in an experimental framework. Johnson and his misguided acolytes criticize MN by saying (quite rightly) that if factors exist which cannot be empirically verified, MN would exclude them from scientific inquiry. However, the fact that they cannot be empirically detected is hardly reason to assume that they even exist in the first place. What the anti-naturalists are asking is that their philosophical assumptions be accepted as scientific in the absence of any scientific evidence supporting the validity of these assumptions.
I'm not aware of any instance in which metaphysical naturalism was insufficient in determining the relevant variables in an experimental framework. If anyone would like to offer a situation in which scrapping the foundation of contemporary scientific methodology has aided scientific progress, I'd like to hear it.
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I would not let the chickens cross the antidote road because I was already hospitlized for trying to say this!-Brad McFall
™ Version 4.2
