Comments on: Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16193 Announcing appearances, publications, and analysis of questions historical, philosophical, and political by author, philosopher, and historian Richard Carrier. Mon, 28 Mar 2022 17:11:44 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: Frederic Christie https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16193#comment-29616 Sat, 25 Jan 2020 20:49:49 +0000 https://www.richardcarrier.info/?p=16193#comment-29616 Yeah, I’ve always disliked the argument because it was clear to me that all one had to do was grant that supernaturalism is possible but needs to be supported by evidence to arrive at literally the exact same conclusion. Folks like Martymer, who are closer to arguing about methodological naturalism as an axiom, are really saying something more like “Scientists are pragmatically naturalist because a lot of supernatural hypotheses aren’t really ones you can crack open, so we might as well assume the natural – really, the understandable – until we’ve removed all other hypotheses”. One can perfectly reasonably take the stance that we can evaluate supernatural claims on their own (though we better not be ignoring background knowledge or other predictions), and dismiss them as either so toothless and useless they’re untestable by design or as obviously false or not remotely the best inference from the facts. Precisely because the supernatural is demonstrably at the least incredibly rare.

I just wonder how many people are arriving at the conclusion that it’s a matter of method because that’s just how they do their work, and not wanting to yell through the argument (since as you know some religious folks will just be bull-headed on this topic and it just prevents communication) that they’re not literally a priori naturalists. Because that’s how people like Craig lie their way through the problem: they jump from “You can’t just say ahead of time that everyhing is natural” to “Therefore, you can’t exclude supernatural explanations on the basis of any assumptions”, (often deliberately) conflating totally a priori assumptions with a posteriori assumptions. But I agree with you that it’s a failure of pedagogy for scientists to not just bite the bullet and say “No, this isn’t some axiom we arrived at ahead of time. We’re pragmatically methodological naturalists because so rarely are supernatural hypotheses worth any time, whether because they’ve been so obviously jury-rigged to be able to preemptively answer problems that they’re terrible theories or because the evidence for them is poor. They’re just never useful”. And I’ve literally never heard anyone make a principled argument for why we should methodological naturalists ahead of evaluating our priors.

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