Methodological Naturalism

Post date: May 11, 2021 10:7:14 PM

Methodological naturalism, as it appears in science, is based on an inductive generalization derived from 300 to 400 years of scientific experience... Time and time again, scientists have considered hypotheses about occult entities ranging from souls, to spirits, to occult magical powers, to astrological influences, to psychic powers, ESP, and so on... Time and time again such hypotheses have been rejected, not because of philosophical bias, but because when examined carefully there was not a shred of good evidence to support them... Scientists are allowed, like anyone else, to learn from experience. . . . The experience is straightforward... We keep smacking into nature, whereas the denizens of the supernatural and paranormal realms somehow manage to elude careful analysis of data...

It may be described as the view "that there is nothing besides nature, nothing in addition to nature, nothing outside or beyond nature..." The natural world, according to this view, is all that there is... It follows that we should not even consider proposed explanations that posit non-natural entities... This is a common-sense but crude description of the naturalism I am discussing... Can we produce something more precise??? It is not easy to do so... As it stands, my crude definition is less than informative, since it merely raises a new question: What do we mean when we speak of nature??? If we take "nature" to be equivalent to "the physical universe," then naturalism can be thought of as equivalent to physicalism...

"It is not only scientists who have good reason to be methodological naturalists... We all do..."