In recent controversies about Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), the principle of methodological naturalism (MN) has played an important role. In this paper, an often neglected distinction is made between two different conceptions of MN, each with its respective rationale and with a different view on the proper role of MN in science. According to one popular conception, MN is a self-imposed or intrinsic limitation of science, which means that science is simply not equipped to deal with claims of the supernatural (...) (Intrinsic MN or IMN). Alternatively, we will defend MN as a provisory and empirically grounded attitude of scientists, which is justified in virtue of the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernatural explanations in the history of science (Provisory MN or PMN). Science does have a bearing on supernatural hypotheses, and its verdict is uniformly negative. We will discuss five arguments that have been proposed in support of IMN: the argument from the definition of science, the argument from lawful regularity, the science stopper argument, the argument from procedural necessity, and the testability argument. We conclude that IMN, because of its philosophical flaws, proves to be an ill-advised strategy to counter the claims of IDC. Evolutionary scientists are on firmer ground if they discard supernatural explanations on purely evidential grounds, instead of ruling them out by philosophical fiat. (shrink)

Why is the academy in general, and philosophy in particular, not more involved in the fight against the creationist threat? And why, when a response is offered, is it so curiously ineffective? I argue, by using an analogy with the battle against the Black Knight from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that the difficulty lies largely in a failure to see the nature of the problem clearly. By modifying the analogy, it is possible to see both why (...) large sections of the academy have remained unmoved and also why many of the reactions to the threat have been so unsuccessful. Finally, I offer some very broad suggestions as to how to modify our approach in light of this new perspective. (shrink)

Methodological naturalism has been defended on both intrinsic and pragmatic grounds. Both of these defenses agree that methodological naturalism is a principle of science according to which the scientist ought to eschew talk of causally efficacious disembodied minds. I argue that this is the wrong interpretation of methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism does not constrain the theories that scientists may conjecture, but how those theories may be justified. On this view, methodological naturalism is a principle of science according to which supernatural (...) methods of justification, such as faith, are eschewed. (shrink)