As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“What if, instead of a process limited only to biology, Darwinian evolution was promoted to a fundamental law governing all physical reality? That’s exactly what some scientists have tried to do, most recently in a much-heralded paper” - Breakpoint
“…in addition to the traditional areas of scientific inquiry and expertise, such as chemistry, physics, and medicine, many now even look to science for guidance on moral questions—and many scientists and science boosters are eager to claim they can provide it.” - TGC
“As with many atheists, Dawkins prides himself on the fact that science can provide us with all the answers. However, it is not science that proves that God does not exist but the philosophical system that Dawkins uses to interpret science and evidence, namely naturalism.” - AiG
“In the preface to their book Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest For the Foundations of Morality, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky proffer the stunning admission that, ‘While the new science of morality presses onward, the idea of morality – as a mind-independent reality – has lost plausibility for the new moral scientists.
“He wrote me an eloquent letter in which he used his training in philosophy to wonder out loud if Christianity is merely a set of Jungian archetypes, a set of myth-making stories that echo something deep in the human psyche that somehow over evolutionary millennia we have found useful. …Here was my response.” - Mark Ward
(A follow up to Scientism Isn’t Science)
Naturalism is defined by Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro in this way:
Naturalism—very roughly—may be defined as the philosophy that everything that exists is a part of nature and that there is no reality beyond or outside of nature. (Naturalism, 6)
Something being “a part of nature” is here meant to exclude the supernatural. Naturalism then is opposed to supernaturalism. It is seeing all things as natural and nothing as being supernatural. It is this view of the world which informs scientism, and it is this same view which informs modern scientific procedure. Although it is important to say that the procedure does not lead every scientist to embrace scientism (the belief that all questions about reality can be scientifically determined), scientism certainly needs the procedure. This procedure is what is called “methodological naturalism” (MN).
These remarks stem from some interchanges I had with some believers about methodological naturalism.
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