Abstract
This paper defends the view that metaphysical naturalism is a constitutive ontological principle of science in that the general empirical methods of science, such as observation, measurement and experiment, and thus the very production of empirical evidence, presuppose a no-supernature principle. It examines the consequences of metaphysical naturalism for the testability of supernatural claims, and it argues that explanations involving supernatural entities are pseudo-explanatory due to the many semantic and ontological problems of supernatural concepts. The paper also addresses the controversy about metaphysical versus methodological naturalism.
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Notes
If the currently fashionable multiverse scenario were true, this definition could easily be expanded to comprise the totality of all universes. The problem is of course that it seems impossible to ever gain empirical evidence for other spatiotemporal worlds.
If supernaturalism were defined as the contrary of naturalism, everything would be supernatural, including that which appears to be natural. We may disregard this view here, because most supernaturalists admit that some things are natural, whereas some others are supernatural.
It is a popular historical myth that supernaturalism was a serious contender in biology until Darwin rendered the argument to design superfluous (McLaughlin 2008).
A very general ontological realism is probably the least controversial metaphysical presupposition of science (Bunge 1983, 2006; Alters 1997; Gauch 2009), although there is an ongoing realism/antirealism debate in philosophy. However, this debate concerns mostly epistemological problems regarding the justification of more detailed realistic claims such as the status of unobservable entities, the truth of scientific theories, etc. Thus, someone who rejects more specific forms of realism, such as scientific realism, usually is still an ontological realist. I shall not defend ontological realism in more detail here (for such a defense see, e.g., Vollmer 1990), because I submit that both ontological naturalists and supernaturalists share a basic realist outlook anyway.
I sbumit that the mainstream view of laws in the philosophy of science is inadequate. Science calls for a (neo-)essentialist view of laws, according to which “the laws of nature are immanent in the things that exist in nature, rather than imposed on them from without. Thus, […] things behave as they do, not because they are forced or constrained by God, or even by the laws of nature, but, rather, because of the intrinsic causal powers, capacities and propensities of their basic constituents and how they are arranged” (Ellis 2002, p. 1). Thus, “not even an omnipotent God could change the laws of nature without changing the things on which they are supposed to act. Therefore, the idea that the laws of physics are contingent, and superimposed on intrinsically passive things that have identities that are independent of the laws of their behavior, is one that lies very uneasily with modern science” (Ellis 2002, p. 5). The lawful behavior of things neither entails that we can always represent them as law statements nor that every scientific explanation is a subsumption under some law. For example, due to the enormous variation of organisms, many biologists believe that there are no laws (= law statements) in biology. But this does not entail that organisms do not behave lawfully: it is just that it often makes not much sense to try to find general, let alone universal, law statements because their reference class is rather small, holding only for some subspecies, variety or even smaller units, for example; that is, only for those organisms sharing the same lawful properties (more on laws in biology in Mahner and Bunge 1997, Ellis 2002). Finally, even some cases of randomness are lawful because they are based on stochastic propensities such as in quantum physics. That is, there are probabilistic laws. For the neo-essentialist approach to laws adopted here see Bunge (1977), Mahner and Bunge (1997), and Ellis (2002).
Note that “nothing” really means “nothing”, not some form of radiation or some other massless form of matter. For example, what is called particle annihilation is just a transformation of a particle with mass into one or more massless particles, that is, into some form of radiation. However, it seems that the ex-nihilo-nihil-fit principle is being challenged by cosmologists, who keep entertaining the idea that the universe originated from nothing (see, e.g., Stenger 2011). In particular, according to multiverse cosmology some primordial “nothing” keeps randomly popping out universes. But since this “nothing” has at least one property, namely the propensity to pop out universes, it doesn’t seem to be a genuine nothing which should have no properties at all and hence be unable to change. Anyway, a metaphysically more satisfying statement is this: “…if you can’t grasp the notion of tunneling from nothing, just think of our universe as having tunneled from an earlier one, a process that is already well understood” (Stenger 2011, p. 146). Finally, even if we had to make an exception for the origin, if any, of the universe, the metaphysical principle of nothing-out-of-nothing would still hold within the universe, until further notice. It may also be objected that the ex-nihilo-nihil principle is not really metaphysical, but an intrascientific conservation principle. However, as it occurs in many different scientific disciplines which share no common conservation theory, such as physics, biology and economics, it is a metascientific principle concerning a basic feature of the world.
Since this is not the place to review the many concepts of causality, I shall not commit myself to a specific variant. All we need here is an ontological concept of causation, for instance, in the sense of some energy transfer between things (see, e.g., Bunge 1979, 2000, 2006). A possible objection to the antecedence principle is the fact that some physicists have considered the possibility of backward causation. But this only shows that not every formal consequence derived from a mathematical model need have a real or factual application (Bunge 2001). In any case, unless we encounter such causation, we may regard such talk as metaphysically misguided.
The no-psi principle was one of Broad’s (1949) so-called basic limiting principles of science. Being a strong believer in the paranormal, Broad maintained that this basic limiting principle had been refuted by parapsychology. However, Broad was fooled by the sloppy and partly even fraudulent parapsychological research of his time.
This was already acknowledged by J.S.B. Haldane (1934), who stated that his “practice as a scientist is atheistic”, that is, when he sets up an experiment he assumes “that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course” (p. vi).
It may be argued that the principle of parsimony should be invoked here to distinguish between ON and supernaturalism. However, I submit that Ockham’s razor must be combined with ON. Wouldn’t a Berkeleyan world, in which there is but one infinite spirit (God) and some finite ones (humans) and where everything else is just appearances in these minds, be more parsimonious than a natural world with all its very complex things and processes? Or wouldn’t occasionalism, according to which God is the cause of every event, be simpler than naturalism with all its manifold and complex causes? It seems that the application of the parsimony principle (a methodological principle) needs an ontological grounding, which should be ON. Only together do they make for a powerful tool.
Despite many theological defenses, the notions of omnipotence and omniscience are incoherent (Martin 1990), so that we have reason to reject characterizations of the supernatural that employ them.
I submit that the difference between naturalism and materialism concerns the status of abstract objects. If abstract objects really existed as immaterial things, perhaps somehow interacting with our mind, then they would be part of the natural world. By contrast, according to Bunge’s materialism, abstract objects do not exist independently of thinking organisms: they are at best constructs or fictions, and thus part of the real world only via their tokens in thinking brains (see, e.g., Bunge 2006; Bunge and Mahner 2004).
This makes room for abstract objects as the contents of thinking brains, and for the mental as being an emergent or, if preferred, supervenient property of highly complex neuronal systems.
To answer this question, some readers may expect that we turn to confirmation theories such as Bayesianism, which is widely believed to allow us to assess the “probabilities” of the hypotheses involved. However, as an objectivist, I am ignoring these methods here because they operate with subjective probabilities. I concur with Bunge’s criticism of Bayesianism that the probability calculus is not the correct means for formalizing concepts such as plausibility, credence, degree of confirmation, or approximate truth, or whatever the “probability” of a hypothesis is supposed to be (Bunge 2006). Moreover, even if Bayesian methods and their like were legitimate, they could only be applied if we had admissible evidence in the first place, and it is exactly the (in)admissibility of alleged evidence for the supernatural what is at issue here. However, this is not the place to go deeper into this matter. See Fishman (2009) for a defense of Bayesianism as a means of evaluation of supernatual hypotheses, and Sober (2009) for likelihood considerations concerning the argument form design. For a criticism of Sober’s approach, see McLaughlin (2008) as well as Boudry and Leuridan (2011).
More on the problems of supernaturalist explanations in Pennock (2000), who also explores the consequences of supernaturalism for the legal system, which would have to reconsider the-devil-made-me-do-it arguments including historically superseded forms of evidence based on “higher insights” and revelations.
Note that the famous “theory of everything” in theoretical physics is a misnomer, because it would not explain everything. It would just offer a unified theory of the fundamental forces of physics. But this would not even begin to explain all the emergent properties of higher-level systems.
This is the broad sense of occasionalism. In its narrow construal God only causes the bodily reactions of our mind, which was assumed to be immaterial. And even back then it was known that the immaterial cannot interact with the material. So an intermediate entity was needed to causally bridge the material (body) and the immaterial (mind).
Those supernaturalists who dislike the god-of-the-gaps approach for theological reasons, have retreated to a transnatural conception of the supernatural, which is immune to any empirical refutation.
It may be argued that the variation in the meaning of “God” is not problematic, because scientific concepts often start out with fuzzy and variable meanings too. Think of terms like “gene” or “atom”. However, the variations in the precise meanings of these concepts are adjustments guided by empirical research and theory development. These concepts could be made precise enough to even get hold of their referents: today genes can be sequenced, and atoms can be photographed. The various concepts of God, by contrast, are not constricted and guided by empirical research, so there is no improvement in the sense of an approximation to reality. The conceptual “development” in theology is purely apologetic in that the traditional overnatural concepts of God have been transformed into transnatural ones, so that they can no longer conflict with science, or anything factual for that matter.
MN in the first sense can be held either dogmatically or provisionally. In the latter case we may provocatively propose the name “methodological methodological naturalism”, so as to point out the double meaning of “methodological”. Note also that Boudry et al. (2010) distinguish intrinsic MN (in the sense of a defining feature of science) from provisional MN. The latter would be what I have just called methodological MN. Here I defend provisional ON as an intrinsic feature of science.
Scott (1998) is one of the few who seem to share this view, as she speaks of "methodological materialism" rather than MN. Since materialism is obviously metaphysical, "methodological" in this case can only mean "provisional".
Note that fallibilism with regard to metaphysics does not preclude that the latter has some a priori aspects. As Warenski (2009) argues, certain forms of apriorism are compatible with fallibilism.
Boudry et al. (2010) actually argue against the thesis that MN is an intrinsic feature of science, but it seems this quote presupposes exactly the opposite.
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Mahner, M. The Role of Metaphysical Naturalism in Science. Sci & Educ 21, 1437–1459 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9421-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-011-9421-9