Naturalism
From Neoredemptive
Highly reductionist worldview which assumes all things (from physics to the human condition) can be explained in terms of natural laws of cause and effect without reference to intelligent agency (including, when followed to its logical conclusion, the appearance of intelligent agency in human behavior). Often expresses itself through religious scientism.
Ontological naturalism is the assertion that the material universe and the natural laws which govern it are all that actually exist.
Methodological naturalism is the position holding that one should think, act, and behave as though ontological naturalism were true, without insisting that it is or isn't. This is widely regarded as one of the defining properties of scientific inquiry, that the investigator is forbidden from taking the all-too-tempting "God did it" short cut. In practice, however, this impulse is rarely suppressed and usually simply redirected into equally content-free explanations bearing scientific-sounding names. After all, "mutation followed by natural selection must have given rise to this feature, although we have no idea how the mutation might plausibly have arisen to begin with" contains precisely as much falsifiable and explicative content as "God must have done it, but we have no idea how".
The demand of methodological naturalism as a precondition for "science" is of itself problematic in a properly pluralistic system, in that it demands that adherents to any non-atheistic system of thought or doctrine "pretend their religion is false" for the purpose of doing "real science". A chemist or ancient near-east linguist cannot legitimately be required to "pretend that atheism is false" as a prerequisite to saying something meaningful about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and yet a Christian wishing to pursue research into cellular biochemistry must functionally cast aside the intellectual content of his faith before his work can be deemed "truly scientific", regardless of the intellectual, evidentiary, and rational merits of his position.
Choice Quotes
“There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of medieval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.” Theodore Roosevelt, “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” Outlook, Dec. 2, 1911.
