Given currently-established data, yes. Given certain conceivable types of
(but, in my opinion, not bloody likely) data, no, pure ordinary naturalism
could collapse into mere portion of a much larger theory that would NOT be
naturalistic in the ordinary sense (it might involve aliens who like to
design "universes," for example)
>
>Chris
>>Again, since that's what a naturalistic universe with any number of
>>variations would do also, I don't see how you can propose to test it,
unless
>>you can show that it's violating laws of chemistry or physics by occurring
>i>n ways that contradict those laws.
>
>Bertvan:
>Any theory which assumed the laws of nature were part of a complex design
>would not contradict the laws of chemistry of physics. Have you figured
out
>a way to test whether the universe is an accident? Or do you claim you
don't
>have to test it, because you've already put the burden of proof on everyone
>else?
Well, yes, non-naturalists DO have the main burden of proof here, because
they are claiming so much more than naturalists.
In the sense in which YOU seem to mean it, no, I don't see how to test
accidentalism, except in a fairly weak sense. By showing that the progress
of evolution follows general patterns that would be naturalistically
expected or predictable, but without FURTHER signs of "direction," we can
say that design seems unlikely. For example, if we examined a section of the
human genome and found a pattern of codons that UNMISTAKABLY spelled out the
entire New Testament in a heretofore unknown language that we managed to
uniquely decipher and translate, we would have to suspect that WE, at least,
were at least partially the result of design. But, as long as the human
genome continues to appear to be a kind of hodgepodge collection of
"instructions" for the building of a human body in a human-female womb, the
rational presumption is that it probably IS just such a hodgepodge. Can we
PROVE it? No. Do we NEED to prove it? Not really; again, Occam's Razor cuts
in favor of naturalism (at least at the moment and for the empirically known
past).