Michael Poole has an excellent review of "Darwinism defeated?" in the
latest issue of "Science and Christian Belief (vol 13 #1). In it he
notes that "theistic naturalism" and "methodological naturalism" are a
misleading terms and should be scrapped. Theistic naturalism he regards
as an oxymoron. Poole prefers to regard science as dealing with
"efficient" causes, in line with Aristotle's taxonomy of causality,
rather than a discipline using or requiring methodological naturalism.
My encyclopedia notes that Aristotle argued that there were four types
of cause: material causes, formal causes, efficient causes, and final
causes. Material causes are those effecting the substance of a thing.
Formal causes relate to the design of a thing. Efficient causes are
those forces that shape a thing. Final causes are to do with the motive
or purpose behind a work. Perhaps an undated development of these ideas
may be useful.
If we update it somewhat then we can say that scientific inquiry deals
with the first and third type of causes and theology and metaphysics
with the fourth. The second type of causes is an area of overlap with
both metaphysics and science having something to say. This is not the
same as Gould's "non overlapping magisteria" but has more to do with
MacKay's complementarity. A single event can have multiple
complementary causal descriptions applicable to different levels.
In the discussion about design and creation, a naturalist might well
agree with a theist over the first and third types of causation but
disagree over the second and fourth. Johnson seems to expect that,
because a theist acknowledges the fourth type of cause, they must
therefore exclude certain types and second and third causal types. This
only makes sense in the view that there is a necessary link between one
and the other - methodological naturalism is as outcome and precursor of
philosophical naturalism. If they are complementary ways of viewing
causation then this link does not exist.
Jon
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