From: george murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Thu Oct 02 2003 - 16:29:36 EDT
Steve Petermann wrote:
> What does naturalism mean?
>
Steve -
I don't see a great deal of value in fine-tuning definitions of
"naturalism" very much. As I use the terms, "methodological naturalism"
(MN) means that science should attempt to explain what happens in the
world in terms of natural processes, without appeals to divine action.
"Metaphysical naturalism" or "ontological naturalism," OTOH, means that
there is no divine action because there is no divine. One can hold to
MN as a rule for scientific procedure without insisting that
investigations subject to this constraint will, in fact, be able to
explain all phenomena, and Goedels theorem suggests that they won't be
able to.
One can then go on to consider ways in which God may act in the
world consistently with the assumption of methodological naturalism -
i.e., different theologies of divine action. If you want to you can
characterize such theologies (like those which Barbour discusses in
_Religion and Science_) as different varieties of naturalism but I don't
see that that terminology is terribly helpful.
Shalom,
George
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