For Some People Science Is the Supreme Form of Knowledge. Is This View Reasonable or Does It Involve a Misunderstanding of Science or Knowledge?

Naturalism is, ironically, a controversial philosophy. Our modern civilization depends totally for its existence and future survival on the methods and fruits of science, naturalism is the philosophy that science created and that science now follows with such success, yet the great majority of humans (at least 90% of the U.S. population) believe in the antithesis of naturalism--supernaturalism. Our culture persistently indulges and celebrates supernaturalism, and most people, including some scientists, refuse to systematically understand naturalism and its consequences. This paper proposes to show that naturalism is essential to the success of scientific understanding, and it examines and criticizes the claims of pseudoscientists and theistic philosophers that science should employ supernatural explanations as part of its normal practice. Along the way I will speculate briefly on the reasons why such individuals are today advocating what would appear to be such an oxymoronic conjunction as supernaturalistic science (or worse, theistic science). Also, quite a bit of this essay is devoted to examining basic concepts in metaphysics and the philosophy of science, since there seems to be some confusion about them.

Definitions

Naturalism is

"a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through methods which, although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are continuous from domain to domain of objects and events...[thus, there cannot] exist any entities or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation" (Danto, 1967, p. 448);

"the view that nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature" (Audi, 1996, p. 372);

"the twofold view that (1) everything is composed of natural entities--those studied in the sciences--whose properties determine all the properties of things, persons included, ...abstract entities... like possibilities...and mathematical objects...and (2) acceptable methods of justification and explanation are commensurable, in some sense, with those in science" (Post, 1995, p. 517);

"the view that everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world..." (Lacey, 1995, p. 604);

"the philosophical movement that "wishes to use the methods of science, evidence, and reason to understand nature and the place of human species within it"..."skeptical of the postulation of a transcendental realm beyond nature, or of the claim that nature can be understood without using the methods of reason and evidence"... and "the philosophical generalization of the methods and conclusions of the sciences" (Kurtz, 1990, p. 7, 12).

In my own definition, a synthesis of those above, naturalism is the philosophy that maintains that (1) nature is all there is and whatever exists or happens is natural; (2) nature (the universe or cosmos) consists only of natural elements, that is, of spatiotemporal material elements--matter and energy--and non-material elements--mind, ideas, values, logical relationships, etc.--that are either associated with the human brain or exist independently of the brain and are therefore somehow immanent in the structure of the universe; (3) nature works by natural processes that follow natural laws and can, in principle, be explained and understood by science and philosophy; and (4) the supernatural does not exist, i.e., only nature is real, therefore, supernature is non-real. Naturalism is therefore a metaphysical philosophy opposed primarily by supernaturalism.

Naturalism is, noncontroversally, a subset of metaphysical realism. Naturalism is not an ethical system, although a variety--pragmatic naturalism, a synthesis of pragmatism and naturalism--does develop ethical positions. Philosophical naturalism is also the key part of naturalistic humanism, without question the most important personal worldview or philosophy of life that exists as an alternative to the planet's many supernaturalistic, transcendental religions and religious philosophies. Humanism exists in two varieties, religious and secular, and as a dynamic, fulfilling, and intellectually compelling alternative to transcendental religion, humanism is a frequent subject of criticism by supernaturalists; indeed, part of the motivation for the attack on naturalism in science by creationists and intelligent design proponents is their explicit and long-founded antipathy to naturalistic humanism. Philosophical naturalism itself exists in two forms: (1) ontological or metaphysical naturalism and (2) methodological naturalism. The former is philosophical naturalism as described above; the latter is the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it. As will be exhaustively discussed below, science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success (although science does have metaphysical implications), but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is. This is methodological naturalism.

Is naturalism true? We may think so, but we can't know for certain. Naturalism's truth would presumably depend on the existence of a supernatural realm. If there were empirical evidence for the supernatural or a logical reason to believe in the supernatural without such evidence, then naturalism would be false. If we knew for certain that the supernatural did not exist, then naturalism would be true. But if there is no evidence for the supernatural and no reason to believe in it despite the lack of evidence (both of which are the case), the supernatural could still possibly exist without our knowledge. Such a lack of evidence and reason forces one to be agnostic about the existence of the supernatural and thus about the ultimate truth of naturalism. However, because of such lack of evidence and logical argument, it is more reasonable to disbelieve the supernatural and believe that naturalism is true.

Fortunately, whatever we think about the supernatural, we may all agree that a natural world exists. Naturalism could be accepted as the most reasonably true philosophy by examining and justifying it's statements as a scientist would examine and justify the statements of a scientific theory. In scientific