Delfino read like a theist, so I looked him up and found out he’s an assistant professor at a Catholic university in NYC. Imagine my surprise!

I can only assume that he’s completely serious and earnest in his writing, but I find it so hard to take him seriously. I just want to laugh out loud. I really do!

His ideas on science are preposterous. I wonder if he has any idea how silly his theistic ideas on scientific methodology sound to most scientists.

I mean, let’s really, really think about this for moment. First off, these “supernatural causes” would not be detectable by scientific methods or instruments, right? Does this then mean that whenever scientists encounter phenomena that cannot immediately be explained through reference to known natural causes, these phenomena should than be chalked up as “supernatural”?

Well,(tongue firmly in cheek here) maybe this is
a good idea. Just think of the bother, trouble and expense that could be avoided with this approach.

Wow! Why have we not seen the wisdom of this until now? Why, we could even turn the whole enterprise of scientific inquiry back into the hands of the Catholic church!

OK, I’m serious again. Delfino profoundly miss-apprehends the nature and foundations of scientific inquiry. He needs to either take a few more science classes, or go back to his philosophical and theological musings and forget about science altogether.

Enough said for now.

Mr. Delfino reads to me like another philosopher with a fascination for the concept of the supernatural, and an inadequate understanding of the philosophy of science.

I’m basically in agreement with Jason Streitfeld (comment #6). If Delfino and his cohorts want scientists to consider supernatural causes, then they should come up with a COHERENT definition of what they mean by the word supernatural, and then present at least some real evidence for supernatural causes.

Note to super-naturalists here: Just presenting one or more phenomena that may not be sufficiently explained by currently known natural causes is not necessarily evidence for supernatural causes.

It’s a tall order, to be sure. I won’t be holding my breath for either the definition or the evidence to arrive, especially the latter.

Is there a general lack of philosophical sophistication among many scientists today? No doubt.

Is there a similar lack of such sophistication among many philosophers? Indeed.

Neither point indicates that we should consider “the supernatural” as part of the possible realm of scientific discovery, simply because the notion of “the supernatural” has not been coherently defined.

If anyone is interested, I’ve recently written a rather scathing and thorough criticism of Delfino’s paper, “Replacing Methodological Naturalism,” on my blog:

On Junk Philosophy And Naturalism: A Criticism of Robert A. Delfino

Here’s the naked link, if you prefer:

http://specterofreason.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-junk-philosophy-and-naturalism.html

While it is true that science may legitimately remove topics from consideration through indirect evidence, an entire system that is based on potentially untenable assumptions will obviously overlook certain evidence. It is much the same as misplacing your keys, and then looking for them in an entirely different location than where you misplaced them. Of course, you will never recover your keys, because not only were you looking in the wrong place for them, but there wasn’t even a chance you could see the keys from the area where you were searching for them.

Whenever a flaw is uncovered within a system we have come to fundamentally acknowledge as “truthful” or “sound,” all reasonable efforts should be made to correct such flaws. To do other is to live in self ordained ignorance.

Methodological naturalism is not some arbitrary dogma: it is an attitude that follows from a meta-hypothesis (metaphysical naturalism) that has been consistently confirmed so many times (and never once scientifically falsified, despite quite a lot of trying, contrary to the claim that scientists never try), that it is simply unreasonable to allow the prior probability of any supernatural hypothesis to be anything more than remotely small.

By analogy, no one thinks we should invest even a minute of labor or a dollar of money investigating whether gremlins knock down planes. That is not even a supernatural hypothesis–gremlins could be natural, normal, evolved organisms just like us and fluffy the cat. But the prior probability that they exist has been indirectly but sufficiently shown to be so remotely small, by vast amounts of scientific inquiry into the causes of plane crashes, and vast amounts of empirical observation by ordinary people, that there is just no worthwhile reason to consider it anymore. Unless some really amazing new evidence came along. But this never happens. Which is precisely my point.

Thus, it isn’t that scientists “rule out” gremlin hypotheses as somehow methodologically outside the purview of science. It’s that there is simply no good reason to consider such hypotheses as likely–they are not even likely enough to do a high school science project on, much less any real, institutional, peer reviewed science.

To draw the analogy over, brain science has consistently failed to find evidence of anything other than electrical and chemical activity in neurons having anything to do with any mental experiences of any kind, and explanations in terms of such physics consistently do a much better job fitting and predicting the facts than any other alternative, supernatural or not. Thus, that it is logically possible for science to test and confirm supernatural theories of cognition is irrelevant. There is simply no more reason to believe such research to be worthwhile than there is for the FAA to include gremlins in its crash investigation criteria.

But I must be clear: I still do agree with Delfino’s methodological point, as well as the institutional point that scientists are doing exactly the wrong thing in the way they are trying to demarcate their field. I have made this point myself in my book Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, but in much more direct and extensive detail on my blog:

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html

Pigliucci seems to hold that the word supernatural refers exclusively to God. He adds that “if God can do whatever he wants for whatever reason he wants, then there is no way to test hypotheses about what he does and why.” From this he concludes that the supernatural, since it is not testable, must be excluded from science by definition.

But why should the scientific community, or anyone for that matter, adopt this understanding of the word supernatural? Must we define the supernatural to refer exclusively to God? And even if we must, why should we adopt the understanding of God that Pigliucci has offered? The understanding he discusses is very close to a voluntarist conception of God espoused by theologians such as William of Ockham. However, this is not even a view of God shared by all Christian theologians, let alone other religions.

Since I do not understand the supernatural in the way that Pigliucci understands it above, his argument about the supernatural being ruled out of science by definition does not apply to me. But perhaps Pigliucci thinks that all non-natural explanations (even if they do not involve God) are by definition not testable. If so, I think it begs the question to define the non-natural in this way. (I should note that I use the word supernatural interchangeably with the word non-natural.)

Rather than impose on science some pre-conceived understanding of natural or non-natural, I advocate a different view, which I call methodological neutralism. The principle of methodological neutralism states that scientists should simply search for causes without setting any a priori conditions on what ontological status those causes must have. Once evidence is gathered scientists can lean in favor of a cause being natural or supernatural as the evidence indicates. However, even this is only tentative as new discoveries might cause scientists to change their view about a particular cause’s ontological status.

Greg Solits gave several examples to help clarify my view, including this one:

Many scientists maintain that super- or non-natural explanations are not allowed in science. “An explanation of the mind, like that of the brain, must ultimately be an explanation in terms of the way that neurons function,” says physicist Sir John Maddox, who served as editor of Nature for 23 years. “After all, there is nothing else on which to rest an explanation.” Scientists like Maddox, for example, are unwilling to consider as a scientific possibility that the human mind is non-physical…. [Delfino] believes scientists like Nature’s Maddox limit science unnecessarily. According to Delfino, a scientist assuming that everything can be explained through natural causes is like a reviewer “coming to a book with an ax to grind.” Just as evidence encouraged scientists to consider prions as a category distinct from viruses and bacteria, Delfino notes that the right evidence could reveal that the mind belongs in a category separate from matter and energy.

Soltis also gave a quick summary of my position: “Delfino says that the evidence — not a prior commitment to naturalism or Christianity — should lead scientists to their conclusions and, if necessary, the positing of new metaphysical categories.” In addition, he alerted the reader, and gave a clickable link, to my article “Replacing Methodological Naturalism,” published in the Global Spiral, where I discuss these issues in greater detail.

Let me give that link here as well: http://www.metanexus.net/Magazine/tabid/68/id/10028/Default.aspx

First, when I said that strong evidence of fine tuning of the universe (which we do not have) would force the consideration of an intelligent designer this is not the same as saying that supernatural explanations are part of science. Reason is broader than science, and God is still out of the latter (see next paragraph).

Second, Delfino seems to take a rather naive position (at least as reported in the article). Science does not consider the supernatural for the simple reason that a supernatural explanation is an oxymoron: if God can do whatever he wants for whatever reason he wants, then there is no way to test hypotheses about what he does and why. Since science is all about empirically testable hypotheses, the supernatural is out by definition.