In “Methodological naturalism (MN) does far more than ‘not study the supernatural’,” I noted “To understand the role of MN, we need to see the full picture. Not only what it forbids, but what it permits and encourages. And what the evidence for the permitted and encouraged stuff is.”
The conventional picture of methodological naturalism (MN) is simply wrong. MN, far from letting evidence rule, actually discounts evidence and substitutes consensus based on its premises. The multiverse is but one example.
An instance noted last week, though it doesn’t happen to involve cosmology, was the unblinking denial that humans are smarter than animals. It is easy to mock or discount such nonsense; it is more useful to see what underlies it.
The methodological naturalist knows that humans are “just another animal.” And MN is the correct way to see things. So when evidence arises that appears to contradict MN (human intelligence, for example), it can simply be denied. And such a denial is by definition “science’s” view, even though it owes nothing to evidence.
MN not only attracts countless crackpots, in cosmology as well as elsewhere, it undermines the integrity of basic sciences. As I noted in “The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion,”
Multiverse cosmologists look out on a bright future, freed from the demands of evidence. Leonard Susskind writes, “I would bet that at the turn of the 22nd century philosophers and physicists will look nostalgically at the present and recall a golden age in which the narrow provincial 20th century concept of the universe gave way to a bigger better [multiverse] … of mind-boggling proportions.” Physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez say their computer program shows that “universes with different physical laws might still be habitable.” And reviewing theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss’s Universe From Nothing (2012), science writer Michael Brooks notes that the multiverse puts laws of physics “beyond science — for now, at least.”
Before methodological naturalism really sank in, undemonstrable universes, not the laws of physics, were beyond science. More.
See also:
What has materialism done for science?
Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train
Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how.
“Behold, countless Earths sail the galaxies … that is, if you would only believe …”
Don’t let Mars fool you. Those exoplanets teem with life!
But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization?
How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?
Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd
The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion
– O’Leary for News