NATURALISM: METHOD OR WORLDVIEW?

The main stalking-horse of Intelligent Design (ID) advocates (and creationists in general) is naturalism, or the belief that science must restrict itself to natural, repeatable and testable, causes and processes. The reason for this is obvious. If the commitment to naturalism is upheld, supernatural explanations (and hence all versions of design arguments) are ruled out of science in principle. In order to even be considered as viable scientific alternatives to existing explanations provided by evolutionary genetics, comparative anatomy, paleontology, cosmology, etc., design arguments would have to restrict themselves to repeatable, testable, natural processes…, which they clearly do not (and cannot) do.

Hence, numerous smoke-screens have been constructed by the ID movement to undermine science's commitment to naturalism, including: (a) claiming that naturalism is, in fact, a philosophical ‘worldview' as opposed to a scientific position, (b) claiming that the identity of the ‘designer' is irrelevant to design arguments, and hence there is no necessary commitment to supernatural causation, but only to ‘intelligent' causation (e.g., perhaps the designers were intelligent extra-terrestrials), (c) appealing to the religious commitments of most contributors to the history of western science to imply that science's commitment to naturalism is both recent and unnecessary, and (d) insisting that what they call the ‘fact' of design is not only independent of the identity of the designer, but also established by purely scientific means (unless, of course, design is itself unfairly ruled out by a prejudicial and biased appeal to naturalism). These particular claims are by no means exhaustive, but they represent a wide variety of ID efforts (whole books and conferences have been devoted to them).

I will address these claims in detail, and show that ID advocates misrepresent science's commitment to naturalism by either failing to distinguish between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism, or by completely misidentifying the meaning and purpose of the latter. Worse, this distortion allows them to provide superficially plausible defenses of their claims to a largely naïve public, and to render these claims even less susceptible to empirical refutation.