[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm happy to be speaking again with historian of science Michael Keys, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and author of the book Unbelievable Seven Myths about the history and future of Science and Religion. Key serves as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Biola University, and he's on the board of directors of Ratio Christi, an alliance of apologetics clubs on college campuses. Mike welcome back to ID the future.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: Andrew, it's good to be with you.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, you've written an important new essay that was recently published in the journal Religions titled Christianity Cultivated Science With and Without Methodological Naturalism. It comes in at 33 pages and is chock full of interesting insights into the history of science, the history of this idea known as methodological naturalism, and how Judeo Christian tradition and thought influenced science. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned a lot from it. I took 18 pages of notes on it, and I'd like to unpack some of it and the essay's key insights with you on this episode. You up for that?
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Okay. Well, first, what inspired you to write this particular essay?
[00:01:31] Speaker C: As I've taught graduate courses in science and religion at Biola University, I kept encountering the influence of Ronald Number's essay, Science Without God. Now, there are parts of that essay that are on target, but I noticed some departures from careful historical analysis that I knew needed to be done. And so eventually, I wrote the essay that I've been telling my students for years that I would write, and it shows that science and Christianity collaborated in ways that go beyond Ron Number's thesis. Now, Ron Numbers is an excellent historian, but he did have some blind spots in his thesis that I've now cleared up.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Yeah, you indeed have. Well, the idea that Judeo Christian ideas inspired the rise of modern science is starting to gain some mainstream currency these days, I've noticed, thanks to your work and books like Stephen Meyer's latest, Return of the God Hypothesis. But until I read this essay, I hadn't come across such a detailed account of the role of methodological naturalism in the history of science or how it fundamentally differs from methodological pluralism. So before we go much further, can you define what is meant by the term methodological naturalism, often shortened to MN, and in contrast, what's? Methodological pluralism?
Yeah.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: So methodological naturalism is just the criterion that if you want to do science, if you want to buy into this criterion, then you can only invoke unintelligent natural causes for any event in nature, particularly nature's history. Methodological pluralism, on the other hand, is the idea that we should be open to invoking any kind of cause whatsoever, as long as we have evidence that points to such a cause, whether that be unintelligent or intelligent. And so it allows for a plurality of causal agents to explain the history of nature and thus the term methodological pluralism. So it's a more open minded sort of approach to science that doesn't prejudge the outcome before you even begin investigation.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: I like the sound of that. Now, did you come up with methodological pluralism, or is that a term that's been around?
[00:03:51] Speaker C: I crafted the term as a way to identify the two fundamentally different ways of doing origin science. Of course, methodological naturalism is a term that's been out there a long time, but I coined this other term. Maybe others have used it, but I'm the first that I'm aware of that's used it in connection with methodological nationalism, that is, as an alternative to methodological nationalism and is actually the majority view in science in the 19th century before methodological naturalism became the majority view.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Right. As you note there in your essay. Well, at the beginning of it, you say that many assume ceaseless conflict between natural science and Christianity, but the conflict is actually between scientism and Christianity. How do you define scientism and how does it combine with methodological naturalism to impede scientific inquiry?
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Right. So scientism is the idea that science is the best or only rational way to find truth about anything.
So it is an overinflated estimation of what science can do, in contrast with other disciplines like philosophy and the study of human history, to just take two other examples. So scientism can be defined narrowly or broadly, but I've basically described the broad meaning of the term. Now, if you think that science is the best or only way that you can approach truth or attempt to find truth, that means that anything outside of the confines of science would be just opinion or wishful thinking. So if you combine that view scientism with methodological naturalism, which says when you're doing science, you can only invoke unintelligent causes. And that would mean that if there were evidence for intelligent causation, whether it be in the sciences, or in any field, then the two together would say, all we can know is that, sure, we're intelligent agents because we're here thinking about nature, but we can't know anything about other intelligent agents that might have preceded humanity. Or that might have had a role to play in the origin of the universe or the origin of life or for that matter, anything in history. So scientism is a narrow view of what counts as knowledge, and methodological naturalism, sometimes combined with scientism, pretty much excludes anything from reasonable discourse besides sort of naturalistic based scientific inquiry.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you end up with a very restrictive approach when you incorporate both into your methodology. Well, according to Victorian scientists, natural science was invented by ancient pagan Greeks, declined in medieval Christian Europe, and was restored in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. What's wrong with this view?
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Well, it doesn't correspond to history very well. And I'll give you some pointers as to how. Now, it's true that ancient Greek thinkers did craft some of the components of what we now call science. But it's not true that medieval Christian Europe spelled nothing but decline for these scientific traditions, particularly in the High Middle Ages when you have just before the universities arose. And then during the period when universities were proliferating across Europe, there were eventually hundreds of thousands of Europeans who studied science and cultivated new perspectives in science, particularly through the university setting. And so that was helpful for the continued growth of science. And then the scientific revolution vasti accelerated this process of the development of new scientific ideas that were tested and passed those tests, and it became all the more rigorous. And of course, ever since then it's been proliferating into more and more disciplines and a vast amount of knowledge. So there is an element of truth to the story. But this particular group of Victorian scientists, which included Thomas Huxley, later known as Darwin's bulldog, they sort of reinvented history to make it look like naturalism of some sort, methodological or otherwise, was sort of the default mode for rational inquiry, especially science. And that's only part of the story. It's a much more interesting story than that.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah, indeed. Well, with this essay, you argue that not only did Christianity generate science, fostering rational belief that contributed to the rise of modern science, it also provided rationales for when to practice methodological naturalism and when not to. You give us examples of this development in your essay, starting with the Greco Roman philosophers and going all the way up to Darwin and modern day. Let's touch on a few examples that you provide. First. Were the vast majority of ancient pagan Greek thinkers open to a divine rationality in nature, or did they restrict themselves to pure naturalism?
[00:08:58] Speaker C: So, yeah, the Greek thoughts about this subject before the advent of Christianity provides the backdrop for sort of received wisdom. And then we'll see how the Christian tradition later opened up additional possibilities. But the Greco Roman period of science? Well, let's just pick the most influential of all the scientists in the ancient world in the area of astronomy, and that would be Ptolemy. Ptolemy wrote a book called the Almajest, or later became known as that. And there he argued that the first cause of the first motion of the universe, quote, can be thought of as an invisible and motionless deity. Okay, so that's a hint that he was thinking about Aristotle's account of the prime mover. Let's jump back multiple centuries to earlier antiquity with Aristotle. He argued that not just the first cause of the first motion, but daily stellar motion, the reason why stars seem to be all attached to one sphere and rotate around the Earth. That's what it seems like from the Earth's perspective. That he argued that this was caused by what he called the prime mover, which was that which contains the cosmos, and it is the unmoved mover. It itself does not move, but it causes motion within the universe. So he argued, and that the stellar motion that the unmoved mover, or prime mover, causes the daily stellar motion, also in turn influences the terrestrial elements, that is, the elements on or near Earth in its atmosphere, fire, air, water, and the Earth element itself.
It causes these four terrestrial elements to move in ways that, along with their own internal tendencies, explain almost all the natural changes that we see around us, what Aristotle called generation and corruption, things coming together and things falling apart. So he argued this in his Physics, his book called The Physics. In his metaphysics, he explicitly identified the prime mover as divine, divine being, that which is self existent, and everything else depends on it. Of course, the Judeo Christian tradition identifies God as that upon which or upon whom all things depend. So Aristotle had a conception of the divine, and he used this in not only his metaphysics but in his Physics book. So this was not just a metaphorical use of divinity. It was right there in the very center of his thinking about the natural science of how things move here around us. So that's a great example from two of the most prominent scientists, if you want to call them that, or natural philosophers, who, although coming from a pagan perspective, did not believe in a transcendent God, did believe in a kind of imminent God or divinity that has always existed and that helps explain events in nature. That's not methodological nationalism, is it, Andrew?
[00:12:09] Speaker B: It certainly is not. No, not as it is understood today, anyway. Well, as you move through the history of science, you discuss a few medieval philosophers that help to clarify when to invoke natural causes and when to invoke supernatural causation. Englishman Adelard of Bath and Frenchman Peter Abelard. I did confuse those names a couple of times as well as I was reading, but two distinct gentlemen and really good thinkers. What's notable about their work in this context?
[00:12:39] Speaker C: Adelard of Bath is known for his book called Natural Questions.
And there he argued that we can distinguish between God having miraculously created the original natural order, and he focused particularly on plant life. And once that natural order is in existence, he and other medieval intellectuals, of course, thought that God maintains that natural order in such a way that we, using our God given reasoning capabilities, can discover the more immediate causes of routine effects, what we would just call natural causes or natural mechanisms. Now, anytime you're investigating something and if you try first to find a natural cause of something if, after persistent effort, you fail to find a natural cause for something, then we should, he argued, reasonably, conclude that we've encountered the foundation of that natural order where God would have to act directly to initially create that natural order as opposed to indirectly through what is called secondary causation, which is God upholding the natural cause and effect structure of the world. So Adelard was able to distinguish between these two ways in which God is involved or related to nature directly in the origin of the universe and the origin of, let's say, plant life and other kinds of life, and then indirectly, as God upholds the way that plants naturally reproduce and so on over time. So there was a clear understanding that both of these can be rational conclusions. It wasn't that one is rational and the other is irrational leap of faith, but both were rational conclusions based on careful thinking. Now, Peter Abelard, a contemporary of Adelard, he also had a similar perspective distinguishing these two ways that God relates to the universe that I just outlined with his earlier contemporary. And he thought that when it comes to plant life in particular, he argued that when plant seeds germinate or we see what looks like spontaneous sprouting of plant seeds, even when you've tried to carefully remove all the known seeds. It must be due to unknown seeds that are in the soil that cause like what we would call weeds to grow, where we're not specifically wanting those, but they just spring up, apparently spontaneously. And he argued as a step forward in natural reasoning about the world, that these are not due to some principle within the soil, but due to seeds that we just didn't notice that were too small or somehow insignificantly present in the soil. So that was a step above Adelar of Bath, who thought that the soil itself had some kind of a God given capability to produce plants spontaneously. But they were both thinking about God's initial creation of things and then later God upholding the order of the world in such a way that we can discover immediate natural causes. And that, of course, is very helpful for the growth of science.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it sure is. I like how their work helps to delineate that. Well, something interesting that I learned as I was reading your essay was the role of the university in all of this. You point out that one interesting reason for natural philosophy, which is the old fashioned term for science, became sharply delineated or separated from theology over time was the rise of the universities and their disciplinary boundaries that established different fields and different requirements for study in those fields. Can you touch on that a little bit?
[00:16:31] Speaker C: Sure. The two medieval thinkers I just covered. Although their lives do overlap with a couple of the early universities, it wasn't until the universities began to multiply and then their ways of organizing academics became more institutionalized in a more rigorous way, that you had a very sharp distinction that eventually became drawn between what someone hired in the theology faculty should be doing versus what one hired in the liberal arts faculty. The liberal arts faculty being the more general study of the world of God as opposed to theology, focused on the study of God himself.
Most of the universities had well, all of them had or virtually all had liberal arts faculty, and only a few of them had actually theology departments.
And so I think that what you find as the theology departments then sprung up into more universities, there was the question of, well, what's the sort of practical way of dividing up the labor so that when you're hired, you know, what you're supposed to be spending your time on. And so they did this by saying, look, if you're studying natural philosophy in the liberal arts part of a university, you should focus on what the medievals called the common course of nature, as opposed to supernatural causes. And these are terms that were coined or became precisely defined within the university context. Now, there were some points of flexibility here. The boundaries weren't completely set in stone, but they were enforced as a way of sort of dividing up the labor, as a practical way of knowing what your job was. And it tended, in some cases for those in the liberal arts faculty studying natural philosophy, to say, well, look, here's how we're different than the theologians. We're going to focus on natural causes. And so when they said that, it often sounded very much like what we call methodological naturalism, that in studying the natural word world, we're going to study natural causes of the way things routinely happen in nature. But at the same time, they also recognized that, like the two intellectuals I just sketched, that this natural order had to originate at some point back in time, and that would have, of course, required supernatural causation on their way of thinking, and that there was good reasons to think that. So even though medieval intellectuals did not develop a rigorous science of origins in terms of tracing the history of nature over time, they did see that at the edge of what was called science or natural philosophy, which is the way nature normally operates. At the edge of that, you would come to a point where it looks like you're looking at the foundation of that natural order rather than how it normally operates since that foundation. And so you had the incipient idea for the origin science, but it wasn't developed into a complete origin science until much, much later.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah, and that was actually my next question. Part of the reason for these different approaches to science is that science is concerned, as you write, with two kinds of knowledge how things work and how things originated. So you write that each aim is achieved with a different set of investigative tools. How does this figure into the development of science?
[00:19:57] Speaker C: Well, virtually all scientific activity prior to the late 18th century was Operation Science or how things work, not origin science, how things originated. So when you're practicing Operation Science, how does nature operate routinely? Well, there's no reason to invoke intelligent or supernatural causes. In fact, the medieval scholars would say only uninformed popular opinion would say that routine meteorological phenomena or things like that are miracles if they were sort of unusual or eye catching, like, let's say, the Northern Lights or something like that. And so they said, no, that's just being lazy. And that part of it sounds like the way proponents of mythological naturalism couch it today. But the huge difference is, in the medieval period, there really was no rigorous origin science. And so when you practice, try to find the best account of what's the way nature operates and there's no good reason to invoke God or intelligent causation, then of course, it's going to look like methodological naturalism, but it won't really make a difference until later on, until the 18th century, where you have truly rigorous origin science being formulated.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: Okay, well, how did JudeoChristian thinking inspire the rise of the first science to detect nature's history, which was called geology?
[00:21:23] Speaker C: Right? Well, Jean de Luc, a French thinker, actually coined the word geology, and he came from an explicitly Judeo Christian perspective and contrasted himself with the French philosophs who, from the Enlightenment, were trying to distance themselves from God talk. But Delic was very comfortable with bringing to bear in his study of Earth his perspectives as a Christian. So the Judeo Christian idea of history, the idea that the reality that we have in front of us, it didn't always exist like this. It had a beginning. And there have been unique stages, particularly known in human history.
The Roman Empire didn't always exist, and Jesus of Nazareth came at a specific time in Earth history and that kind of thing, these specific events in the history of the world, there's no just endless repetitions going on here. There's actually new things happening that have consequences for later periods. And that's what historians investigate, is how to explain currently existing evidence in terms of a series of past events. And so Delic and other intellectuals, particularly in France, applied this way of thinking from Christian and Jewish roots that there is a meaningful succession of events that's non repeatable and applied that to nature, similar to how we find coins, let's say Roman coins. And that helps us to date different archaeological sites. They very self consciously transferred this kind of methodology to nature because fossils became known as nature's coins. That's a clever way of putting it, right? You find a trilobite, and that's a trigger that it's a very early period of Earth history that you're looking at, because that's where you have these suddenly appear in the fossil record, just like you have certain kinds of coins suddenly appearing at different points in human history. And so the historian that I particularly lean on for this part of my essay is the British historian of geology, Martin Rudwick. And Martin actually received the history of science society's highest award for a lifetime achievement in the history of science for unveiling this very idea that I'm now conveying to you. So I'm very indebted to his scholarship to be able to happily report this event.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Well, there's so much to unpack here, Michael, and I don't want to cram it all into one episode. Let's close this one, and let's continue the discussion in a part two of this conversation. We'll put a link to Dr. Keys's essay in this episode's description, as well as part two's at idthefuture.com. So find it there. And to read about some of the most popular and pernicious myths about science and religion, be sure to check out Dr. Key s's book, Unbelievable Seven Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion for now. And for Idthuture, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: Visit
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