Two Ways of Explaining the World - How Science Works: Evolution - page 3

ancient authority. Reason is defined as the intellectual faculty by which conclusions
are drawn from premisses. Now you might say that I am an ancient authority - I am
certainly ancient! - and that you are accepting what I say because I am an authority,
but the difference is that any scientific claim I make can be checked by anybody
prepared to take the time and trouble, whereas it is not possible to check claims
derived from revelation or ancient texts - you either accept such claims or you
don't.
The Incompatibility of Religion and Science
Now it is important to understand that both naturalism and supernaturalism are
assumptions, and both are logically possible, but both cannot be correct - by defi-
nition, one excludes the other. This exclusion arises because the word “supernatural”
describes by definition a hypothetical realm which cannot be observed or recorded
by the procedures of science. Supernatural agents by definition posssess properties
above and beyond the natural world and its properties - that is why we use the word
“supernatural”. So supernatural agents are not constrained by the unvarying regular-
ities implicit in the naturalistic assumption. If we could apply natural knowledge to
understand supernatural agents, then by definition they would not be supernatural.
It follows that science is incompatible with religion. Why is this? It is because
once you attribute any particular event to a supernatural agent, a proposition that
cannot be disproven by observation or experiment, then science becomes both irrel-
evant and impossible. This is because science works on the assumption that natural
events have natural causes. For example, if a scientist carries out an experiment
and finds that he or she cannot initially understand the results of that experiment,
the scientist does not say that is because of the actions of supernatural agents - if a
scientist did say that, science would stop, because the actions of supernatural agents
by definition are not subject to unvarying regularities. What scientists do instead,
is to think more imaginatively about the problem, until they come up with another
testable hypothesis involving natural causes.
I will address in Chapter 2 the reasons why some scientists nevertheless hold
religious beliefs, but it is important to note here that even religious scientists do
not introduce supernatural explanations into their science. If they did, then anything
that is logically possible might become actual, despite the unvarying regularities that
characterise the natural world. It follows that introducing religious explanations into
science would destroy the practice of science. So supernaturalism is not included
within science because, by its very nature, it is not testable. Supernaturalism lacks
a methodology by which its claims can be tested, whereas science does have such a
methodology. How this methodology operates I discuss in Chapter 2.
The naturalistic viewpoint that defines science is more accurately termed
“ methodological naturalism ” because of its emphasis on methodically testing ideas.
This term is used to distinguish this type of naturalism from a separate type, called
by various names - ontological naturalism, or philosophical naturalism, or meta-
physical naturalism. These three names are equivalent, and I shall henceforth use the