Posted: Dec 26, 2014 8:00 am
Jerome Da Gnome wrote:Darwinsbulldog wrote:
An atheist scientist, who would not make the presumption of a celestial clock-maker in any case, is freer to propose models of less prejudice. He would simply ask if the universe is clock-like or not.
If it is done with proper method, personal bias is irrelevant. The beauty in science.
Methodological naturalism means you leave your prejudice/bias at the door to the lab. This is the difference between someone like Michael Behe, who refuses methodological naturalism, and Francisco Ayala, who accepts it. Ayala is some sort of Catholic deist. But when doing proper science, and science write-ups in journals, he is purely MN. In his popular works however, that try to bridge religious belief in science, he is more ambiguous. In other words, his religious beliefs urge him to write about god as a possible cause with a little more enthusiasm than prudence would allow. OF COURSE god could be the ultimate cause or prime mover, it is possible, but it is not science to deal with such things, because there are no tests for it. In other words, as I said above, science can test for clockwork universes, but not the clock-maker. [Unless of course, the clock maker is a natural process, like natural selection in evolution]. Of course, one can argue that NS is perhaps only the clock-maker's helper.