Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

168 Notes
28. The sociologist Peter Berger (Sacred Canopy, 100) uses the phrase “methodological
atheism,” which more precisely describes the aspect of naturalism in
which I am interested. But I shall continue to use the phrase “methodological
naturalism,” with the qualifi cation that it is the exclusion of divine agency in
which I am interested.
29. The cross-references throughout this study are to the numbered sections of
each chapter. The fi rst number indicates the chapter in which the relevant
section is to be found. So 1.2.2 refers to the relevant subsection of Chapter 1
(the present chapter).
30. Quine, “Naturalism,” 257.
31. Pennock, Tower of Babel, 190.
32. Ibid., 191.
33. Ruse, “The New Creationism,” 180–81.
34. Johnson, Reason in the Balance, 211.
35. A similar point is made by Paul Draper (“God, Science, and Naturalism,”
299–300).
36. Johnson, Reason in the Balance, 105.
37. Johnson, “Unravelling of Scientifi c Materialism,” 23.
38. Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” 31.
39. Numbers, “Science without God,” 267–69, 280.
40. Carroll, “Introduction,” 29.
41. Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. 13 (428–32).
42. Neal Gillespie’s Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (1979) offers
a philosophically aware and historically insightful account, which has yet to
be bettered.
43. While some early twentieth-century philosophers took a narrower view—Otto
Neurath, for instance, saw successful prediction as the primary object of science
(Hempel, “Logical Positivism,” 173)—the task of explanation took centre
stage in the work of their successors. Carl Hempel, for example, wrote that “to
explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question
‘why?’ rather than only the question ‘what?’, is one of the foremost objectives
of empirical science” (Hempel, Aspects of Scientifi c Explanation, 245).
44. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 386–87.
45. Fakhry, “Classical Islamic Arguments,” 133–45.
46. Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument, 8.
47. There are philosophers, infl uenced by the later Wittgenstein (see 3.1.2), who
suggest that religious beliefs should not be regarded as explanatory hypotheses.
(Phillips, Religion without Explanation, 116; idem, Religion and the
Hermeneutics of Contemplation, 164). If this is intended to be a descriptive
rather than a prescriptive statement, it seems simply false (Banner, Justifi cation
of Science, 87–95). On many occasions, believers at least think that their
beliefs are explanatory (Boyer, Naturalness of Religious Ideas, 43, 125–54).
And some of these believers are also philosophers.
48. A similar criticism was made by Larry Laudan (“Commentary: Science at the
Bar—Causes for Concern”) in the wake of the 1982 McLean vs. Arkansas
Board of Education creationism trial.
49. Jones, “Memorandum Opinion,” 64 (emphasis mine).
50. Draper, “God, Science, and Naturalism,” 288–89.
51. Swinburne, The Existence of God, 38–45.
52. Brauer, Forrest, and Gey, “Is it Science Yet?” 48.
53. Ibid., 48–49.
54. It may be that talk of “intuition” here is also unhelpful, for the reliability of
an intuitive procedure may be intersubjectively testable. Chicken-sexing, as