Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Against Religious Explanations 9
What is interesting is that, according to Judge Jones, any explanation that
“invokes” or even merely “permits” supernatural causation ipso facto
ceases to be scientifi c. This ruling defi nes science in such a way as to exclude
supernatural agency, which hands an easy victory to the opponents of ID.
But it would be a Pyrrhic victory if it resulted in the exclusion of what is, in
fact, the best explanation of some phenomenon.
In any case, the important philosophical question is not whether these
proposed religious explanations are scientifi c; it is whether they are any
good, as explanations. After all, what we choose to count as “scientifi c”
is, to some extent, a mere matter of defi nition. 50 Richard Swinburne, for
instance, thinks that what he calls “personal” (and I call “intentional”)
explanations—those that appeal to the purposes of an agent—are not, and
cannot be reduced to, scientifi c explanations. 51 I myself would argue that
since such explanations yield testable predictions, they can be regarded as
scientifi c, even if they rarely rise above the level of a “folk science.” But
little of substance rests on this debate. The more important question is
whether they are adequate explanations, and on the answer to this question
Swinburne and I would probably agree.
1.2.3 Religion and Revelation
There are at least two ways in which one might argue against proposed
religious explanations. Let me begin with a work in which the two are
confused, namely a recent article by Matthew Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and
Steven Gey. What Brauer, Forrest, and Gey are concerned with is, once
again, the teaching of intelligent design in American schools. But in the
course of their discussion they offer a defence of the methodological naturalism
of the sciences. What they fail to notice is that they are offering two,
quite distinct defences. At times they appear to be arguing that naturalism
is a defeasible position, justifi ed in a de facto manner by its explanatory
success. “MN [methodological naturalism],” they write, is simply
science’s universal procedural protocol requiring natural explanations
for natural phenomena. . . . This protocol is not arbitrary, and contrary
to ID proponents’ accusations, requires no a priori metaphysical
commitments. The only commitment is to an empirical methodology,
which scientists use with good reason: it works. Natural explanations
are scientifi cally successful; supernatural ones are not. The commitment
to MN is thus pragmatic and provisional, not ideological. 52
So far, so good. It appears that there exist proposed “supernatural explanations”
and that they have been shown to fail. We do not have suffi cient
reason to regard them as true. I, for one, would have no quarrel with that
conclusion, which I shall describe shortly as a de facto objection to religious