PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM: A LETTER TO AN ATHEIST

The atheist wrote:

·       “So if we can explain the physics involved in the mechanical world, there is no requirement to ascribe supernatural forces to it.”

While science is a valuable tool, it is clearly limited. Scientific explanations can never be complete for a number of reasons. This should be obvious. Science cannot even explain the basics like, What is space? Time? Matter? Light?

Science cannot explain both its origins – where the laws of science came from and what sustains them immutably in a world of constant change. It cannot explain why they function universally and uniformly – why, like other causal factors, they are not localized like a TV or radio station, whose impulses grow more faint the further we move away from them. Nor can science explain why its laws are elegant and knowable.

There are many other things that science cannot tell us. What does sweet taste like? Or love? Or guilt or shame? Science might give us some insight about the workings of a car but tell us little about its designer or Who holds its atoms together.

Most problematic of all -- today’s science is erroneously based upon philosophical naturalism, which only allows natural explanations. However, there is absolutely no evidence available that anything has ever happened or been caused naturally. Perhaps, instead, all of the laws of science (all causation) emanate from the Mind of God.

You might respond that this hypothesis isn’t falsifiable. However, I’d invite you to consider that your hypothesis that everything in science is naturally caused is equally unfalsifiable.

You might also invoke the disappearing “God of the gaps” problem and claim that science in quickly filling the gaps that God had once inhabited. Instead, it could be argued that each scientific advance represents a validation of the God who gave us science. Perhaps instead we should be invoking a “Naturalism of the gaps.”