LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 216

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

nomena. Likewise, Romans 2:14–15 says that everyone can know something
of God’s moral law, despite its being a transcendent, non-material entity. And
Christ himself clearly distinguishes between body and soul and (unless one
radically reinterprets the plain meaning of Jesus’ words) this makes sense
only if both the soul and the body are entities His hearers know about: “And
do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him
who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).201 Suppose instead
that Jesus had distinguished between some undefined X and our body. If
Jesus had implied that our X is not the same as our body, and that we should
worry about our X as well, this would have conveyed no information because
people do not know what their X is. Jesus’ actual remarks make sense because
people have an innate knowledge or awareness of their souls, despite the fact
that souls are not material entities.
It can be concluded that, in its strong form, scientism is directly opposed
to an authentically Christian worldview. However, there are many weaker
ideologies associated with materialism, and it is often claimed that these
at least are compatible with a Christian worldview. There are several
related attempts to suggest that Christians can, in effect, think as if they are
materialists within the realm of science, even though they are not. Indeed,
some people have claimed that the “scientific method” requires Christians
to bracket their faith in this way. This view has become quite popular
among Christian scientists. The two best-know versions of this strategy are
“methodological naturalism” and the idea that science and religion are “nonoverlapping magisteria.”

c. Methodological naturalism
Philosophical naturalism is the claim that the natural world is all there
is. It is possible to be a naturalist and not a materialist, as, for example, some
“broad” naturalists202 believe that souls and objective moral values are part
of nature.203 Yet most naturalists are materialists of some sort (eliminative,
reductive, or non-reductive), and for many, “naturalism” and “materialism”

201
There are Christian physicalists (such as Kevin Corcoran, Nancey Murphy, and Trenton
Merricks) who claim that human beings are or emerge from physical objects and who deny
the existence of an immaterial soul, but it seems they must implausibly claim that Jesus was
just using the thought-forms of the time (souls do not really exist, but the “soul” is short-hand
for something revealed by modern science), which appears to imply that Jesus was either confused, misleading or simply wrong! Surely, if Jesus is God and knew that the “soul” does not
really exist (or reduces to, or wholly depends on the body), he would not have contrasted the
body with the soul as if they are two different things.
202
Goetz and Taliaferro make the distinction between strict and broad naturalism in their
book Naturalism.

are interchangeable terms. Naturalism still denies that God exists, and if the
naturalist is a materialist, he or she will typically deny the existence of the
soul and objective moral values as well. However, these exclusions are not
required if one embraces only methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is a rule of scientific method which includes a permission clause and
an obligation clause. The permission clause says that scientists may believe in
any entities they want, including supernatural entities like God and angels.
The obligation clause says that within science, however, scientists must act as
if naturalism is true (as if there are no supernatural entities).
The posture of methodological naturalism is defended by a number of
supporting arguments. Some of these are a priori “in principle” arguments, to
the effect that science must by its nature be limited to natural causes. Others
are a posteriori “in fact” arguments, which aim to show that science has been
most successful when it has been guided by methodological naturalism.
These arguments are advanced by both Christians and non-Christians, but
they have also been widely critiqued by both Christians and non-Christians.
This suggests a cautious and balanced approach should be taken in discussing the merit of these arguments, one that attempts to hear out the concerns
on both sides.

1) In-principle arguments for methodological naturalism
Some of the most common in-principle arguments are designed to show
that such immaterial entities as God and the soul cannot be detected by science because science can only discern the existence of entities that behave in
predictable ways. The problem with immaterial entities, it is argued, is that if
an immaterial God (or the soul) has free will, there is no way for a scientist to
control or predict what such a being will do. Therefore, it is claimed, science
is better off studying material entities that behave in regular ways.
Thus, for example, Michael Ruse famously argued at the Arkansas
creation-science trial of 1981–1982204 that science can only account for those
phenomena produced in accordance with natural law. Having free will, neither
God nor souls are governed by natural law, and so appealing to these supernatural entities does not qualify as a scientific explanation. Closely connected
with Ruse’s point are several other concerns. In science, we generally accept
a result only if it is replicable. The free actions of God or a soul, however,
need never be repeated, nor need diverse actions conform to some overarching pattern. For related reasons, some worry that appeal to God or souls is
empirically sterile, because it leads to no interesting predictions and because
science cannot work with such entities since they are not experimentally controllable. One cannot specify conditions, or design an experiment, such that it

203
Thus there are atheistic moral Platonists who think that nature includes both physical objects and forces and a realm of moral values or virtues. For example, see Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality Without God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Erik Wielenberg,
“In Defense of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism,” Faith and Philosophy 26:1 (2009),
23–41.

204
See “A Philosopher’s Day in Court” and “Witness Testimony Sheet,” both in M. Ruse, ed.,
But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Question (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988).

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is reasonable to expect God or a soul to do something, since they can always
choose to do otherwise.

was assassinated only once. In historical science, the focus is not repeatable
types of events, but particular, singular events. They are not controllable,
because there are no conditions under which those events could recur. So in
these cases, scientists are not looking for a law of nature and do not use inductive logic, since they are not trying to understand the relation between a class
of causes and a class of effects, but a singular cause of a singular effect.

Another set of concerns centers on what counts as a scientific explanation.
The worry is that appeal to God or souls is a “science stopper,” which commits the “God of the gaps” (or “soul of the gaps”) fallacy. The first concern is
that if we say that God or a soul did something, there seems nothing more to
be said. This would discourage scientists from further investigation of possible causal mechanisms. The second concern is that appeal to God or souls is
really an argument from ignorance: it takes the form, since we do not know how
some surprising phenomenon arises, it must be that God or a soul did it. But from
the fact that we do not know a statement to be true, it does not follow that it
is false —otherwise, centuries of uncertainty about whether the Earth is moving would imply that it was not. Thus, scientists may urge that our current
inability to understand a natural mechanism that could produce a remarkable
phenomenon does not mean that no such mechanism will ever be discovered.
All of these arguments have some force, in the sense that there are many
areas of science in which the concerns raised make a great deal of sense. This
is because much of science is concerned with investigating secondary causes
within nature and pursues a paradigm sometimes called operations science.
In operations science, scientists focus on repeatable and controllable205 and
therefore predictable effects. They are interested in cases where it is possible
for us to isolate and analyze a tractable, physical mechanism that accounts for
the phenomenon. In this domain, methodological naturalism is, at the least,
a very reasonable rule of thumb, because the goal is to discover a natural
regularity, one which relates natural causes with natural effects in a predictable way. The underlying logic of operations science is inductive logic, which
looks for repeating patterns of causation and infers a general law. This logic
can only be used if there are predictable connections between causes and
effects, and therefore is unsuited to investigating the free actions of God and
souls.
Problems arise, however, if it is claimed that methodological naturalism
is (or is part of) a universal scientific method, one that applies in all domains
of science. This is mainly because not all of science is operations science. In
the historical science paradigm, scientists focus on singular (non-repeatable)
events. For example, they may investigate the origin of the cosmos, the mass
extinction of dinosaurs, a particular volcanic eruption, a crime, or any other
historical event which, in all of its specificity, cannot be repeated, even if there
are similar events (e.g., other extinctions, volcanic eruptions or crimes of the
same sort). There was just one origin of the cosmos, and Abraham Lincoln

Instead, in historical science, scientists investigate the evidential traces
surrounding a particular event, consider the range of possible, plausible
explanations, and seek to infer the one that is the best current explanation.206
This turns out to be quite a sophisticated process, but the main idea is that
the best current explanation will be the one that not only covers the available data, but also appeals to an entity with the causal powers required to
explain it.207 This leads to a major contrast with operations science. It is to
be expected that operations science will center its attention exclusively on
the investigation of natural causes of natural effects, so it will operate within
methodological naturalism. But in historical science, it appears impossible
to justify an a priori presumption in favor of natural causes. To be sure, there
are many cases where scientists have discovered particular natural causes of
particular natural effects (e.g., the plate movements that caused a volcanic
eruption). But in the competition for best data coverage and requisite causal
power, there is no guarantee that the best candidate explanation will be one
appealing solely to natural causes.
This is particularly clear if “natural causes” are defined to include only
those undirected causes that feature in the theories of modern, physical
science. These causes include events that happen of necessity (as a result of
natural law) or by chance (e.g., the decay of a radioactive nucleus), but they
exclude the intelligent actions of an agent (such as God or souls). There are
several kinds of cases where an intelligent cause seems to be a better explanation of the phenomena than an undirected cause. In some cases, the intelligent
cause clearly resides within nature; in other cases, it is plausible that the cause
transcends nature, and may even be God, although this usually does not follow from the scientific evidence alone.
Examples of the first kind of case include forensic science, archaeology, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence (SETI). For example, when forensic science investigates a fire,
it will consider three main kinds of explanation: (1) natural necessity (e.g.,
the circuits were overloaded and this caused the fire); (2) chance (e.g., while
repainting a building, workers accidentally caused contact between worn
insulators creating a closed circuit and this caused the fire); or (3) design (e.g.,
there was a deliberate act of arson). To protect themselves against fraudulent

205
Of course, scientists do not literally control the orbit of a planet. But it is controllable in the
sense that the scientist can reliably specify the conditions which govern the planet’s path, so
that if those conditions obtain, the orbit is predictable. Operations science requires controllability in addition to repeatability. Even God or souls could repeat the same type of event, but that
would not make it any easier to predict their future actions.

206
See Carol Cleland, “Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science
and Experimental Science,” in Philosophy of Science, 69:3 (September 2002), 474–496.

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207

See Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (New York: Routledge, 2004).