Two years ago, John F Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University gave a lecture at Duke University entitled "God After Darwin: Evolution and the Question of Divine Providence." I found the lecture to be very helpful in understanding the major points of Haught's book, which I reviewed on the "Books" page of this website.

The lecture is concisely summarized by the following quote:

"Theology can accept Darwin not in spite of but because of evolution's recipe: accidents, natural selection, and deep time."

The full lecture can be viewed here.

I have decided to take a more pro-active role as an advocate for science education. So, I have started a new blog focused solely on the teaching of consensus scientific understandings in public schools:

stand up for REAL science

Check it out!

Over at the KCFS Discussion Forum, Greg Myers has posted an essay that I think nicely summarizes the theological problems with Creationism.

Here's his introduction:

After some years of trying (with little success) to convince creationists that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, it has become clear that the objection is primarily theological, and not evidential. The reason that creationists will not accept evolution is because it contradicts their theology, and no amount of reasoning concerning evolution will address that.

This leads me to the conclusion that more attention needs to be placed on the theology of creationism. There are at least two faulty assumptions creationists make. First, that the Bible should be taken as “literal” truth, and second, that the God of the Bible would deceive humans (plant misleading evidence) as to the origins of the natural world by making it seem that the world is one way (old), while it is actually some other way (young).

You can read the rest here.

Methodological naturalism, as I understand it, is not a "naturalist world view." It is simply a term that describes a practical and fruitful technique for learning about physical phenomena.

Science involves the testing of hypotheses. In order to be scientifically useful, a hypothesis must make predictions that can be tested and verified by repeatable observations. If a hypothesis cannot be tested and verified by repeatable observations, then it does not qualify as a scientific explanation. That doesn’t mean the proposed explanation is necessarily wrong, just that it’s not scientific.

Science does make a few philosophical assumptions, but they are what most people would consider common sense. For one, science assumes that phenomena are continuous. In other words, in order to do science we assume that the past really happened and that what we observe happening today will continue into the future. Science also assumes that there is an external physical reality apart from our internal consciousness. That’s really about it as far as assumptions are concerned.

Despite claims to the contrary, science does not assume naturalism. In general, scientists do not rule out non-natural explanations a priori. If you can propose a testable hypothesis based on it, then it can be scientifically tested. Indeed, so-called "supernatural" causes have been the subject of scientific investigations (i.e. prayer efficacy studies). However, at this point, "supernatural" causes have not been incorporated into scientific explanations because none of the experiments designed to test them have yielded positive results that were independently verifiable. Of course, if such experiments ever did yield positive results, scientists would most likely drop the "supernatural" label.

Some people say that methodological naturalism is a restriction on science. I see it as more of a description of science. Science is based solely on "natural" explanations simply because the things we call "supernatural" have yet to yield repeatable, verifiable observations.

When investigating an unknown phenomenon, the history of science has shown that a "natural" explanation is the best bet. "Methodological naturalism" is merely a description of the fact that scientists routinely bet on "natural" explanations.