Natural science is that science which investigates contingent facts about the material world through empirical observation, experiment, and induction. Its method deliberately restricts itself to the measurable, the repeatable, and the falsifiable. This methodological self-restriction is often called methodological naturalism — a designation that Plantinga criticizes, because it presents a philosophical pre-decision as a methodological necessity (see below).
Reach and limit
The strength of natural science lies in its methodological rigor: it asks after the causal connections of material processes and has thereby produced insights of enormous reach. Its limit lies precisely where its method ends: it can grasp only what can be quantified, measured, and experimentally reproduced.
Personhood is not an empirically measurable property. It is neither a physical parameter nor a biological finding, but an ontological reality that in principle eludes the natural-scientific method. Natural science can therefore methodologically neither affirm nor deny the genuine concept of person — not out of weakness, but out of methodological self-restriction.
Demarcation from scientism
Scientism transforms this methodological self-restriction into an ontological thesis: only what is natural-scientifically measurable is real. That is a philosophical fallacy — an encroachment of the method upon being. Natural science itself does not claim this; scientism puts it into its mouth.
Husserl showed in the Crisis that natural science tacitly presupposes the lifeworld — the pre-scientific world of experience. Natural science rests on foundations it cannot itself lay: on the experience of the cognizing subject, on logic, on the principle of non-contradiction. These foundations belong to philosophy.
Critique of methodological naturalism
Methodological naturalism — the demand that science may admit only natural causes — is no necessary condition of science, but a philosophical pre-decision. Alvin Plantinga showed that Newton, Kepler, and Boyle pursued science explicitly within the framework of theistic convictions. If methodological naturalism is absolutized, it leads to scientism: from “science finds no supernatural causes” the fallacy follows that there are none.
Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) shows further that ontological naturalism cancels itself: if our cognitive faculties were selected only for adaptive behavior, there is no reason to credit them with the capacity for truth — and thus no reason to hold naturalism itself to be true.
Max Planck formulated this critique from within natural science itself: natural science presupposes the existence of a real external world, the validity of causality, and the reproducibility of measurements — presuppositions that are not obtained empirically but are metaphysical. Consistent positivism issues in “unreasonable solipsism”.
Relation to philosophy
Natural science and philosophy do not stand in contradiction but complement each other, provided each respects its limits. Natural science investigates the contingent facts of the material world; philosophy asks after the necessary structures of being, after the essence of the person, after the good and the true. Conflicts arise only when one side claims the competence of the other.
Ontological classification
Superordinate concepts: Science
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Science
- presupposes: sensory cognition (German)
- is illegitimately universalized by: Scientism
- complements: Philosophy
- is ontologically grounded by: Philosophy, Lifeworld
Chapter assignment: Chapter 2: Method (German)
See also
- Science
- Philosophy
- Scientism
- Lifeworld
- Phenomenological Method
- Personhood
- Edmund Husserl
- Alvin Plantinga
- Max Planck
- Positivism
- Solipsism
- Causa finalis
- Duhem-Quine thesis
- Falsificationism
- Pierre Duhem
- Willard Van Orman Quine
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Husserl, Edmund (1936): Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Husserliana Vol. VI, The Hague: Nijhoff 1954.
- Plantinga, Alvin (2011): Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Planck, Max (1937): “Religion und Naturwissenschaft”. In: Vorträge und Erinnerungen. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1949, pp. 318—333.