 I'd like to start with a quote. This is from the Discovery Institute's response to the leaking of the wedge document, which revealed their agenda to overthrow materialism and replace it with a broadly theistic understanding of nature. Far from attacking science, as has been claimed, we are instead challenging scientific materialism, the simplistic philosophy or worldview that claims that all of reality can be reduced to or derived from matter and energy alone. We believe that this is a defense of sound science. They provide their own definition of scientific materialism, the simplistic philosophy that all of reality can be reduced to or derived from matter and energy alone. They say this is bad science. There are some subtle differences between materialism and naturalism that they seem to be confusing. Naturalism is a statement about what exists, but by adding the phrase scientific, which is a process of acquiring knowledge, they've changed the meaning to a question of what answers science should be considering. What they're actually attacking is scientific, or as it's more usually called, methodological naturalism. I'd like to take a minute to explain what that phrase means. To contrast it to philosophical naturalism, and at the end I have a challenge for anyone who agrees with the Discovery Institute that it's not sound science. So what is methodological naturalism? In defining it, it's important to differentiate between philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Philosophical naturalism is the positive assertion that nothing exists outside the natural world. This is an ontological position, that is, it deals with the nature of reality and our ability to perceive it. Many atheists are philosophical naturalists, and the only religious belief system I can think of that would be compatible with philosophical naturalism would be a sort of loose pantheism worship of nature itself, personifying the universe. This is because naturalism would preclude the possibility of the supernatural that is an integral part of most religions. In contrast to philosophical naturalism, methodological naturalism is not a statement of ontology but epistemology. That is, it does not deal with ultimate truth, but merely our perception of the world, how we can know what we know. One can be a deeply religious person and employ methodological naturalism. It simply requires that we acknowledge that the supernatural is invisible to us, that we are unable to perceive, test, or interact with it. This is compatible with most, but not all, religious belief. Why should we even adopt such a view? It's not because of some great point of logic, it's actually just a practical guideline based on our experience. There's never been a natural phenomenon that has been best explained by supernatural forces. If at any point we discover positive evidence for a supernatural force, methodological naturalism will be abandoned in favor of methodological supernaturalism. But the history of science is essentially a history of overthrowing supernatural explanations, showing them to be better explained by natural forces. We've discovered that disease is not divinely inspired, that the motions of the planets are not divinely regulated, and that the soul fleeing a body does not register on a gravimetric scale. Every instance where we ascribe something to demons or angels, magic or fairies has turned out to have a more profound natural explanation. So far I can't think of any supernatural explanations that have shown positive evidence of being true. Now there's a dangerous problem here, and this is something the philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote about. The problem is induction. There's a danger that we rely on our past experiences as a guide to the future. Just because we have never observed something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. For this reason, Popper suggested falsifiability as the standard for theories. It was a way to bypass the negative argument from induction. No explanation that invokes a supernatural force, such as intelligent design creationism, could be falsifiable, so long as the supernatural remains invisible and undetectable. It takes only a cursory glance at their literature to see what the true agenda is. They want God to be part of the science curriculum. Despite their protestations, they really want the direct intervention of supernatural beings to be taught alongside the existing scientific explanations. By contrast, modern evolutionary theory does not require supernatural forces, and each of its predictions can be tested and replicated. It can be mathematically modeled, and simulations and computers can approximate the actual outcomes quite well, using only observed natural forces in the models. The positive assertions of evolutionary theory can be falsified, so it's easy to say that evolution is scientific and intelligent design creationism isn't. This leads me to my challenge. This is not a challenge specifically for the Discovery Institute, but for anyone who like them opposes the use of scientific naturalism. You're welcome to email them about this challenge to see if they have a response. Here's the challenge. Can you cite an instance where the supernatural proved to be the superior explanation to the natural for a phenomenon in the natural world? I'm looking for a case where the empirical evidence showed a supernatural explanation to be the best match to the evidence. This is what they're saying is the case for intelligent design creationism. Surely there's a historical precedent for their belief that scientific materialism is a defunct approach. I'd like clear documentation and well-published data on such a case. I won't limit it to cases where a god or goddess was invoked. Psychic or afterlife explanations are also acceptable, so long as they had no materialistic explanation. I suspect no example will be advanced because there has never been a time when supernatural explanation like ID creationism was found to be superior to a naturalistic or materialistic explanation. I recognize that this is again the inductive problem. That just because magic has never worked before as an explanation doesn't mean it won't work just this once. But does it really make sense to overthrow scientific materialism when it's the only conceptual framework that seems to have produced the slightest advantage in our study of the natural world? Thanks for watching.