Methodological Naturalism and the Case of the Waving Statue

I have noted the case of Michael Shermer twice now and I thought I would return to it and provide the full transcript. This is very instructive because Shermer, a well known skeptic and agnostic/atheist, shows just how recalcitrant so-called open-minded skeptics can be to evidence.

The excerpt comes from a program on miracles which was broadcast a year ago on the UK's "Unbelievable" and is available here.

To begin with, Shermer says:

"What's curious for us from the skeptic's perspective, the scientific perspective, is why the things that are miraculously healed are always those things that might've gotten better anyway. Uh, cancers or tumors go into remission, um, uh you know certain illnesses just seem to just go away and doctors say ‘Gee I don't really know. Um, yet and those things do happen. And yet certain things never happen, like growing a new limb for an amputee. Why doesn't God heal amputees? It's a legitimate question."

Yes that is a legitimate question. But I'm more interested in Shermer's epistemology. Is it sufficient to say that if it is possible to explain an event through natural, undirected processes (i.e. undirected by an intelligence) then we ought to do so?

The Waving Statue

Surely this cannot be right. As I have noted, it is consistent with the laws of physics that the atoms of a solid object would move. So let's say that there is a brass statue of a soldier astride his horse in the city park. I go to the park distraught about the meaning of life and cry out "God if you're there, please give me a sign!" Suddenly the statue waves at me. Would it make sense for me to conclude "Well it is consistent with the laws of physics that that event was the result of natural, undirected processes, so I should conclude that it was. And that means no sign and no God."

Shermer the Open-minded Skeptic?

Would Shermer reason like this? You might think he would not. (Like me, you also might hope he would not.) After all, in the above quote he seems to distinguish amputees regrowing limbs as a case so extraordinary, so apart from the run-of-the-mill healing claims (like "God healed my arthritis! Ouch. He really did! Groan...") that it would warrant an intelligent and presumably supernatural cause. So perhaps he does distinguish a class of sufficiently unusual cases that would be miraculous.

Shermer the Dogmatist

But then as Shermer continues the conversation it becomes increasingly clear that he aligns himself with a rigorous methodological naturalism according to which there simply could not be such miraculous cases. For instance, he says: "The fact that we don't know something doesn't mean it's miraculous. It just means we don't know it."

Host Justin Brierley asks:

"Is that something you do that kinda influences you Michael, the fact that you are an atheist, you don't believe in the supernatural, so a priori your presupposition is that there must be a natural ex it must always be a natural explanation in these claims of healing...?"

Shermer replies:

"There's no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There's just the natural, the normal, and the stuff we haven't explained yet."

[With this statement Shermer skips merrily over from methodological naturalism to metaphysical naturalism. Methodological naturalism doesn't deal with the supernatural at all, and certainly makes no claims about its existence. So what is Shermer? A metaphysical naturalist of opportunity?]

Shermer then begins to suggest that not even limb regeneration would warrant anything beyond natural causes. He observes that salamanders regenerate their limbs and thus that it may be that the human body is able to do so as well under certain conditions which we do not presently understand. Thus Shermer concludes that he would not accept divine action even in the case of a regenerating limb:

"so if it started happening and somebody said ‘God did it' I would want to know, ‘Really? How did he do it?'"

Consistent with what he has said, it follows that if Shermer witnessed a pastor pray in Jesus name for an amputee and then saw a limb immediately grow, he would retain his methodological naturalist assumptions that the event must be explained through natural, undirected processes alone.

No Possible Evidence?

This seems to be a shockingly dogmatic, indeed irrational approach to evidence. Understandably Justin Brierley is interested to see if there is any event which would be so unusual that Shermer would consider his methodological naturalism inadequate to deal with it. But when he presses Shermer on the point, Shermer replies with a joke by that 10 million dollars transferred into a Swiss bank account under his name would convince him of the miraculous.

But is this really the time for recycled Woody Allen jokes? If Shermer were in the park would he think the waving statue was a miraculous sign or not? How many other skeptics are this dogmatically recalcitrant to evidence?