A friend of mine likes to invest in stocks. He understands computer companies so he trades only those stocks. This limitation makes for a simple and straightforward investing strategy. Evolutionists also limit themselves. They investigate only those phenomena that are the result of strictly natural causes. This limitation makes for a simple and straightforward research strategy, though it does create a blind spot.

An investor who buys only computer company stocks can easily identify those companies. He can find companies that build computers, computer components, computer software, and so forth. But how can evolutionists know whether the causes of a past event are strictly natural? How can evolutionists decide which phenomena fall into their research program?

The answer is they can't. Evolutionists have no test for naturalism. They have no way of knowing whether a phenomenon is the result of strictly natural causes.

Imagine an evolutionist using natural laws and processes to describe a phenomenon that does not follow such laws and processes. By searching and searching, he may find a partial fit. So he may have some success, but there are always unexplained observables—data anomalies for which the naturalistic explanation cannot account. Naturalistic explanations will always be problematic. More data will be collected, further analysis will be done, and theories will be modified or replaced altogether. All good scientific research and—in this hypothetical example of a non natural phenomenon—wrong.

When problems are encountered there is no way to tell whether the correct naturalistic solution has simply not yet been found, or whether the phenomenon itself is non natural. Non natural phenomenon can be confused with natural ones, and science has no tools for detecting this, for there is no mechanism within science to detect non natural phenomenon.

Consider the following example. What if it were found that a code existed in all living species and that, within each organism, complicated machinery was used to read vast amounts of stored information via the code? The machinery was so complicated that it automatically (i) read the information, (ii) used the code to interpret the information, and (iii) acted on the instructions.

And what if, after decades of research, no naturalistic explanation could be found for how the code and machinery arose? Even in this example, scientists could not know if naturalistic explanations have been exhausted. There are many problems with naturalistic explanations for the existence of the code and associated machinery. The problem seems to defy naturalistic explanation. But there could be a plausible explanation for how the code arose which has not yet been discovered. And how could anyone prove otherwise? To prove that a plausible explanation does not exist is far more difficult than simply continuing the search for such explanations. For to prove that no explanation exists requires knowledge about all possible explanations.

And what if there were hundreds of other such problems for which naturalistic explanations offered little more than speculation and were consistently falsified?

The answer is, of course, "so what?" Evolutionists cannot consider the possibility that there is no naturalistic explanation. This is science's blind spot. If a theory of natural history has problems—and many of them have their share—the problems are always viewed as research problems and never as paradigm problems.

Evolutionists continue to search for naturalistic explanations for hard problems because they must. Like Sisyphus forever pushing the stone up the hill, they must pursue naturalistic explanations no matter how unlikely. Imagine if they did not. What if, at some point, they were to give up? If they did, then they might miss an undiscovered solution. They might have been on the cusp of a stunning new discovery. One cannot stop trying because the problem seems too difficult—this would be stopping science in its tracks.

Consider the problem of the planet Uranus. After its discovery Uranus did not seem to orbit the sun correctly. Could there be an unknown force perturbing the planet? Uranus's orbit could be explained by the presence of yet another planet. This was one idea to explain the strange orbit of Uranus, and it led to the discovery of the next planet, Neptune.

Imagine if astronomers had considered that Uranus's anomalous path was due to non naturalistic causes. Perhaps an invisible giant was blowing on the planet. Then the prediction and subsequent discovery of Neptune would not have occurred. Deciding on non naturalistic causes can be a science stopper.

How can we decide when a scientific problem is not a research problem, but a paradigm problem? Naturalism has no criteria, no set of rules by which to make such a judgment. And no one wants to turn science's attention away from the future discoveries. In fact, phenomena that are more daunting for naturalism are also more tantalizing, for their explanations will be more surprising and dramatic. Not only does science have a blind spot, not knowing if it has stumbled upon an unsolvable problem, but there is a certain allure of such problems. No one knows what will be science's next "Neptune."

This helps to explain the hesitancy of scientists to admit that non natural phenomena might exist. In science we follow Descartes' prescription and approach everything using naturalistic explanations. It also helps to explain the tolerance for improbable theories. Historical theories, no matter how erroneous they may seem, could be just a "Neptune" away from falling into place.

All of this helps to explain how such an implausible theory as evolution persists. It is underwritten not only by theological conviction that natural causes must suffice, but by a philosophy of science that cannot abide any other possibility, no matter how implausible evolution becomes.

Finally someone has stated the obvious: Evolution does not play a crucial role in life science research. Of course evolution, like the flat earth theory, does make some helpful predictions. But one need not have one eye on the evolution text in order to rightly do life science research, as Steven Shapin explains:

I have taught many talented biology students, both in the US and the UK, who could not give a coherent account of evolution by natural selection – teleology remains strikingly popular – and while it may or may not be the case that
evolution provides the conceptual ‘foundation’ of life science, it is certainly not the case that biologists need to have command of any such theory to do competent work, for example, on the sex life of marine worms, on algal photosynthesis, or on the nucleotide sequence of breast cancer genes. Lots of practitioners of lots of modern expert practices turn out not to be very good at articulating their practices’ supposed foundations.

Don't count the evolutionary myth of self-importance to go away anytime soon though.

In her recent paper, The Non-epistemology of Intelligent Design: Its Implications for Public Policy, evolutionary philosopher Barbara Forrest states that science must be restricted to natural phenomena. In its investigations, science must restrict itself to a naturalistic methodology, where explanations must be strictly naturalistic, dealing with phenomena that are strictly natural. This is the consensus position of evolutionists and, in typical fashion, Forrest uses this criteria to exclude origins explanations that allow for the supernatural. Only evolutionary explanations, in one form or another, are allowed. She writes:

The sciences are unified by their naturalistic methodology and empiricist epistemology, a unity ... that can take us to the outer reaches of natural phenomena, but never beyond them. When we move beyond the epistemic boundaries that these faculties and rules set for us and the correspondingly limited metaphysical boundaries they enable us to define, we move from the relative epistemological safety of knowledge to the unmapped, supernatural territory of faith.

That seems like a reasonable philosophy of science insofar as it goes. But how then would Forrest have us implement this limitation? For there is a three-way tug of war between method, realism and completeness. One can mandate any two of these three, but not all three. The underlying problem here is that we don't know the truth at the outset.

For instance, if we mandate a naturalistic methodology as do evolutionists, then this restriction may rule out true explanations in some cases. We have no way of knowing if method restrictions will rule out the truth, because we don't know the truth.

This means we'll either have to settle for explanations that may be false (as did Descartes), or for explanations for only the subset of phenomena that match up with our method restriction (as did Bacon).

The first option mandates method and completeness but sacrifices realism. The second option mandates method and realism but sacrifices completeness. Finally, the third option is to mandate completeness and realism but sacrifice restrictions on method. Historically this was the favored position of moderate empiricists.

Within this larger context we can see that Forrest falls into the second option, mandating method and realism but sacrificing completeness. The question for Forrest and the evolutionists then is: What is the boundary between natural phenomena and supernatural phenomena?

Forrest tells us science must never violate this boundary, so it is important that we discern it. We need to distinguish between natural and supernatural phenomena? How can science know when it is investigating a supernatural phenomena rather than a natural one? Bacon wrestled with this problem. What does Forrest have to say?