God did it! Methodological Naturalism and answers to questions.

Question: why x?

Answer: God did it.

To me there's nothing (well in principle) nothing wrong with this answer. If you look out at a garden where all the tulip bulbs have been dug up and ask: What happend here? Someone can answer squirrels did it. This could very well be the answer in general terms. Similarly I have no problem with God did it in principle as a general terms answer to a question. The problem occures right after when the answer is hollowed up.

Why? How?



With the squirrels this is easy. Squirrels are rodents and need to search for what food they can find often in the form of seeds so that they can power their bodies and survive. They dug up the bulbs using their clawed paws which have been adapted through natural selection to be good and both climbing and diging in soft soil. You can continue with more follow up questions: why seeds? Why do they need food for energy? How do they get energy from foods? Why do squirrels fill this niche? How do their paws work as tools in digging?

This is where using god as an answer fails. We have no evidence of god, no proof that any religious tradition knows his views, no idea how this being we have no evidence for can interact in the world we understand or how these interactions can lead to the results being claimed.

Some people claim that science rejects God as an answer because it's supernatural outside of the bounds of methodological naturalism. Frankly this seems false. The reason god is rejected as an answer is because a mystery was solved with a bigger mystery. One with no explanatory power itself and which offers no further explanation to the original problem. More so this answer is itself often given as if no further questions need be asked in the first place this is maybe the biggest problem with using God as an answer to any question. This is what makes this answer irrelevant not some discussion of what is or isn't natural.

Unless you buy into the fact as I see it that the supernatural is by definition currently understood to be non existent  In which case methodological naturalism becomes so much window dressing. It hides the base idea that you can't explain an existent thing with a non existent thing. That's not natural vs supernatural that's practically the beginnings of logic. A is not B / Existence is not nonexistence.


Picture of the cosmic sky bunny taken from the website for church of the cosmic bunny which I must now explore thoroughly.... I like bunnehs ^.^