12 Evolution and the Fossil Record
could be caused by evil spirits inside us trying to escape; stock market fluctuations
could be caused by the secret manipulations of powerful extraterrestrials. Scientists
reject such claims on the grounds of parsimony. All of those claims are possible, but
they require adding complicated entities which there is no adequate evidence for. To
make matters worse, the nature of those entities effectively prevents investigation of
them, and the impossibility of investigation prevents us from learning anything new
about them. We cannot conclude that any of those explanations are wrong. But from
a scientific standpoint, they are worse than wrong; they are useless.Johnson also shows that he has not read much about the history or philosophy of science
(which is odd, considering that the whole debate is about a central point in the philosophy
of science). Methodological naturalism arose out of necessity more than 400 years ago when
early scientists tried to make sense of their universe and realized that as long as the prevail-
ing attitude was “God did it this way—end of story,” our scientific understanding of nature
would go nowhere. Yet all of these early scientists were religious men, not atheists trying to
dispose of God. Indeed, Isaac Newton is probably more responsible for scientific naturalism
than anyone. Newtonian physics showed how the universe could function completely with-
out supernatural intervention. Yet Newton spent far more of his time and energy exploring
religious questions than doing physics! In the centuries that followed, methodological natu-
ralism became ingrained in science. When the great mathematician and astronomer Pierre
Laplace presented a copy of his 1799 book on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, who asked
where God fit in, Laplace replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.” He wasn’t saying that
he was an atheist—only that supernatural intervention did nothing to help us understand
the motion of the heavenly bodies and that the entire enterprise would become unscientific
if supernaturalism were introduced.
A similar transformation from supernaturalism to naturalism took place in many other
fields of science over this period. For example, until about 1780, geologists tried to explain
the record of the earth’s history by stories such as Noah’s flood. But in 1788 the great Scot-
tish geologist James Hutton introduced a naturalistic view of the earth (often called uni-
formitarianism or actualism) that used present-day understanding of natural earth processes
to decipher the past. Even though he was devout, Hutton did not resort to Bible stories
to explain the rock record, because he could see that they had led nowhere after centuries
of theological debate, whereas naturalistic explanations provided a whole new view of the
earth. For about 40 years, there was continual strife between the uniformitarians and the
old-line “catastrophists” such as German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner, who still
used untestable supernatural explanations for the earth. But by the time Charles Lyell (who
was devoutly religious, as were most British scientists of his time) published Principles of
Geology in 1830–1833, the case for a naturalistic explanation of the earth was overwhelming,
and supernaturalism in geology died soon thereafter. Today, the label “catastrophism” is
so tainted with supernaturalism and untestability that when there is evidence that natu-
ral catastrophes happened on the earth (such as the impact of asteroids or gigantic glacial
floods), many geologists were reluctant to accept the evidence.
Finally, Johnson makes another assumption that reveals his bigotry and lack of under-
standing of religion. He writes (1991:115) that “scientific naturalism makes the same point
by starting with the assumption that science, which studies only the natural, is our only
reliable path to knowledge. God who can never do anything that makes a difference, and