The Status of Methodological Naturalism as Justified by Precedent -Phil Stilwell -Studies in Liberal The Status of Methodological Naturalism as Justified by Precedent

Methodological naturalism (MN) is often misconstrued as a metaphysical denial of supernatural causation. This paper instead defends MN as a provisional scientific heuristic justified a posteriori by precedent: the cumulative explanatory, predictive, and technological success of inquiries conducted under naturalistic constraints. By contrasting MN with methodological supernaturalism (MSN), the paper traces the historical displacement of supernatural explanations in astronomy, meteorology, medicine, and psychology as natural causal accounts became increasingly coherent and productive. The argument is pragmatic rather than definitional: MN directs inquiry toward hypotheses with empirically accessible mechanisms and constrains the otherwise unlimited range of possible supernatural explanations. Nevertheless, MN does not exclude intermediate supernatural causation in principle. Such causation would warrant scientific consideration if it produced robust, replicable evidence across multiple domains, or if the prevailing naturalistic framework underwent sustained explanatory failure. In the absence of such evidence, epistemic agnosticism is preferable to assigning supernatural causes to unexplained phenomena. The paper concludes that MN remains the most efficient and empirically warranted default for scientific inquiry, particularly as research advances into increasingly complex and counterintuitive domains where conceptual difficulty may otherwise be mistaken for evidence of immaterial causation.