"Methodological naturalism does not yield answers"

In a piece published yesterday in the World Peace Herald, Lloyd Eby (an Assistant Professorial Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University^*) writes:

Even if you favor some form of ID, as I do, you should recognize that the ID proponents vastly overplayed their weak hand in this Dover case and deserved to lose. Nowhere did or do ID proponents perform any of the philosophical heavy lifting needed to show where and how the demarcation should be made between science and non-science, nor did or do they produce any credible attempt - credible to the larger non-ID scientific community - to show how ID could be incorporated into the corpus of received scientific methodology. They also tried to claim that ID is not religion, but they did not give a credible account of how it is either good science and thus not just religion, or how religion and science could or should be merged, if, as I suspect, that is really their view. Because of those catastrophic failures they deserved the scorching that Judge Jones gave them.

All very good - and this is approvingly quoted by Red State Rabble. However, the remainder of Eby's piece is more problematic and deserves less approval.

Eby presents the classic ID playbook by stating:

There is growing evidence that methodological naturalism does not yield answers to some of the most intriguing questions that arise at the edges of today's science. [1] How could an irreducibly complex biological structure come about through evolutionary methods that require gradualism ... [2] how is it that there exist a significant number of physical constants such that if they were different by as little as one part in twenty decimal places (i.e. 1 in 10 to the 20th power) or even less, the universe could not exist? ... [3] If the Big Bang really happened, where did it come from and what came before it? [4] Where did that first living cell come from and how did it come into existence? - the question known in biology as the question or problem of abiogenesis. (Darwinism and neo-Darwinism do not have any answers to the question of abiogenesis.)

Note what he states: "methodological naturalism [MN] does not yield answers" (emphasis mine). This, as Eby himself notes, does by no means imply that naturalistic answers will not be found for each of these "intriguing questions". Indeed, given the success of MN in the past - in particularly its fecundity compared to ID - there is little reason to abandon it. I certainly would not want my physician to do so because we have, as yet, an incomplete understanding of cancer, or a pilot to do so because we have little idea of what causes gravity!

Eby ends his piece predicting

that sometime in the future - say a hundred years hence - this case and Judge's Jones opinion in it will turn out to be seen as having been like the Catholic Church's case against Galileo. Except that this time the winning and losing sides will have switched; the proponents of evolution and scientific naturalism will by then have lost the war against religion and ID, even though they won the Dover battle

Note that Eby (perhaps unconsciously, but rightly) unifies ID and religion. The claim of eventual victory for both is not surprising, given that the World Peace Herald, is a Unification Church news outlet, and like Jonathan Wells, Eby is a UC member (and has been since 1974; he graduated from the Unification Theological Seminary a year before Wells entered in September 1976).

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^*Eby has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Fordham (1988) for a dissertation entitled "Objective Knowledge and the Knowing Subject: The Popper-Kuhn Debate" and thus has some background in the philosophy of science, though at GWU he appears to specialize in teaching business and professional ethics. I am unable to find any peer-reviewed philosophical publications by him. Since 1990 he has been as a contributing editor for The World & I, a magazine published by the Washington Times Company (owned by the Unification Church), and a member of the UC's International Cultural Foundation (source). In 1999, along with the International Coalition for Religious Freedom (a UC-funded group), he fought Maryland's attempts to form a "Task Force to Study the Effects of Cult Activities on Public Senior Higher Education Institutions" (Chris Mooney has more on that here).