I understand methodological naturalism in science but philosophical naturalism is what goes unchecked and is wrongly considered synonymous with science to many.
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You made a correct distinction between science and empericism, Packfan.  However, you used some very loaded and incorrect terms.
 
"Philosophical naturalism"?   I really don't know what that is.  Empericism, now that is what I think you meant to say.  Empericism is a philosophy with a long, and very rich history.
 
Aristotle and therefore the great Aristotle thief, St. Thomas Aquinas can be both considered empericists.
 
Roger Bacon (born around 1214)
Sir Francis Bacon, b. 1561
Thomas Hobbes, b. 1588
John Locke, b. 1632                            This is, of course, a very incomplete list.  Leaving off
Sir Isaac Newton, 1643                      some very  notable empericists.
George Berkeley, b. 1685
Francis Hutcheson, b. 1694
David Hume, b. 1711
  
Wow.  A philosophical tradition of success for empericism going back to 384 B.C.E.!  Aristotle's empericism was so successful that it was morphed into Scholasticism and became the public philosophy of ALL churches until the 1700's when a new flavor of empericism took over, now called Empericism.
 
This was left pretty much untouched until the 1910's to 1920's when empericism was modified by the Vienna Circle and called Logical Positivism.  This lasted until the 1940's (it was dead by the middle of the 1940's) to be replaced by a new version of empericism constructed by Karl Popper (which is what the current 21'st century empericism is based on.)
 
Later, in the 1960's, with Philosophers of Science such as Lawerence Bonjour and Thomas Kuhn, an anti-realist version of empericism was born, substituting different Theories of Truth  for the Correspondence Theory of Truth.
 
Other notable modern empericists are W.V.O. Quine, Ernst Mach, Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein.
 
Golly, with a record of success going back to 300 B.C.E. it is no wonder why people have Empericism and Science conflated to the same thing.  There hasn't been ANY success in ANY science without empericism!

I'll bet relious people were saying that about people who started to suspect that demon possession and other backwards beliefs of the religous had a natural explaination.  It is also why Gallileo was imprisoned for the blasphemy of saying that the earth was not the center of the universe. Face it, religous people have been using the "god of the gaps" for eons. They have been proven wrong everytime. It is laziness at it's worst.

I'll bet relious people were saying that about people who started to suspect that demon possession and other backwards beliefs of the religous had a natural explaination.  It is also why Gallileo was imprisoned for the blasphemy of saying that the earth was not the center of the universe. Face it, religous people have been using the "god of the gaps" for eons. They have been proven wrong everytime. It is laziness at it's worst.

 

I don't think that everything unexplained by natural causes can only be explained by supernatural causes.  I just don't rule out supernatural causes b/c it doesn't fit into the way I'd like for the world to be.

" I just don't rule out supernatural causes b/c it doesn't fit into the way I'd like for the world to be."

 

Neither do I. It is just that phenomenon have never been attributed to supernatural causes, ever.  There  is always a rational and physical explaination.  It started with Galileo and has continued until today.  That is the reason religion requires "faith" to this very day.  There is no evidence for that "faith", that is why it is called faith and not the assurance one gets from facts and evidence.  You try and paint me as a person who sees what they want to see.  I am a person who sees what is and does not want to see a supernatural reason.  There is no evidence for the supernatural and never has been.  I think is a safe assumption that it does not exist, save in the minds of people who believe it does. Nothing wrong with that, but lets face facts.

The christian religion will soon go to the realms of the religions of Zeus, Thor, Odin, Kali.....Why don't you believe in any of those gods pack?  When you tell me the reason,  it will be your understanding of why I don't believe in the christian, jewish or muslim god.  You see the old adage of me just disbelieving one more god than you do is true and verifiable.  You are an athiest just like me.  You are an athiest to people who believe other myths of man.  Understand that and you will understand my rationality as to the subject of the supernatural.

I just don't rule out supernatural causes b/c it doesn't fit into the way I'd like for the world to be.

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Which means you have no evidence or no reason other than your own personal opinion.
 
That is fine, but don't try to constrain science by your own personal opinion, then.

Living here in the southern US, I sometimes dispair that we are sinking into another dark age, with the forces here trying distort good science to conform to their ancient religious texts.  But then again, I wonder if  instead (in the bigger picture) the increased religious frenzy in the desert religions (particularly Islam and Christianity)  is really the death gasps of the superstitions and the stranglehold they've had on world progress and rational thinking. 

 How many more generations will accept without question, people turning to pillars or salt, living 900+ years, or  a worldwide flood that is virtually impossible and completely unsubstantiated in our geology and biology?  How many more generations will accept God coming to earth as his son to serve as a blood sacrifice for himself so that he can forgive us for being exactly like he made us to start with?   How many hundreds of predictions of his return will it take before people give it up?   Will future generations continue to accept walking on water, burning bushes and virgin births, all with no proof, just a highly edited bunch of ancient writings (written by people we know nothing about except that they were hopelessly ignorant and barbaric by today's standards)?   Maybe that kind of unquestioning belief is actually declining, and that's causing the fervor in the institutions themselves.

Maybe what seems to be a resurgence of religious dogma and superstition is really just the convulsions before we accept that these religions are no more or less superstition than any of the others throughout history. I probably won't see it, it would take generations - the grasp of religion is so powerful.  But maybe? 

I  happen to think we would be better off.

There are NO atheists in foxholes their whole Logic is flawed and as thin or nonexistent as Jessica Simpsons underwear.

 

There are NO atheists in foxholes their whole Logic is flawed and as thin or nonexistent as Jessica Simpsons underwear.

Thank you for that completely unsupported, and provably false, drive-by posting.

lol..funny how they do that. Nothing to back it up, so the answer is to post and run.

 

Utter nonsense.  There are plenty of 'atheists in foxholes'; there are many people  who face their end with dignity without belief in  god(s). 

 

There are NO atheists in foxholes their whole Logic is flawed and as thin or nonexistent as Jessica Simpsons underwear.

 

Beg to differ seeing as I am one.

I am an honorably discharged veteran. 

There are NO atheists in foxholes

------------------------ acliche'

Actually-it's hard to believe that a loving god would let any of us end up in a foxhole-isn't it? Afterall-isn't god supposed to have created ALL the people, on both sides of any war? How could he choose to let some of them be brutally murdered for no other reason-ever-than greed? More likely, sitting in a foxhole waiting to die while watching hideous carnage makes disbelievers out of many.

Yeah, funny how gods require human assistance to fight their wars/jihads/crusades.

God did not create foxholes nor did He create wars, that was man's doing. Why are people so anxious to jump on the "How could God allow..." wagon. He wrote the Ten Commandments and I don't recall seeing Thou shall commit heinous act of war and kill each other, anywhere in them. Sinful man has done that in disobedience to Gods word and the devil works overtime in the hearts of the people who reject God. I hope someday you will open your heart and mind enough to see that.

"God did not create foxholes nor did He create wars, that was man's doing. Why are people so anxious to jump on the "How could God allow..." wagon. He wrote the Ten Commandments and I don't recall seeing Thou shall commit heinous act of war and kill each other, anywhere in them. Sinful man has done that in disobedience to Gods word and the devil works overtime in the hearts of the people who reject God. I hope someday you will open your heart and mind enough to see that."

 

Songbirds- whose god are you referring to? There are 10,000 so called "deities" worshipped on this planet today and none of them have the same characteristics or belief systems as the others. Also according to your particular form of dogma did not your god supposedly create all human kind? If so he/she/it sure did a lousy job in the common sense department. Also your god did not write the ten commandements, they were written and created by humans, humans that at that time wanted nothing more than to control others. And also along your "train of thought" good ol" Bush who professes to be doing god's will, is responsible for the war in Iraq and all the deaths it has produced. So Bush is sinful? Nahhh...

God did not create foxholes nor did He create wars, that was man's doing.

On that we can agree.  However, religion has been the catalyst for more than its fair share of war and strife.  Neither side thinks of themselves as the bad guy of course, but invoking their deity is an awfully convenient way to do evil while labeling it good.

Why are people so anxious to jump on the "How could God allow..." wagon.

Perhaps because after many centuries of asking this question, theologians have yet to give a satisfactory answer.  The existence of evil suggests that if a god(s) existed, he/she/they/it was either unwilling or unable to do anything about evil.  That pretty much eliminates omnipotence (being all-powerful), omnibenevolence (being all-good), or both.

The closest thing I've come across as an almost satisfactory answer to the existence of evil is that the god allows it because we have free will, and so naturally some of us humans choose to commit evil.  This assumes that free will is an either/or thing, though.  Most humans are probably a lot more repulsed by pedophilia than by regular murder.  And yet it could be argued that both pedophiles and murderers are exercising their free will when they choose to commit those acts.  However, I'm guessing pedophilia is nowhere near as common as murder, because we have stronger tendencies against it.  So why couldn't a creator god have made us humans as repulsed by murder, or by any other act of evil, as we are by something as awful as pedophilia?  That would certainly cut down on the amount of evil in the world while leaving our free wills intact.  The fact that we were supposedly created the way we are means that a creator god wasn't really interested in minimizing the amount of evil in the world.

He wrote the Ten Commandments

Let's not confuse knowledge with beliefs....

and I don't recall seeing Thou shall commit heinous act of war and kill each other, anywhere in them.

Have you not read the bible?  "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:  I came not to send peace, but a sword.  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.  And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."  Matthew 10:34-36.  The bible is full of far more violence, cruelties, injustice, and bloodshed than any Hollywood film I've ever seen, or any book I've ever read.

Sinful man

So you believe man is inherently evil?  What an...anti-humanity worldview.  I must also go back to the issue of why a creator god would have made us inherently evil rather than inherently good.

has done that in disobedience to Gods word

Which god?  Which words?

and the devil works overtime in the hearts of the people who reject God.

I see.  So you also believe that humans are evil, but atheists are extra-evil?  Your god must really hate, and your devil really love, rational thinking.  Because that's all that's really needed to reject believing in myths and superstitions.

I hope someday you will open your heart and mind enough to see that.

It sure seems like one of us is in need of broadening their worldview, but I'm not so sure it's the atheists.  Science has done a great job of advancing mankind out of barbarism and into prosperous civility.  What has religion delivered to the world, other than strife and a darkness of the mind?