Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 29.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Last time I argued that contrary to what you often hear on both sides of the creation

evolution debate, that the contemporary theory of biological evolution does not assert

that mutations are undirected or unguided and that therefore the evolutionary process is purposeless.

Rather we saw that what evolutionary biologists mean when they say that mutations occur randomly

is that they occur irrespective of the benefit that they might bring to the host organism.

And that definition is not at all incompatible with the evolutionary process being directed or guided by God,

or even by God's miraculously intervening in the evolutionary process to cause key mutations

that would bring about evolutionary advance.

Now this raises a related issue, methodological naturalism.

Many philosophers and scientists would argue that science, by its very nature, is committed to a sort

of methodological naturalism.

Now, it's important to understand that this is not synonymous with metaphysical naturalism.

Metaphysical naturalism is a thesis about the nature of reality.

That reality consists simply of space-time and its contents, the physical world.

That's metaphysical naturalism. But methodological

naturalism holds that science seeks only natural explanations for phenomena in the world. It's

simply part of the methodology of science to seek natural explanations

for various effects. And therefore supernatural explanations of some phenomenon would not even be

permitted into the pool of live explanatory options.

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