The term God could mean different things depending on the topic. Regardless, however, to use the term “God” to mean both supernaturalism and the theistic God (particularly of the Abrahamic religion) is an inexcusable sloppiness—often done on purpose to confuse matters and sneak in arguments from supernaturalism in support of the theistic God. My use of the term God is always intended to mean the latter, which is far from the typical definition of supernaturalism as being outside of nature and thus the purview of naturalistic explanation.

The Abrahamic God is indeed no idle bystander concerning the material world. He splits the ocean, stops the rain, creates fire out of thin air, turns humans to statue instantly and breathes life to inanimate objects, raises the dead, and in some (recent) accounts, might even have ‘guided’ evolution. This God is clearly very much into the natural world and, if not He directly, His interactions with the natural world are accessible to naturalistic inquiry. Of course some may say God, despite plenty of Biblical (and Qur’anic) evidence to the contrary, never breaks the laws of nature. This is of course a defeater to the very claim God intervenes in the natural world (unless one happens to believe nature is deterministic and “God foresaw, thus”, nevertheless one still loses the argument “God intervenes”).

I will leave this topic here for now. My focus here is on supernaturalism, that which is ‘outside’ of nature and to require a naturalistic explanation is considered begging the question. I believe supernaturalism is the fertile ground from which Christianity apologist like Plantinga and others draw their arguments from.

Supernaturalism, by its very definition, is a collection of beliefs that live (and die) in the belief forming faculty of human beings. With no casual link to the natural world, the premise of supernaturalism could be stated as “all logically consistent theories are true of reality” so long as the theories address what is ‘outside of nature’, as logical consistency is the only test to their validity.

But of course the problem here is that the reflective person S who accepts logically consistent theory A as true of reality presupposes S is capable of forming true beliefs—regardless if S accepts naturalism or supernaturalism or something else. The challenge to the naturalist is to provide verifiable evidence to A. Whether the naturalist succeeds or not, the fundamental question about S’s ability to forms true beliefs remains unanswered. And if it were indeed the case that S is improbable to be capable of forming true beliefs, the consequence of this conclusion is more devastating to the supernaturalist for supernaturalism completely depends upon our ability to form true beliefs.

Methodological naturalism (naturalism hereafter) says only that all natural phenomena are best explained by natural causes. Naturalism is a means to an end (that of explaining natural phenomena) and in principle says nothing about the (continued) successfulness of those that practice it. What is often the case with anti-naturalists like Plantinga is that they point to the lack of naturalistic explanation to a natural phenomenon and conclude naturalism is inconsistent (and shouldn’t be taken seriously). Herein lays the first problem with EAAN. By pointing to a gap in a naturalist’s explanation as to how the truthfulness of a belief can be casually efficacious in such a way as to be evolutionarily beneficial, Plantinga then makes the leap to conclude there is no good reason to believe the truthfulness of our belief (all that is derived from it, including naturalism and evolutionary theory). By replacing the experimenter (her success in carrying out the experiment to be exact) with the experiment itself, Plantinga commits the straw man fallacy. Not only has Plantinga placed the burden-of-(naturalistic)-proof for any natural phenomenon on the naturalists, but he equated naturalists’ inability to produce a proof for any given phenomenon as evidence against naturalism all together.

If history is any lesson, it has been the case that gaps in the naturalist explanatory scheme have been ‘short’-lived (perhaps we are biased to explore certain class of phenomena by our nature such that this is the case, but that is another story). There is every reason to believe this gap too will close and the anti-naturalists will search for other gaps to pick on.  

Needless to say, there is also good reason to believe the truthfulness of our beliefs given naturalism and the evolutionary theory (N&E). When a naturalist holds a belief to be true, which presupposes she is capable of true beliefs (regardless of N&E or supernaturalism—more on this in part II), her theories (the truthfulness of her theories to be exact) are casually linked to the natural world (and generally are not mere conjectures of an inaccessible reality). Furthermore, statistically speaking, it is probable, given the verifiably truthful beliefs naturalism has produced thus far, her beliefs are trustworthy, even if the exact naturalistic explanation of why her beliefs are trustworthy given evolutionary theory elude her (for the time being).

I listen to and like the BBC but they often do not seem to be willing to post comments contrary to their honored contributors. In this BBC article, a self-prophesed scientist claims all sorts of pseudoscience/religious nonsense: Here is my comment:

"There is already enough confusion among lay persons about science and the scientific method. This commentary by a medical 'scientist' only adds to and deepens the confusion. For starters, there is no struggle between science and the divine. Science assumes (almost) nothing, religion assumes everything (God thus the universe). Religion/the Divine/God/etc is in itself the product of our brains and thus is to be studied scientifically. The comment "[science] leaves more unanswered questions" almost seems to imply scientific investigation confuses rather than enlighten us. When we look at the moon through a telescope, our initial questions about the moon (does it have mountains, for example) are in fact answered. A curious mind, however, doesn'’t then dismantle the telescope and sit idly but builds an even more powerful telescope and starts asking finer questions, more questions. Lastly, science does give us certainty about ourselves and our origin. There is no supernatural "‘dimension"’ except in the conversations of human beings living in the four dimensional space-time. No amount of commentary, books (holy or otherwise) can hide the fact that no proof of supernatural phenomenon, much less God/the Divine, exist today despite how long these ideas lasted. Speaking of enduring ideas, humanity believed for millennia as they looked up at the night sky, stars are mere decorations not far off from where they stood."