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Jerry Coyne has backed away from his previous claim that science is a "world view":

o.k. let me clarify this for everyone who seems to have misunderstood it. I don't know if I'd call SCIENCE a world view in itself. But that's irrelevant. What I meant is that the scientific ATTITUDE of requiring evidence for what one believes is incompatible with the religious ATTITUDE of requiring no evidence beyond revelation and dogma.

This is dichotomy that I was talking about. Please get over the "world view" stuff; it's irrelevant.

Well, that certainly clears things up, doesn't it? Real rigor and logic there, right? Science is not a philosophy but the only "attitude" that a scientist can properly have is that everything that one believes must be supported by, presumably, scientific evidence -- or else why can't Miller accept science, as he does, and believe in nonscientific ways where science provides no answers?

As "smijer," who is one of the better commenters in the thread, pointed out immediately:

Yes, you have to assume a naturalistic attitude ? or put more precisely ? you have to employ methodological naturalism to do a science project. I'm not religious, but if I were, nothing about the fact that I was religious would prevent me adopting a naturalistic attitude (i.e., adopting methodological naturalism) to do a science project.

Nobody disagrees with this. It's as you say, "trivial".

If your goal is to garner the authority of science for the philosophy of naturalism ? an observation about attitudes and methods is only a tiny first step in doing it. To make such an observation one's entire case is probably a fallacy of composition.

I'd add that it is a rare scientist indeed who meets Coyne's standard. Larry Moran believes that J.M.W. Turner is the greatest artist who ever lived but I've yet to see him produce any scientific evidence on that point. Great art and literature, beauty, who we love, and numerous other things human beings, including scientists, "believe" are determined not on evidence but based on emotion, intuition, social convention and other unconscious or semiconscious influences. Coyne is free to try to make the case that religion is somehow different than these other very human beliefs or to try to convince us that scientists are somehow above these "failings" but, as smijer points out, merely smudging the difference between methodological and philosophical naturalism won't cut it.
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