ElElohe said:
After reading and participating in a few of the threads in this forum, I need to ask a question, or few.
Of those who espouse evolution, do any of you believe in any sort of spiritual realm whatsoever?
Do you adhere only to what can be scientifically proven?
Science won't address the existence of the spiritual realm. It is a limitation imposed on science by methodological materialism -- how experiments are done.
We cannot say, wearing out scientific hats, whether anything exists beyond the material or not.
The head of the NCSE -- which promotes the teaching of evolution -- and who is an atheist, has put it like this:
"The flip side, though, is that if science is limited by methodological materialism because of our inability to control an omnipotent power's interference in nature, both "God did it" and "God didn't do it" fail as scientific statements.
Properly understood, the principle of methodological materialism requires neutrality towards God; we cannot say, wearing our scientist hats, whether God does or does not act. I could say, speaking from the perspective of my personal philosophy, that matter and energy and their interactions (materialism) are not only sufficient to understand the natural world (methodological materialism) but in fact, I believe there is nothing beyond matter and energy. This is the philosophy of materialism, which I, and probably most humanists, hold to. I intentionally added "I believe" when I spoke of my personal philosophy, which is entirely proper. "I believe," however; is not a phrase that belongs in science.
We philosophical materialists may all be methodological materialists, but the converse isn't true. Gregor Mendel was a methodological materialist who didn't accept the philosophy of materialism. I think we make a grave error when we confuse philosophical views derived from science--even those we sup port--with science itself."
""First, science is a limited way of knowing, in which practitioners attempt to explain the natural world using natural explanations. ... if there is an omnipotent deity, there is no way that a scientist can exclude or include it in a research design. This is especially clear in experimental research: an omnipotent deity cannot be "controlled" (as one wag commented, "you can't put God in a test tube, or keep him out of one.") [From personal experience, I agree totally with the wag.] So by definition, if an individual is attempting to explain some aspect of the natural world using science, he or she must act as if there were no supernatural forces operating on it. I think this methodological materialism is well understood by evolutionists. But by excluding the supernatural from our scientific turf, we also are eliminating the possibility of proclaiming, via the epistemology of science, that there is no supernatural. One may come to a philosophical conclusion that there is no God, and even base this philosophical conclusion on one's understanding of science, but it is ultimately a philosophical conclusion, not a scientific one. If science is limited to explaining the natural world using natural causes, and thus cannot admit supernatural explanations , so also is science self-limited in another way: it is unable to reject the possibility of the supernatural."
No need to get defensive. I just asked the question purely out of curiousity. Sure I have my own bias', but I do have the ability to ask a question without expecting an argument. 
