Science is based on observed regularities and logical induction to unobserved regularity. The secular scientist assumes that everything works in a regular, reproducible kind of way because that is what science has always found to be the case so far. The scientist who is a Christian agrees, but in addition believes in a rational basis for that order, the creator God who faithfully endows the universe with its regularities and intelligibility. Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (Monarch Books; revised and expanded ed,, 2014), 48.
There's some truth to this claim. However, it suffers from a strange overstatement. Mind you, that's not surprising considering the fact that he's one of the bigwigs at BioLogos. In particular, consider his claim that:
The secular scientist assumes that everything works in a regular, reproducible kind of way because that is what science has always found to be the case so far.
Really? To take a stock counterexample, what about miraculous healing in answer to prayer? I'm not saying that's commonplace. But how many medically verifiable examples would you need to disprove his universal claim to the contrary?
Compare his outlook to M. Scott Peck. Peck was a psychiatrist who received his B.A. degree magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1958, and his M.D. degree from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1963. From 1963 until 1972, he served in the United States as Assistant Chief Psychiatry and Neurology Consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army:
I had come to believe in the reality of benign spirit or God, as well as the reality of human goodness. I'd come to believe distinctly in the reality of human evil, and that left me an obvious hole in my thinking. Namely was there such a thing as evil spirit, or the devil specifically? In common with 99.99 percent of psychiatrists and with 80 percent of Catholic priests--as confidentially polled back in 1960, the figure would be much higher now--I did not believe in the devil.
But I was a scientist, and it didn't seem to me I should conclude there was no devil until I examined the evidence. It occurred to me if I could see one good old-fashioned case of possession, that might change my mind. I did not think that I would see one, but if you believe that something doesn't exist, you can walk right over it without seeing it.
These cases, in a whole number of ways--the more I studied them, the more they did not fit in a typical psychiatric picture. The second case [Becca], for instance. As she should have been getting better, she got worse.
And this is what's called diagnoses by exclusion. I'd go through the whole range of psychiatric conditions, whether they could explain the patient's condition. In both of my two cases, they were unexplainable by any kind of traditional psychiatric terms.
Because I was a scientist I was perhaps more stringent than most people would be in diagnosing these two cases. I wasn't going to try to deal with something I wasn't sure was possession. Particularly as a psychiatrist, I was really sticking my neck out.
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/01/The-Patient-Is-The-Exorcist-Interview-With-M-Scott-Peck.aspx
Peck doesn't begin with the postulate that "everything works in a regular, reproducible kind of way because that is what science has always found to be the case so far." Peck is more scientific than Alexander. Peck doesn't assume he knows the answer in advance. He examines the evidence.
If, moreover, some forms of mental illness are the result of possession, then everything doesn't work in a regular, reproducible way. Machines work in a regular, reproducible way. That's in contrast to personal agency.
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