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Alejandro1 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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True, but I don't think "naturalism" is the right name for that. "Determinism" seems closer to it; though perhaps many of them believed that humans had souls that were exempt from the physical laws of nature--so, "physical determinism"?
I also don't think "successfully compartmentalized their theism" is a good description of what they did. Many of them would have insisted there the lawfulness of Nature was tied to the existence of a Lawgiver, and that theism and science fit together harmoniously in a unified worldview, not in separate mental boxes. From today's standpoint we can say that the implications of the scientific way of thinking that they launched lead, when fully developed, to an incompatibility or at least a strong tension with theism. But I'd say it is anachronistic to say read that back some hundreds of years and say that the early scientists were compartmentalizing.
Science is also possible in a non-deterministic universe, one in which the evolution of physical systems has a random component and the future is not fully predictable from a full knowledge of the present. All science needs are natural laws, repeated regularities; they don't have to be entirely deterministic. And in fact scientists did not have a strong reason to think the universe is deterministic until they had what looked like a complete set of the laws of physics, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On the other hand, a god that does miracles is incompatible with natural law as we know it, because we presumably can't put an upper limit on the probability of a miracle occurring. An intelligent god can selectively cause miracles to disrupt particular experiments or to lead scientists to a false conclusion. Science pretty much assumes that won't happen.
"Many" is ambiguous. What place and time are we talking about? I would expect that until, say, the 19th century, the majority of scientists everywhere were conventionally religious.
An intelligent God could also write crap into a holy book to mislead people. A God that's good has no reason to mislead people.
Or does he?!
I'm talking from the perspective of modern people like Newton. They didn't consider a good God to engage in morally bad practices like lying and misleading.
And I was joking.
That said, lying could be a necessary evil. Perhaps there are lovecraftian mind-destroying truths out there?
EDIT: relevent
EDIT: Retracted due to double-post.
There are places in the Bible where it sounds very much like God does not want to be clearly understood. I seem to remember a verse (I don't recall which book it's in...) where Jesus says that he speaks in parables (as opposed to plainly) because otherwise most people would understand him. The general argument I've heard is that evil serves a purpose, and perfection according to God requires the experience of lots and lots of bullcrap. The obvious question is why he wouldn't then create people with those experiences built in...
Those ... don't seem connected. You appear to be talking about theodicy.
As for "otherwise most people would understand him", I think that's in the context of hiding his messiah-ness.
Twentieth? If you're talking about the first couple decades of it, yeah, but I'm pretty sure that, after quantum mechanics became widely accepted and before the relative state interpretation and similar were proposed, most scientists were not determinists, and many still aren't today (see the third column of this table).
I don't know the math of quantum mechanics. My layman's understanding includes the belief that quanum state evolution is deterministic (described by the Shrodinger equation). I may well be wrong about this.
Either way, my point was that before Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism, and the understanding that light was a form of EM, science didn't have anything like a complete description of physics. So it was hard to say whether physics was deterministic, even though the existing Newtonian law of gravity was. Once there was an attempt at a Law of Everything, even though it was refined over time, there was at least strong evidence for determinism.
Yes, the evolution of the quantum state is deterministic, but according to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, after a “measurement” “wave function collapse” occurs, which is stochastic.