: Hi Ivan Y, I see your points, but we should keep focus on the scope of the article as it is a philosophical article, not a cultural or a legal article or a political. Philosophical debates in the philosophy of science are not concerned with religion or legality or politics or things like that per se, they are focused more on universal concepts. It should be ok to cite a source that focuses, at its core, on developing a philosophical criteria for distinguishing scientific ideas from non-scientific ideas (trying to distinguish why a chemist is not a cook and a cook is not a chemist, even though there are substantial similarities in both of their activities, aims and understanding of transmuting matter). However, Pennock's work clearly does not do that - it merely asserts that methodological naturalism is common practice or assumption among scientists and leaves it at that. Also, its overall focus and commentary pertain to court cases, not the philosophy of science. In its assertions of methodological naturalism, it obviously does not even attempt to demarcate between naturalistic non-science topics like Big Foot hunting, UFO research, and telepathy vs naturalistic science topics like zoology, SETI, neurology. "Methodological naturalism" is just not developed in that source to be of any use for philosophical demarcation issues and it does not shed any new light on demarcation issues either. For legal issues on education, maybe it is useful, but not for the philosophy of science (which is what this article is about). 

 :Its core is about a court case and is clearly more political/legal than it is about the philosophical demarcation problem. The court case involved matters of demarcation, for sure, but the court case was on education policy, not demarcation issues themselves. 'Involving a topic' and 'focusing on the topic' are two different things. Furthermore, court cases are legal activity and the interpretations made by lawyers and judges are not done for the sake of truth or for the sake of loving wisdom (philosophy). They are there for the sake of social order. All court cases interact with philosophy to some extent, for instance murders, drug dealing, kidnapping, rape etc all have interactions with deontology, utilitarianism, relativism, and other topics in philosophy, but no court cases are ever 'about' these philosophical topics. Furthermore, philosophers of science do not use legal sources in general to develop their ideas about what is and what is not science.