How can science accommodate the supernatural?

Melendwyr said:
How many ways would there be to put check marks in those boxes? How many of those groupings would be incoherent, containing self-contradictory or mutually-contradictory statements? And how many would describe a consistent system?

One grouping is as real as the next. But not all groupings have the potential to be real.

Do you understand?
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No.

~~ Paul
 
Mead said:
Behe wants to change those rules.

For what it's worth, the new Kansas criteria ought to suit Behe just fine.
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Yet neither Behe, Kansas, nor you have defined the supernatural nor explained how science is going to study it. I wonder why that is?

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
No.
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What's the difference between a thing and the complete, accurate description of that thing?

There was once a religious sect that believed the world had already happened, and this was just the memory of God, therefore they could do as they pleased because nothing mattered. What's the problem with this belief?
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I daresay you cannot even give a hand-wave about how some entity is making decisions that do not stem from deterministic and/or random factors ....
~~ Paul
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What do you make of Spinoza's thought: "a thing exists and acts by its own nature rather than by external compulsion".
 
Mel said:
There was once a religious sect that believed the world had already happened, and this was just the memory of God, therefore they could do as they pleased because nothing mattered. What's the problem with this belief?
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Hmm. Well, if this is just the memory of God, then what they are going to do is already determined. So they can think they are doing what they please, but that's just part of God's memory.

Now I have a headache.

~~ Paul
 
Can you imagine any experiment which would make possible a distinction between a "real" world and "remembered" world, when the memory in question is presumed to contain each and every detail of the "real" world?
 
Mel said:
Can you imagine any experiment which would make possible a distinction between a "real" world and "remembered" world, when the memory in question is presumed to contain each and every detail of the "real" world?
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No.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
No idea what that means.
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Ol' Pigmeat is actually saying something intelligent for once. Everything acts because of its own nature, and nothing can be made to act in a way contrary to its nature. If I throw a ball, and it arcs away under the influence of gravity, that is because it is part of the ball's nature to be subject to gravity.

It's essentially a refutation of the idea of the supernatural - contrast it with medieval thinkers who widely accepted the notion that witchcraft could make things act outside of their natural bounds.
 
Mel said:
Can you imagine any distinction that can be made between the two, based on their properties? That is, are there any abstract experiments that can distinguish between the two, as opposed to more "empirical" experiments?
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No.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Yet neither Behe, Kansas, nor you have defined the supernatural nor explained how science is going to study it. I wonder why that is?

~~ Paul
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Because you haven't been paying attention. In this case, I won't speak for Behe, just myself.

The "supernatural" consists of all those things that are not explainable by laws. Spousal salinification is a supernatural phenomenon. Things that Randi would pay a million for are supernatural.

In my humble opinion, the only evidence we have of supernatural phenomena actually occurring in the real world consists of anecdotal evidence that can easily be dismissed by a reasonable observer, but as a definition, it works fine. If it is outside the laws of nature, it is supernatural.

Science cannot study it directly. It can only study the effects. When snakes appear to replace gopherwood staves, science can study whether or not a gopherwood staff was present at one moment, whether or not a viper was present the next, and whether or not they can come up with a naturalistic explanation for the sudden disappearance of the wood and the sudden appearance of a poisonous reptile. If they conclude that the appearance of the reptile cannot be explained by any known phenomenon, and cannot be repeated, they cannot say anything about the actual mechanism or nature of any entity involved in its creation. Science cannot study God, the gods, or any other supernatural phenomenon, except in the way that they affect the real world.

So, when that claimant comes forward, and turns the stick to a snake, and claims God told him to do it, a reasonable scientist observing the show could not conclude that God really exists, based solely on the evidence. After all, it could have been Leprachauns, not God. On the other hand, based on their preconcieved notions about how certain beings would behave, they might conclude that a bit of God worship is in order. Furthermore, this would not be unscientific. After all, they would have an inductive observation to work with. So and so said God would turn the stick to a snake, and the stick turned into a snake. I predict that the next time he tells me God wants something to happen, it will. This theory is easily falsifiable. If he tells me God wants something to happen, and it doesn't happen, the theory that God is operating through him is falsified.
 
I said I would discuss the scientific theory of Kashrut. Kashrut is the Jewish dietary law. A food or food preparation method that is in accordance with Kashrut is called kosher.

Most of my examples are slightly tongue in cheek, but the next paragraph is something I believe really and truly happened. I believe that the ancient Hebrews observed that eating certain things could result in death. They paid attention to what things caused people to die after they were eating them. They had no idea about parasites or bacteria, food poisoning, or anything to do with modern medicine, and they didn't have food preparation and preparation technology. They just could watch and notice that people who ate pigs died younger than people that didnt' People who boiled meat in mik died younger than people who didn't. Etc.

So, they had observations, and they verified those observations through experimentation, by watching who lived and who died. Those experiments weren't controlled. No good control group. No placebo trafe. None of that stuff that makes a good experiment, but it was an experiment, nonetheless. The hypothesis predicted taht those who ate pork would die younger, and it happened.

The theory that explained the experimental results was that God was angry at people who ate pigs, shrimp, and cheesburgers. God killed people who he was angry with, but not always, and not predictably. That's why some people ate pigs and didn't keel over and die, but others did, and there was no way of knowing who lived and who died, but statistically, trafe-eaters died more frequently. Obviously, God was angry at them.

It's perfectly scientific. It matches my dictionary, and the new Kansas guidelines. Subsequent study of the death rates and food preparation techniques revealed different observations and theories that were much more successful at predicting who lived and who died, and so Kashrut was abandoned as a scientific theory. However, in its heyday, it worked quite well.
 
Melendwyr said:
No, not wrong. An inconsistent system cannot emulate a consistent one, nor can it emulate another inconsistent system, because doing so would require consistent behavior.

To the extent that a human being is inconsistent, it cannot create a useful and meaningful model of the world. To the extent that a system is inconsistent, it cannot create a useful and meaningful model of anything. I could build a calculating device that expressed inconsistent statements about mathematics, but it couldn't emulate any systems - and I could do so only to the degree that my construction is consistent, and that is possible only to the degree that the underlying physics is consistent.
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I think what he's saying, DrKitten, in other words is if our behavior (and consequently nature) was fundamentally pre-determined we would think like a computer, and lack any capacity for abstract thought.
 
Mead said:
The theory that explained the experimental results was that God was angry at people who ate pigs, shrimp, and cheesburgers. God killed people who he was angry with, but not always, and not predictably. That's why some people ate pigs and didn't keel over and die, but others did, and there was no way of knowing who lived and who died, but statistically, trafe-eaters died more frequently. Obviously, God was angry at them.

It's perfectly scientific. It matches my dictionary, and the new Kansas guidelines. Subsequent study of the death rates and food preparation techniques revealed different observations and theories that were much more successful at predicting who lived and who died, and so Kashrut was abandoned as a scientific theory. However, in its heyday, it worked quite well.
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This is not science studying the supernatural. It is a goddidit claim standing in for a scientific explanation of dietary consequences.

I agree that placeholders are required in science until adequate explanations emerge. Calling the placeholder "god" is not a scientific study of god.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
I agree that placeholders are required in science until adequate explanations emerge. Calling the placeholder "god" is not a scientific study of god.

~~ Paul
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I think I said, more than once, that science cannot study God, or the supernatural. It can study the effects of God in the real world, although it can't actually prove that God is involved, using science.

Take ID. It can show that no known natural process can create the structures found in nature. It can infer from similarity to designed structures that the structures were designed. (I'm not saying this is a correct inference. I'm just discussing the thought process.) They can even say it was designed by God, and all the evidence would fit the theory.

However, in truth, it cannot say anything about the designed if investigated. If I say it's God, and you say it's the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and someone else says it's the collective force of conscious minds waiting to be born ( a vaguely Buddhist idea), science can't distinguish between them. The designer is acting outseid natural law, away from scientific investigation. By faith, they believe it's God, but that's outside of science. All they can say based on reason is that there was a designer.

Similarly with Kashrut. By science, they can observe that trafe eaters die more often, and they can assert that there is no natural cause. They can create a theory that there is some supernatural trafe-hater who kills people, and they can call it God, but if someone else says it's the Pig God and Shrimp Goddess, protecting their friends, science can't tell.

On the other hand, science can continue to investigate the effects, and search for natural causes. Once someone notices that people who put their bacon in the fridge don't die from it, they might come up with a third theory that there are little tiny animals that live in pigs and humans, and that make people sick. At that point, the disease theory, although complicated and sounding ridiculous, might replace the Pig God theory, because it makes better predictions, and let's people eat bacon.
 
Mead said:
I think I said, more than once, that science cannot study God, or the supernatural. It can study the effects of God in the real world, although it can't actually prove that God is involved, using science.
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Then it isn't studying the affects of god, let alone god. You don't get to say you're studying the affects of a horse dropping dung on the ground if you aren't confident that it was a horse that done dropped it.

You're using "god" as a placeholder. It's silly.

~~ Paul
 
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