So there is, and can be, no evidence for non-empirical claims.
So the absence of evidence can tell us nothing at all about the truth, validity, reliablity, signficance, etc, of non-empirical claims.
So the absence of evidence for those claims is not in any sense a criticism of the claims, or a reason to reject them. The absence of evidence is completely consistent with those claims being wholly correct, true, valid, etc. The absence of evidence is completely irrelevant.
No?
So how can you say that reality is limited to that which can be empirically observed? The absence of evidence for the non-empirically-observable is a given; it can tell us nothing, one way or the other, about the reality of the non-empirically-observable.
You need to address that question to someone who makes that claim.
My claim is more modest. It is that the fact that religious enquiry employs epistemologies other than the scientific method to examine non-scientific questions does not establish that religion and science are incompatible. It merely means that religions is one of a very large number of fields of enquiry which are not science.
Religion is a pathway to faith. Faith is “true” personally. It’s true “for me,” if not necessarily for anyone else. Faith-based “truths” aren’t testable the way other kinds of truths are…but they still can be accepted as “truths” in the “I Like Cheese” sort of way.
“Will I see Aunt Marjory again after I die?” Religion offers an answer. No one can know it’s wrong until they’ve died and gone and seen for themselves.
Well, there’s only two possible answers to the question. Unless you count an expressive shrug and a raising of the eyebrows as a third answer.
But, yes, religion can offer more than one answer to the question. Plus techniques for evaluating the answers offered.
Science, by contrast, offers no answer to the question. It just goggles blankly at the question with its mouth open, so to speak.
It’s a matter for the individual as to whether they find the multiple answers of religion or the blank silence of science a more satisfactory and meaningful response to the question.
There will be no empirically-observable evidence? There can be no evidence, period. Claims of the supernatural are not akin to mathematics, where we have a small set of axioms and and agreed-upon set of rules for manipulating the symbols. And claims of the supernatural are not like politics or ethics, where we’re just expressing an opinion and examining it.
You’re using an offbeat definition of “supernatural” where it’s something that has zero possible effects on the world we live in. Now most people use the word to mean something that does have an effect, but that effect is accomplished by something other than laws of physics (known or unknown) - in other words, magic.
But using your preferred definition of the term, there cannot possibly be evidence for this supernatural world.
Look UDS, you’re speaking to us as if you think you’re educating us on epistemology. But you’re coming across like the college freshman who just discovered the idea of solipsism, and has to argue with everyone that all of this could be just in his mind. Yes, we know that, and it’s a dead-end, and we’ve moved on.
Science looks at the question (of life after death) and finds that the very claim itself is silly on its face. Because the only evidence you have for life after death is that someone said so.
Seriously it is so damn hard to get this through to people. Supernatural claims come from ordinary humans, People make those claims, People write those books, People spread those truths as if they have some meaning behind them more important that whatever meaning you can find in Harry Potter. (note I haven’t actually read Harry Potter) In the first Harry Potter book it is prophesied that Harry would save us from the evils of Voldemort, then in the last book Harry saves us from the evils of Voldemort. Does this make J.K. Rolling a prophet? Do all the characters in the book who witnessed it make it a valid prophecy. Does the fact that there are witnesses in the book mean that it really happened some where in history? that this is a True and real event?
Life after death has nothing behind it at all in the form of evidence.
god/Allah/Zeus/the FSM are all equally invalid concepts, not because we cant prove them wrong, nor because billions of people believe in some kind of higher power. The reason they are all invalid is simply because if you could dig deep enough, maybe travel through time, you would be able to trace these myths back to their origins. And those origins are people making shit up. Take Moses and the burning bush. Seriously imagine someone coming up to you and telling you god talked to them in the form of a burning bush, you would wonder if they were high and what they were high on. Second is that even if Moses did talk to a burning bush that claimed to be god…isn’t is just slightly more likely that he was pranked by a couple kids hiding nearby than an omnipotent, omniscient, all loving god turned into a burning bush to have a chat with his main man?
The total lack of evidence for an insanely complex, physics violating deity is all the evidence you need to know its false. If you accept that GAWD is real or possibly real you are also (even if you don’t think of it this way) allowing for every single crazy idea that pops into anyone anywheres head and out of their mouth. Russles Teapot Really does put the final nail in every single supernatural claim ever made. or to quote Sagan “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
If I tell you my farts stink after eating dairy you would probably just take my word for it, if I tell you I have predicted every single lottery’s winning numbers in America starting at the age of 12, and I have never been wrong. You would immediately and justifiably think I was full of shit. Now for the second claim we have 2 paths to convincing you I can really do this, you can just take my word for it and believe I am telling the truth in spite of the fact that I am pretty poor right now and you have never heard of the guy who won 7,000 lotteries, or I can produce evidence. My evidence would have to be pretty convincing as well, a hand written notebook wont cut it here. Maybe a pile of unopened letters I sent to myself dated before the lottery drawings that I was predicting inside. but even this wouldn’t be much in the way of evidence. It is a hell of a lot easier to open a sealed envelope and then reseal it with the letter than it is to predict lottery numbers. My point is that in your day to day life you look for evidence in essentially every thing. For some strange reason when it comes to the truly bizarre, the truly fantastic, the touchy feely makes us feel better about ourselves claims we just take it on faith.
It can hardly be less good, since the scientific method is no good at all for this purpose.
But I’m not saying that it’s any good. I’m just saying that pointing out that it isn’t science doesn’t show it to be no good. Lots of things that aren’t science are nevertheless quite useful for a variety of purposes.
(And, it’s an irrelevant nitpick, but I’d question whether scientology - so far as I understand it, which is not very far at all - makes any claims about the supernatural. Alien beings from other planets, even extremely powerful ones, are not “supernatural”. They’re just an aspect of the natural universe which - the claims of scientology notwithstanding - we have yet to experience.
Does scientology make any claims about whether I will see Aunt Marjory after I die? I don’t know.)
Well, an awful lot of claims of the supernatural do present a small set of axioms and an agreed upon set of rules for examining the postulated concepts. (E.g. that the material universe is created by God. That God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving. That God is not contingent. Etc, etc. ) These axioms are of course unproven; that’s in the nature of axioms. Whatever reasons people have for accepting the axioms they accept, “proof” is not one of them. That goes for the axioms which underpin science as much as for the axioms which underpin religion, or ethics, or metaphysics, or whatever.
No, at no point have I said that the supernatural has zero possible effects on the world we live in. I have said that the supernatural is not itself a part of the world we live in, and cannot be empirically observed. There is nothing remotely offbeat about my saying that; it’s very mainstream religious thinking. But I have never said that the supernatural has no effect on the observable world. On the contrary, it is mainstream in the monotheist traditions (and I suspect in some other religious traditions) that the existence of the observable universe is contingent upon god. If no god, then no universe. And the existence of the observable universe is (given the axioms of science) certainly observable.
(That’s not magic, by the way.)
Yes. How can we see something that is not part of the natural world? If we could see it, it would not be supernatural: QED.
Not at all. Solipsism is the is the complete opposite of what I am saying. I entirely accept that the scientific method answers questions about empirically-observable reality with a degree of certainty which attends very few other epistemologies. I note that all our observations could be illusions, etc, etc, but, yeah, they’re not. The material, observable universe is real, and science tell us about it with a high degree of reliability.
I’m just making the point that the scientific method is useless for examining the proposition that anything other than the material, observable universe is real. That’s a limitation built into the epistemology, which depends on empirical observations. Science is no help in enabling us to decide whether the Holocaust, say, was objectively wrong. You might take the view that there is no such thing as objective right or wrong, but there is no scientific case for that view. How could there be?
Most religious answers are good enough to keep the faithful in attendance and putting money in the donation box. It’s giving people something they want.
Truth? Or just cheese?
(Sigh… Aunt Marjory was such a rhymes-with! I’m not sure I want to see her again!)
What nonsense.
You just don’t like the answer that science gives us.
Namely that there is absolutely no indication or reason nor any evidence to assume that there is such a thing as ‘life after death’.
You don’t like No for an answer, so you give a made up one that makes you feel good more credence. Not because the answer given by religion is equally valid.
Well, that would seem to be the purpose of abitrarily bolting on to the scientific method an assumption that the empirically-observable reality which science can investigate is the only reality that there is. The scientific method works perfectly well without that assumption; the assumption is only needed by those who wish to dress up there fideist materialism as “science”.
Wait a minute. What techniques do religions offer to evaluate whether we’ll see Aunt whatshername?
I can think of appeal to a Holy Book, appeal to a guy who claims he knows what God says, tea leaves and tiles, or dreams. And appeals to philosophical logic. None of these are very convincing.
For science the null hypothesis is that we die when we die, since we have evidence that our thoughts are tied to activity in our brains and all such activity ceases at death. If religion has evidence otherwise, it can present it. Until then the null hypothesis is the only sensible choice.
I’ll stand behind pathway to truth. You were talking about proofs, and that has nothing to do with science or the path that gets closer to our understanding of the universe.
And I’ve been very clear about what philosophy covers and what science covers.
Math does not necessarily say anything about the real world. What we know in math is what can be proved from some initial premises.
Do you think your last two items have absolute answers? If so, how can they be shown?
The difference between science and philosophy is that science tests its results against reality, the best it can. For things that cannot be tested, like the answers to your questions, it doesn’t even try. When philosophy tried to apply itself to scientific questions, it failed miserably.
Religion either claims that it has evidence of the interaction of supernatural entities with the world or it doesn’t. Those who don’t, like weak deism, are not amenable to testing by science, but can also make no solid claims about anything a deity wants.
Those religions who do claim interaction with a deity do make testable claims. While we can’t prove that no supernatural beings exist it is good enough to falsify these claims of interaction.
Which we’ve pretty much done.
With no supernatural deities backing up their answers to the questions science is not applicable to, religion becomes philosophy with a superiority complex.
Oh, sure. You may not like the techniques offered. You may not find them very convincing. On this particular question, I don’t find the techniques offered by religion of much value, myself.
It’s just that, at the risk of repeating myself, pointing out that they’re not scientific does nothing to establish that they have no value or utility as investigative techniques in relation to a non-scientific question. And it does nothing to establish that they are “incompatible with science”.
Bzzzt! Category error! The null hypothesis doesn’t pretend to be a universal account of reality. It’s a sceptical stance employed within the scientific method to point to the need for evidence in support of a proposition. It doesn’t assert that a given proposition is false in the absence of evidence; just that we can’t know it to be true, and have no reason to think it true. But of course it’s only of use in relation to propositions whose truth can be known through evidence. It has no probative value, one way or the other, in relation to metaphysical claims.
Can there be consciousness independent of a material, empirically-observable existence? Well, if there can, we have no reason to think that there would be any empirically-observable evidence of it. Hence, the null hypothesis is of no use to us in relation to this question.
There are (in my view) better arguments against consciousness-after-death; e.g. an argument from parsimony. (“We don’t need to postulate consciousness after death in order to account for anything.”) But that’s not a scientific argument. And the refutations of it, if you care to refute it, are equally not scientific.
