Exactly my point. There is no such thing as empirical “evidence” of supernatural entities that could be cognitively valid or rationally consistent. Empirical detectability, cognitive validity and rational consistency are intrinsically part of scientific scrutiny.
No, that’s just modern backtracking. There’s been no historical problem with the idea of science being able to detect the supernatural; the idea that science is inherently unable to detect or understand it only arose because science kept consistently showing supernatural claims to be false.
And it directly contradicts the claims that we can perceive the supernatural
Sure there has. Of course, there have always been believers claiming that they can demonstrate actual evidence of some supernatural entity—and they have always been wrong—but there have also been believers who maintain that no such evidence is possible.
As a reaction to science proving them wrong again and again.
If these supernatural entities changed anything in the world, then we could detect that.
If a invisible supernatural creature lifted a rock into the air, we could observe that the rock is moving without any natural explanation. We could then at least attempt to investigate it to figure it out. If there were supernatural entities regularly interfering with the world, we’d have a lot of observed things that had no natural explanation. But we don’t. We hear about ghosts and all sorts of supernatural things all the time, and they always fall apart under investigation.
For a more practical example, we’ve actually studied the issue of whether intercessory prayer works for medical outcomes. We’ve had patients with similar prognosis, a group that was prayed for, and one that wasn’t, and their outcomes were identical. If that particular form of prayer actually worked, whether we could explain who was answering the prayers or not, we’d actually observe the results - that the prayer resulted in better health outcomes for the people being prayed for.
Now, if you want to posit that all supernatural creatures never interact with the world, never influence anything, and can never be detected - then what use are they? How is that different from them simply not existing? What would we do differently because of our knowledge of their existance?
Which religion?
psik
Religion is a lie. But if people want it, and if it doesn’t harm them otherwise, then it has a legitimate social purpose.
(I’m leaving out the harmful stuff, like faith healing. I’m also excluding theocratic crap, such as church-state entanglement.)
It’s a free market. People want this stuff.
I see religion (in its proper place) as something akin to personal preferences in flavors, or in movies, or in music. If you like Bartok…fine. If you like ghastly slasher flicks…fine. If you like a lot of cilantro…fine.
As fine a thinker as Martin Gardner followed religious beliefs, because they made him feel better.
If someone is lying on their death bed, and a priest murmuring, “Soon you will be re-united with your loved ones,” makes them feel better…who the hell are we to stand in the way? Let them have the spurious comfort. It makes the world just a little better, for just a little while.
(Am I actually the only SDMB atheist who doesn’t object to other people having religious beliefs?)
That’s the same as the believers who say we can’t know anything about God right after telling us all about how God is.
We can imagine the supernatural - our media shows it to us, in fiction, all the time. Say you have someone who can reproducibly create matter out of nothing, passes the Randi test, and happily submits to all kinds of measurements. He can be subject to science in being studied, but since conservation laws still work this might be a good example of the supernatural. Sure I can invent all kinds of super-scientific explanations - but supernatural assumes some kind of natural.
That we’ve never seen such a thing is evidence that no such thing exists, not that science can’t study or detect it.
That’s my gripe with Ghostbusters II. If the stuff in the first movie ever happened, every physicist with a pulse would be submitting grant applications to study it, and the main characters would get their share. Total failure to understand how science works.
And I realize it was a comedy.
No. One of the reasons I agree with you on this, as I’ve been discussing above, is that a scientific view of the natural world can’t demonstrably determine whether or not anything supernatural exists.
In other words, to the extent that they generated any empirically detectable physical evidence of their existence, they would be non-supernatural and thus we could investigate them scientifically. Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying.
Not really: concepts of fundamentally undetectable divine or transcendent qualities existing with no empirical manifestation have surfaced in various belief systems from time to time over thousands of years, and they don’t seem to have any particular connection to contemporary surges in empirical science.
The idea that the only cause of epistemological sophistication or caution in theological doctrines is fear of being embarrassed by the superior explanatory power of science is a self-congratulatory story that a lot of atheists like to tell themselves, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Whew! I was starting to worry I was all alone in this viewpoint here.
And, yes, exactly: it can’t be proven, pretty much one way or the other, especially when the faithful are wise enough not to tie it too strongly to the real world.
When they say, “Jesus will arrive in a fiery chariot on May 21st, 2011,” and Jesus doesn’t, it makes them look a little foolish. But if they say, “Jesus will arrive in a fiery chariot, and he’s coming soon!” then it’s a matter of faith. And at that point, it’s just plain none of my doggone business.
Nope, that’s not supernatural, that’s just natural that we don’t understand. If this hypothetical wizard is “creating matter out of nothing”, then as soon as the matter exists it has to be subject to the laws of physics, and the apparent transition point between its nonexistence and its existence can be studied.
You can’t disprove the hypothetically possible existence of truly supernatural beings by imagining fairy-tale hybrids or chimeras of natural and supernatural entities and pointing out that those don’t exist. Supernatural and scientific are concepts that are truly disjoint.
Not quite. If they were magically lifting a rock - not through any natural force as we understand it, and not within the laws of physics - then they would be using supernatural forces to influence our world. You seem to be essentially defining “supernatural” as “unable to be detected”, but that’s not true. You could posit an entity who could influence our world using powers not recognized as natural or within the laws of physics.
In any case, I ask again, so what? If your definition of supernatural is “is never detectable nor ever influences in the universe in any way”, what’s the usefulness of that belief? It matters to us less than a pair of fleeting virtual particles in a vacuum. They might as well not exist, because nothing is different if they don’t.
There’s a little breathing room between “never detectable” and “never influences the universe in any way.” An inspiring spirit – a muse, for example – might influence the world by bestowing insight, without being detectable. A god might make small revelations without making big ones.
There isn’t any useful test by which we can know if Mohammed or Joseph Smith actually were visited by Angels. But they produced real books. It’s up to everyone’s individual faith to say what the origin of the books actually was: God…or just imagination.
(I agree that this is an appeal to the “shyness effect.” It’s like UFOs or Sasquatch, always being seen by solitary guys out in the middle of nowhere, and never appearing in downtown Cleveland in rush hour. This is a big part of why I, personally don’t believe. But it isn’t, in itself, a working disproof or even a dismissal of religious belief. God must just be shy that way.)
Suppose, just suppose this particular supernatural entity did not act directly on the material world but on the human psyche? or even on animal instincts? Where does artistic creativity spring from? Actually, this isn’t too far removed from the religionist’s practice of seeking guidance and inspiration through prayer, meditation or some other form of worship. I don’t see how this kind of force could be quantified or disproved. But one could certainly posit the existence of some sort of higher power that communicated only in this way. And that is certainly not incompatible with a hard-headed belief in science.
ETA; ninja’d (sorta) by Trinopus
No, no, no. A scientific demonstration that animals can suffer underlines the practical relevance of the ethical question of whether we are justified in causing them suffering, either generally or in any particular instance. If animals can’t suffer then the ethical question becomes an abstract speculation but, if they can, then the ethical question has real-world relevance and importance.
But the scientific demonstration does nothing at all to answer the question - at most, it can tell us that the answer may, or may not, be important. Any techniques we adopt to answer questions about animals’ rights - and they may be religious or non-religious techniques - will be non-scientific. “Rights” are not susceptible of scientific demonstration or validation. The observation that the techniques we use are non-scientific tell us nothing at all about their validity, usefulness, etc.
Well, ethical questions are a fairly obvious example of metaphysical questions which, if not actually useful, are often important. Faced with a choice between two actions, or between action and inaction, we need to find a basis for preferring one over the other. That is an ethical question. Science is quite useful in telling me how to go about exterminating European Jewry in the minimum time at the minimum cost, if that’s what I want to do, but basically useless for telling me the whether I should want to do it in the first place, or what my attitude should be to people who do want it. Nevertheless the ethical question is an important one to most people, and techniques for answering it - whether they be religious or non-religious - are useful to the people who feel called upon to arrive at an answer.
Yes. Which means that secular ethical philosophy is non-scientific, just like religion is non-scientific. Which underlines my point that the observation that they are unscientific is trite; it does not invalidate them in any way, or prove that they are “inconsistent”.
Well, a secular approach to the question of animals suffering might be framed in terms of “animals’ rights” - Budget Player Cadet frames the question in precisely those terms in post #44. Or questions about the Holocaust might be approached in terms of a right to life. Or other political questions in terms of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But do “rights” exist, or is their existence any more demonstrable that the existence of God?
Your suggestion that religous ethics “tends to assert things . . . withotu working throught the reasoning behind them” is, I suggest, not true for all religious ethical thinking, while at the same time being true of a good deal of non-religious ethical thinking.
All ethical systems, religious and non-religious, proceed from postulates which cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Indeed, your own meta-ethical position, that religious ethics “appeals to something that does not exist” itself proceeds from a postulate which cannot be scientifically demonstrated - viz, that the things religious ethics appeal to do not exist. This nonscientific foundation is just inherent in the nature of the field. But it doesn;t mean that ethics or metaphysics or any similar field is “inconsistent with science” except in a complete trite sense, where “inconsistent with” means little more than “is not”.
But that would be one of the “hybrids or chimeras of natural and supernatural entities” I spoke of, and I think that’s not the same thing. If it’s influencing our world in ways we can rationally, empirically detect and quantify, it’s not outside the laws of physics.
I know that such imagined hybrids are routine in all fantasy literature, but I don’t think they fall into the category of these hypothesized fully supernatural beings that are outside science altogether.
If something never manifests in reality, in what way does it “exist”?
Does logic exist? Does the number two exist? The number minus one? Do rights exist? Does dignity exist?
If there are meaningful senses in which any or all of these can be said to exist, then things which are not empirically perceptible can plainly exist. (Whether they do or not, and how we would know whether they do, and whether we should care, are separate questions.)
I don’t know of a fully meaningful and fully precise way to define either “reality” or “existence”.
What I do know, though, is that anything that is not subject to the scientific laws of nature has no existence in any scientifically meaningful way.
The more usual way to express this is to say, “There’s no evidence for the existence of [whatever supernatural being whose existence is being debated]”.
While this doesn’t answer your main question, I notice you refer to “reality” where Kimstu referred to the natural world. It is question-begging to treat “reality” and “the natural world” as synonymous.