Which is a bit of a tautology, isn’t it?
But a more accurate way would be to say “There’s no evidence {of the kind that scientists look for} for the existence of [whatever supernatural being whose existence is being debated] {but, then, we wouldn’t expect there to be}”
The thing is, if X is perceptible by the techniques of natural science, X is natural, not supernatural.
There are some apologist scientists who desperately want them to be compatible. But no, when it comes right down to it, the two are not compatible.
There are some apologist atheist materialists who desperately want them to be incompatible. But no, when it comes right down to it, the two are compatible. 
Yup. What I’m trying to do is to stress the often-overlooked fact that we routinely use very absolute language about concepts like “reality”, “truth”, “existence”, etc., when what we mean is the material reality that we can rationally and empirically observe or infer information about.
That sort of conflation implies a very big ontological claim: namely, that no kind of supernatural entity or aspect of reality not consistent with rationalist-materialist epistemology can have any kind of existence at all.
Mind you, personally I fully believe that no kind of supernatural entity or aspect of reality not consistent with rationalist-materialist epistemology does have any kind of existence at all. But I recognize that I can’t prove it.
[QUOTE=UDS]
But a more accurate way would be to say “There’s no evidence {of the kind that scientists look for} for the existence of [whatever supernatural being whose existence is being debated] {but, then, we wouldn’t expect there to be}”
The thing is, if X is perceptible by the techniques of natural science, X is natural, not supernatural.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly.
Grin! And at least a few atheist materialists who don’t really mind if they’re compatible, given certain diplomatic assurances.
They’re compatible when they don’t stumble into each other, and, most emphatically, when they aren’t at war with one another.
Yes. A fair spread of materialist atheist positions really amount to arguments from definition. They essentially treat reality as “that which can be empirically observed”, and then argue from that that supernatural things can’t be real. This strikes me as the materialist atheist equivalent of Anselm’s ontological argument for God.
Gosh. If you believe something which is inherently not demonstrable by empirical evidence, is that an act of faith? Serious question, not smart-arsery.
Probably, but so what? In fact, I sometimes describe myself as a “fideist atheist”. I don’t feel my atheist beliefs need any kind of materialist absolutism to justify them. They’re just what I personally happen to believe and always have, and that’s good enough for me. If other people happen to believe something different, fine.
I recognize that many atheists view atheism differently, as one facet of an overall commitment to logic and rationalism: for them, lack of belief in a deity is simply an inevitable outcome of honestly cultivating an intellectually rigorous worldview. That’s why many atheists feel that it’s rather shameful or despicable not to be atheist.
In my case, though, I’ve been an atheist at least since my early teens, long before I was logical or rational, much less intellectually rigorous. Whatever it is that leads people to be atheists, it’s clearly not only maturity of outlook and intellectual rigor. So I don’t have a problem with acknowledging “faith-based atheism”.
Assuming it’s not too late to reply, I of course mean all of them. But of course, since I was raised R.C., I am primarily thinking of the monotheistic ones.
Whew! I’ve never seen anyone go that far! As you say, it’s “Anselmic” in its circularity.
The closest I’ll come to this is to relegate some matters into the “untestable” category, and file them as “undecided.” Is there a soul? Since I don’t have any way to test the proposition, I just table it as “Not interesting at this point in time.”
I would say yes…almost by definition.
(I also hold that science holds one or two items “on faith,” most specifically “There is such a thing as reality” and “There is such a thing as Cause and Effect.” These notions cannot be tested – Cartesian Doubt trumps all – but since they don’t lead us anywhere, we make a leap of faith, and then get down to splitting those atoms.)
Its not on you to prove it, and this is the error that keeps getting made over and over. The burden of proof falls squarely on the shoulders of the person making the claim. In the case of religious claims there is no proof, no evidence, and thus no valid claim whatsoever. Feeling like you have to prove them wrong is flawed thinking, it is up to them to demonstrate they are right.
No it doesn’t, It makes the claim that no supernatural entity ever claimed to exist has even once come close to meeting the evidentiary burden required of such an absurd claim. If you allow that the xian god “might” exist because you cannot prove him wrong you also have to allow that every single lunatic unprovable claim “might” also be true.
I claim that the big bang was in fact the gaseous emission from the anus of the invisible pink unicorn, and thus began the universe. Do I really need to point out why this claim is total bullshit? Just because there are billions of people claiming billions of things about allah does not make their claims any less suspect. No evidence = No reason to give the claim any validity at all.
Sure you have. Der Trihs takes pretty much that position in this very thread. He moves from to this (in post #53):
“According to all the evidence gathered by science there are no souls, no afterlife, and no gods, nor is there room in the laws of physics for those things. But people don’t want to hear that so they claim those questions are “beyond science”, instead of accepting “no, there’s no reason to believe they exist” as the answer.”
. . . to this (in post #58):
“No; if there actually were gods and souls and so forth, there would be room in the laws of physics for them. If there actually were “supernatural entities”, there’s no reason to think that they would be any more “beyond science” than electromagnetism is.”
. . . to this (also in post #58):
“Technology in the real world can’t detect the supernatural because there is no supernatural, not because the supernatural is inherently indetectable. The latter claim is a reaction to the consistent failure of the supernatural to produce any evidence of its existence.”
In other words, he starts from “there is no evidence, no reason to believe”, asserts that “if they existed, they would be empirically observable” and concludes that “these things do not exist”. His premise requires that existing things are by definition observable.
And that’s fair enough.
The thing is, though, that there are other equally untestable propositions (“Animals have rights not to have suffering inflected on them. Everyone has rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”) which we generally don’t table as “not interesting at this point in time”. Nobody suggests that people - many of them atheist materialists - who take positions on these are irrational, deluded or behaving in a way incompatible with science. Whereas these suggestions are quite often made about people who take an interest in questions which some atheist materialists find “not interesting at this point in time”.
Sure. All epistemological systems have to start from a number of unproven axioms. In addition to the ones you mention, the scientific method assumes that the universe we perceive is in fact real (as opposed to illusory); that our perceptions of it are, to a useful degree, reliable (i.e. we are not deluded); that the universe is organised, predictable, governed by laws (if it were not, we could not draw any inferences from our observations). And no doubt other fundamental axioms of science can be identified - all unproven, and untestable by reference to any empirical evidence.
All of which is fine; it in no way invalidates the scientific method. But what it does do is to underline my point - there is nothing inherently unscientific, antiscientific, irrational, deluded, etc about adopting a position (of either belief or disbelief) in relation to a proposition not susceptible of scientific investigation. Those who insist that there is are themselves adopting a position which is both unscientific (in that it denies the rationality, etc of the axioms on which the scientific method rests) and illogical (in that it is itself empirically untestable), which is an amusing irony.
I’ve seen others give similar arguments to yours. Is your claim that the truly supernatural is logically impossible? Logically impossible in the sense that whenever I or anyone else describes something that might be supernatural, you it can be measured and therefore isn’t.
You misunderstand me. I don’t feel that it’s up to me to prove that any specific claims somebody may choose to make about the supernatural aren’t true.
I’m just pointing out that it’s intrinsically impossible to prove the negative claim that no supernatural entity exists.
And if I wanted to assert as incontrovertible fact that no supernatural entity exists (a fairly useless activity anyway, to my thinking, but some people seem to enjoy attempting it), I would need to be able to prove it. Which can’t be done.
The claim you describe is perfectly correct. No supernatural entity has ever provided even a smidgen of evidence to suggest that it has any scientifically meaningful existence.
But that is not what the conflation of “scientific reality” with “reality” unqualified is implicitly claiming.
Now you’re getting it! Well done.
Remember, we are not talking here about accepting any such lunatic unprovable claims as plausible or even slightly tenable hypotheses about scientific reality. We’re just talking about the logical impossibility of using science itself to prove that nothing except scientific reality can possibly exist.
No, you don’t, because this discussion is already way ahead of such trivial arguments. Everybody here reached agreement on the fact that irrational or unsupported assertions don’t have any valid claim to scientific reality at least several dozen posts ago.
That is exactly what I’ve been saying all along. Entities for which there is no valid empirical evidence have no scientifically meaningful existence whatsoever.
You say what, bro? I think there are some words missing there.
No. I don’t know whether the truly supernatural is logically impossible. I’m pretty sure it would be logically impossible to demonstrate the existence of anything truly supernatural, though.
Secular philosophy never clams to be scientific. Not current ones, any way - the pre-scientific natural philosophers used arguments and methods just like those of the ethical philosophers. Philosophy today (that doesn’t use formal logic) is similar to that of 2500 years ago - science is totally different.
When religion states scientific things, they get mixed again. Such as: fossils are false because God created the universe 10,000 years ago and wouldn’t lie to us.
The stuff I’ve read doesn’t start by acting if any of these rights is real, but argues why we should accept such rights. And they certainly don’t argue that these rights are actors in the way that God would be if he existed. So you are seriously mixing up the implications of existence. God could punish us - a right to life cannot.
When you trace religious arguments (as opposed to secular arguments written by a believer) back far enough they stem from what God wants or something implied by the very existence of God. Sure bad secular philosophers can assert things, but it is not inherent in secular philosophy.
Secular ethical systems certainly behave as you say. But if a God sets morality in any way (which is how religious ethical systems differ from secular ones) then it proceeds from something which can be scientifically demonstrated. Say the Bible was true. We could record God talking to Moses, we can film the Red Sea parting, we can analyze the composition of manna. It wouldn’t be proof, it never is, but it would count as a scientific demonstration. And we demonstrate that at least some Gods don’t exist by looking at their supposed statements. Some are logically impossible, some make claims which have been falsified (and thus can’t be gods) and some are indistinguishable from not existing. And of course it is the job of a religion basing ethics on some god to show that god. Not doing so is like mortgage companies foreclosing without thinking they need to show a contract.
You guys haven’t proven that the supernatural doesn’t exist, you defined it out of existence. Anything our senses can detect is amenable to scientific investigation - science existed before cameras and recording instruments after all. Therefore supernatural entities cannot be detected and are functionally do not exist.
I think they don’t exist because there has never been any evidence of them and because from what we see of how the universe works it’s science all the way down. It just seems odd to define the supernatural out of existence.
Sorry - that should be if you describe it then it can be analyzed by science and is therefore not supernatural - if you can’t describe it does not exist and is thus not supernatural.
Another way of looking at it is - how many natural laws would you want to toss out or make ugly by adding special cases to in order to have them include the supernatural? F=ma except when someone says abracadabra?
If this stuff ever showed up (which it won’t) wouldn’t science be more elegant with current rules and supernatural exceptions which don’t get covered, as opposed to Newton’s laws for low speeds being rewritten to look like a legal contract? Relativity does not need special clauses to cover Newton’s laws - they just fall out. (The relevant ones, I mean.)
Exactly my point! If empirical detectability is the criterion of existence, then existence is indeed what the supernatural has been defined right out of.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Anything our senses can detect is amenable to scientific investigation - science existed before cameras and recording instruments after all. Therefore supernatural entities cannot be detected and are functionally do not exist.
I think they don’t exist because there has never been any evidence of them and because from what we see of how the universe works it’s science all the way down.
[/quote]
Absolutely true. Although fundamentally circular. When you speak of “what we see of how the universe works” and what “our senses can detect”, you’re inherently assuming that scientific empirical rationality is the only way to know any sort of reality. And while that assumption is a perfectly reasonable one, it’s not provable.
To say “Science has never detected in the universe anything that isn’t detectable by science” isn’t a discovery so much as a tautology. To attempt to infer from that “There can be nothing in the universe that isn’t detectable by science” is a logical error.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
It just seems odd to define the supernatural out of existence.
[/QUOTE]
Not odd at all. The supernatural has no place whatsoever in what our rational-materialist epistemology understands existence to be.
Some people try to force supernatural concepts into a scientific worldview and insist that science should give way to accommodate them. Others just like to drag feeble caricatures of the supernatural into a rational-materialist framework in order to take them apart, like cats bringing half-killed mice indoors to spin out their hunting in comfort. Both of them, IMO, are missing the point.
That’s all fine and dandy if we were speaking about undetected stuff that does not interact with the natural world.
Religion does however speak very much about there being interaction between Gods and the natural world. All the bleedin time.
That’s what religion is all about; how to make the supernatural intervene in the natural world.
Detectable intervention of course. What good is undetectable intervention?
Yes, but imagine if literally the only reliable way of establishing truth you had was via a metal detector - you would have no way of ever fulfilling any reasonable burden of proof that plastic existed. Plastic may just as well not exist. That’s the situation the supernatural is in - we’ve essentially defined it in such a way that it could not even in principle be distinguished from something that doesn’t exist.
Yes, but that second “if” is very iffy. I mean, for starters, it assumes that the truth is not an end in and of itself. I consider believing false things inherently wrong, and thus harmful. But even without going that far, I cannot think of a single religious doctrine throughout history that has not been harmful. Maybe you can? Because here’s the thing - religious dogma leads to people believing stupid things, which leads to people doing stupid things. It doesn’t help that much of it is exclusive and rests on psychological threats, which seems to be a fairly large requirement if you want your religion to be successful and not just die out.
Which, of course, it not fair at all. Sure, if you leave out all the harm in religion, then religion isn’t harmful. But I’d argue that some of the harmful elements in religion are intrinsic - or at least, you cannot have a successful religion without them.
But determining the relevance of the question is in fact infinitely more valuable than that which religion brings to the table. What does religion even offer? I see no valuable tool coming from religion. What’s more, we can derive a fair amount in ethics from science. Check out Matt Dillahunty’s lecture on the subject, or Sam Harris’s.
Well, would you like to provide a more functional definition? The word seems to mean “that which exists outside of the realm of the natural”. Which we pretty much by definition cannot examine.