Generally, when people use the term “supernatural” they assume a context of this “supernatural” interacting with natural. That is, we aren’t talking about some “other universe” or “dimension outside of the one we live in” and so on.
If you are using “supernatural” in the sense of something that interacts with this universe, then your point neatly sums up why religion and science are not compatible.
Either natural principles are always at work, or there is no such thing as natural principles. Science is the effort to uncover natural law. Not only would science be unable to detect or explain some sort of violation of natural law; were such a violation to happen, the incompatibility would be at a much deeper level than intermittent and capricious miraculous events. Science itself would be rendered irrelevant as an approach to understanding our universe. A paradigm which posits natural law but allows for the supernatural is self-contradictory.
The increasingly accurate understanding of natural law has created a steady erosion of the miraculous, marginalizing religious explanations and shrinking grand miracles such as creation stories down to haphazard tiny and untestable interventions of the putatively supernatural into the natural world.
For this reason, we are in the middle of a broader long term trend from religion as a posit of the miraculous to religion as a schema for interacting with one another.
Only by redefining “religion” can we make it compatible with science.
I’m wondering if science can disprove the first Noble Truth of Buddhism: roughly, that life is composed of suffering.
Or the Golden Rule that was said by Rabbi Hillel to be the summary of Judaism (“all else is commentary”): that the basis of all morality is reciprocity: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Strikes me that science can and will displace any statement made about the composition of the natural world by a religious tradition, but cannot displace the ethical or philosophical cores of many religions. Though naturally one could disagree with the notion that life is basically suffering or that the Golden Rule is the basis of all morality, it appears to me that one cannot prove it.
Exactly so. Meaning that they are not “incompatible” with science. They are not subject to proof or disproof.
I can be a scientist, deeply respect the fundamental value of the scientific method, and at the very same time believe that “life is suffering” and/or that “the foundation of morality is the Golden Rule”.
Another scientist, with equal respect for the scientific method, could easily not believe that “life is suffering” or that the foundation of morality is the Golden Rule (preferring, say, some variety of utilitarianism).
They could disagree on these things, and science, as a method of inquiry, cannot decide who is right and who is wrong. Ergo, science and religion are not “incompatible”.
And if anybody’s trying to make a claim for empirical evidence of such an alleged interaction, their claim should indeed be empirically investigated and falsified (or verified, except it’s always going to be falsified).
My point is just that we shouldn’t thoughtlessly overstate the epistemological scope of rational empiricism. No epistemological framework can provide any information about anything outside itself. (That’s not to imply that there necessarily is anything outside rational empiricism, just that if there were, rational empiricism could not be used to detect it.)
What does that even mean? I’m alive at this moment, and I don’t think I’m suffering right now. There are millions of ants within a few blocks of my home and they are alive-how many of them do you think are suffering?
It’s not so much that statements like these are subject to proof or disproof-it’s that they seem to have the philosophical depth of a bumper sticker,
They are concepts, and no, I would say that they don’t exist in the sense that we’re using that word. Remember, the subject is religion and claims of a god’s existence. If you’re wanting to use the sense of “exist” that includes concepts, then sure, I’m happy to say that the concept of a god exists.
Fair enough, I’ll rephrase it: If something never manifests in the natural world, in what way does it “exist”?
Talking about something that, even in principle, cannot possibly be detected, is a good subject to talk about after a few beers, along with the idea that we’re all living in the matrix, and that I’m the only conscious entity in the universe and everyone else is just a robot.
But scientific empirical rationality is the only way to know any sort of reality - that itself is a tautology. And while this doesn’t prove that there is no other reality that we don’t have access to, that’s a separate question. The only way to have knowledge is through the tools of science.
Well, it’s true that superficial interpretations of such statements lack depth. Anybody who thinks that the principle “life is suffering” implies nothing more than a naive claim that “everybody alive is consciously experiencing suffering all the time”, and therefore saying “Hey, I’m alive and I feel okay at the moment” somehow refutes that principle, is definitely splashing in the shallow end of the philosophical pool.
The principle “life is suffering” is about the inevitability of negative emotions and habituation to positive emotions. There are a lot of experiences we naturally don’t want in life, first and foremost among them generally being death, and it’s statistically inevitable that we’re going to encounter a lot of them. The fact that we also encounter many experiences we do want is not enough to overcome our natural tendencies to dread/unhappiness/frustration/boredom/irritation/misery about experiences we don’t want.
Indeed it is, if we’re using “know” in the sense of scientific knowledge. And, of course, there’s no other sense we can use it that is scientifically meaningful.
What you have shown is that “Life is suffering” is a very bad way of imparting the information contained within the latter paragraph, and that by shoving such a concept into such an awkwardly open-ended and vague statement as “Life is suffering” you have created that same shallow pool that you force the scientific process to wade in when you ask it to disprove that selfsame vague statement.
Well, you know, imparting information contained in a 70±word paragraph in a three-word statement is intrinsically kind of difficult.
Because, of course, the terse statement “Life is suffering” was never intended to be completely self-explanatory in Buddhist philosophy. As with most major philosophical principles, it’s essentially a shorthand reference to a very involved analysis of a quite complicated system of concepts developed over a long period of time.
This, I think, is quite well known, which is why most people with some familiarity with philosophy wouldn’t try to interpret such a statement on its superficial face value. If you naively imagined you could meaningfully refute or contradict a famous philosophical principle on a face-value interpretation alone, without even bothering to do a little internet research to inform yourself of the more profound ways in which it’s usually interpreted, it’s not my fault (or the Buddha’s, for that matter). Sorry about your suffering, though.
You’re absolutely right, if “meaningful” connotes rational comprehensibility and consistency in our rational-materialist perspective. And in that perspective, that’s the only thing it can possibly connote.
Don’t you see, the tautology is built in. You cannot apply the vocabulary of rational-materialist empiricism to anything that is (allegedly) outside rational-materialist empirical epistemology. You simply end up saying something about that epistemology itself, not about anything outside it.
Of course we can’t prove scientific empirical rationality - but we can test it, and we do billions of times a day. Lowest p ever!
Since detectable in principle means detectable by science - since we can study even internal brain states which we can’t look at under a microscope, your
“There can be nothing in the universe that isn’t detectable by science”
can be reduced to
“There can be nothing in the universe that isn’t detectable”
which is unfalsifiable.
Just like religionists in the early 1800s flocking to science to help them prove that God exists (and getting way disappointed) the spiritualists of 100 years ago tried to use science to show that their stuff existed - and got equally disappointed. They mostly went to explanations for things they didn’t show existed to be explained.
The reason that the supernatural has no place in our worldview is that there is nothing there to have a place.
This depends a bit on what you mean by a scientific explanation. I think of one that applies to all things under its purview - the laws of motion applies to cannon balls and feathers. And it applies over all time.
What I don’t consider a scientific explanation is one where you just write down what you see. Though this is still scientific. Naturalists collected samples of plants and animals, but didn’t explain them - Darwin did that.
Now, if we found that F=ma except on Thursdays in Sheboygan where F = ma/2 we’d have a problem. I sense that you think that there would inevitably be a law explaining this. I’d think that a list of towns and dates where the laws of physics change is not much of an explanation. So I’d define the supernatural as exceptions to laws.
None exist of course, as far as we know, and we have lots of data.
Here is a programming example. I can write a spacewars game where the ships are controlled by code simulating Newton’s laws. But I can write in a hack for myself which gives me special powers. (It’s been done.) In terms of the game, my ship is supernatural.
To examine it we’d have to split the concept into scientific and philosophical pieces. They’d have to define life and then define suffering. If they do that we can scientifically examine the scientific part. What is likely to happen is that anecdotes of suffering will be used to “prove” the statement.
Kind of like “God is love” being proven by happy believers, while ignoring the unhappy ones.
Perhaps I think that shoving multi-page philosophies into 3 word bumper stickers can only lead to confusion when the bumper sticker is presented to an outsider instead of the philosophy itself, especially when all three words of said statement are open to very wide interpretation by anyone not already well versed in Buddhist philosophy. I understand the underlying philosophy those three words are supposed to represent, and I think they represent that philosophy very poorly…but I do not already subscribe to that philosophy. You, on the other hand, seem to assume that I am ignorant of the philosophy and that if I were well versed in Buddhist philosophy I would find that shortcut statement to be more “profound”.
