I was thinking very much along these lines when I took my wife tonight to try acupuncture for the fist time. Qi and meridians or whatever are just a model for centuries of observed and recorded experience. Whether they are “true” is far less important to me than whether they relieve my wife’s pain without causing her additional undesirable damage. It is far more important that the model be somewhat internally consistent and effective than “true”.
"You do not use your mind to think about your religion!"
– The Reverend Doctor Doctor Mr. M.D. David N. Meyer II, Pope of New York City, Idaho, and the Great Pacific Northwest
Depends on what claims are made about the “phenomenon” itself. I give you the “no punch knockout” as an example.
Sure we could, but we’d be basically talking about the same thing while using different terminology. A hypothesis becomes a theory becomes a law through the scientific method. Many discarded theories do in fact have kernels of truth from which similar though corrected hypothesis pass peer reviews.
On a personal note, I am quite the agnostic when it comes to medicine in general, or to be exact the practitioners of same. Why? Because the almighty buck rules and in my experience many invasive procedures could and should be avoided in favor of palliative treatment. As an example of one I suffer from spondylolisthesis (try saying that once) and in my last and worst ever crisis, less than one year ago, three out of the four neurosurgeons that saw me recommended immediate and quite complicated surgery as the only “true” option. I went with the fourth and my own instinct. And thanks to a lot of conventional physical therapy, tons of ongoing strengthening exercises and the occasional muscle relaxant, I am fairly confident I feel better today, almost a year later, than I would had I opted for the installation of titanium screws and bone implants in my back.
Which is only a long-winded way of saying that whatever for you, go for it. But the only advice I’d be willing to give to anyone is to go through all of the channels available though conventional medicine first – with the caveat already expressed. Namely that medicine in general is Big Business first and foremost.
Quite alright. He can pray all he wants for me with the condition that I’ll be doing the thinking for both of us.
RedFury You and I are on the same page regarding spondylolisthesis. Too often surgery is recommended when strengthening is the answer. I would have made the same choice that you made, exactly.
The four humors of the human body are also a model of centuries of observed and recorded experience. The fact that we know the mechanisms are demonstrably wrong tells us quite a lot about the effectiveness of treatments based on it. Bogus explanations and indemonstrable ideas should be big red flags, especially when actual medicine can explain it. Placebo effect and triggering endorphin release are already known to (temporarily) relieve pain, invoking mystical energy is not necessary. This argument is barely more than ‘I am comfortable in my ignorance’.
You don’t say.
Now this is actually not quite true. The mechanism by which acupuncture works is not completely understood nor explained. “Endorphin release” is only so much handwaving, and may be no better an explanation than pain gates or the placebo effect.
Hell, the mechanism behind many effective drugs is only barely understood. But they work.
But this is pretty much beside the point. The question of interest is which model has greater predictive power and treatment effectiveness. We have had very poor success managing my wife’s chronic pain so far, despite extensive experimentation and testing. Unfortunately, the acupuncture example is moot since it, at least on the first try, was completely ineffective.
Ki does too exist. He has black fur, is 15 1/2 years old, no tail, and is smart as a whip. Half border collie, half cocker spaniel.
My dog. We didn’t name him - the Jewish Buddhists we got him from did.
Posted this before I got to the trainwreck part of this thread. Sorry.
Coming in late, since I’ve been on vacation, I want to address this.
The implication here is that all which exists is natural. However this can’t be what most people mean by the supernatural, since the act of believing something exists means that it isn’t supernatural, which pretty much means the set of supernatural things is null by definition.
I think a better definition is that the set of supernatural things is orthogonal to the set of natural things, which meet certain physical laws. If you could show that a supernatural object meets these laws, perhaps modified by the new information, then you could move them from the supernatural to the natural set. If something supernatural, such as a god, inherently does not obey physical laws, then I’d be happy to keep calling it supernatural.
The set of supernatural things is still null, but from lack of evidence they exist, not by definition. Demonstrating that something is truly supernatural would take a lot of effort, and I don’t think any such thing exists, but if you are truly being scientifically honest you shouldn’t rule them out* a priori.*
We’ve had this argument before actually. I think it just a narrowing of the term nature to say that something can exist beyond nature.
Well I guess it depends on whether or not you view physical and natural as synonyms. Whether or not God obeys the laws of nature is kind of a moot point. If God exists the laws of nature are God’s laws, God is the perfect virtuoso who can manipulate the fabric of the universe with such ease that it seems like a miracle to lesser players. There is some quote by one of those ancient Christian thinkers, Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, someone on the A list regarding a miracle not violating the laws of nature, only being beyond what we thought we knew about the laws of nature. So you might say something is supernatural if it seems to violate a law of nature as you understand it. My argument wouldn’t be that laws of nature were violated but that your model was insufficient to describe what just happened. I don’t see a universal mind as being a violation of the laws of nature. That doesn’t mean that it DOES exist, only that if it exists there is no reason to believe it exists outside of nature.
You’re kind of working with a tautology here. If something is beyond the physical realm proving that it exists scientifically is not possible as science only examines the physical world and describes it by mechanistic processes. If it is beyond the physical then the self-referential models we use to describe physicality cannot be used to describe it. De - fine means to set a limit. If it is beyond all of our existing set of limits then we cannot define it. So either the supernatural does not exist, or there is no way to prove it scientifically. There would have to be some higher order of knowing above science that would allow us to understand it. So not science but whatever replaces science as our primary method of knowing would be needed to delve there I should think. Because by definition science is concerned only with the natural world and it’s functioning by natural processes.
Don’t be stupid. Jewish Buddhists don’t exist.
Sorry. I just couldn’t help myself.
If god created the universe, he also created nature, and natural laws - but why think that he is bound by the laws he created? If you define natural law as being what God can do, it becomes trivial, since God can do anything logically possible. You say player which is exactly right, since God wrote the code and can revise it on the fly, or perhaps use cheat codes he put in which are not accessible to us. If you want to define away supernatural, fine, but it seems the waste of a perfectly good word.
I don’t think any of that crowd understood the concept of laws of nature very well. If a miracle does not violate some broader set of natural laws, then either there is natural anarchy or God is bound by natural law, which makes him not God. I’m not denying that something which looks like a miracle might not be; I’m only talking about things which don’t seem to follow any laws.
Not at all. Consider Yoda and Luke’s fighter. Consider you can detect energy flows in the area. Yoda lifts the fighter, and your energy detection meters never budge. Assuming you actually get all the energy fields measured, that’s an example of a supernatural physical manifestation.
We’re certainly not proving or understanding the mechanism scientifically, or else it wouldn’t be supernatural. But we can detect it.
Of course this conclusion, like anything else in science, is tentative, and can be revised if some new meter finds where the energy is coming from. But saying it can’t be supernatural no matter what is too much like fundamentalism for me. I don’t have faith, not even in this.
I live in California where Jewish Buddhists and Buddhist Jews are all too common. Whatever they were, they did a good job in training a neurotic pup.
Oh. In that case, I do believe in them. And want to find some to help me with my bad dogs!
(demonstrating my greater willingness to believe something that might help me, as humans sometimes do)
Voyager, you do know that I was joking, right? I’m just learning to post on these boards, so I don’t want my poor effort at humor to offend a poster, especially one I respect.
I disagree with you that it’s a perfectly good word. But even if you look at nature in terms of operant code, then changing code still works within certain principles. God as I am using the term implies a universal intelligence. Just like we are bound by our natures, so is God. This is a much deeper metaphysical issue that I could go into but I am not sure how much actual interest there is in it. Basically, the act of creation is a motive act of self. Ontologically God is being himself in the act of creating nature, the knowing and the creation happen simultaneously.
Yeah, I think you are missing the point. They understood quite well that their understanding of nature was quite limited. Pointing out knowledge gaps isn’t particularly relevant. God is himself and thus subject to himself. What you are arguing essentially is that God is free of himself. The idea that God and nature are separate entities is one viewpoint and as valid as any other really.
No, it’s just evidence that the particular sensors you were using don’t detect the force. Radar doesn’t detect lasers does it?
If it is not by definition, beyond definition then it is perfectly within the scope of the natural world.
Well are we really talking about science? Science doesn’t really have any opinions on the supernatural does it? It’s not a matter of faith it’s a matter of utility of definitions. I do not think that the term supernatural is useful. The issue is purely semantic.
Just like The Hamster King was referring to with his talk about how the definition of tree is rather arbitrary. We claim that a tree goes into the ground but is not the ground around it, that it is not anything outside of its roots. However, why not consider the system of mushrooms that the tree has a commensal relationship with as being part of the same organism? Why do we do that? Because we are de-fining things we set limits based upon certain criteria that irrevocably separate the mushrooms from the tree even though they are each getting something from the relationship. Why do we consider the tree or the mushrooms as being separate from the ground? Because we need to define things.
I agree with your delineation of the concept of the supernatural; but, as I hinted at earlier, I also think this definition implies that the supernatural and the natural can’t ever actually interact. If Yoda wants to lift the X-Wing, there must be some causal agent he transfers to it, if only to let it know that it should rise right now; if there were nothing of the sort transferred, the X-Wing would rise in an ‘uncaused’ fashion, so there’s nothing to saying that Yoda lifted it, and he wouldn’t really be able to let it rise according to his will. This causal agent, however, is something we can detect, by virtue of it making the fighter rise if nothing else. Seems to me that this is tantamount to the causal agent being something physical – I don’t see any great differences to, for instance, using iron filings to detect magnetic fields; it might be a bit cumbersome to build a detector from an array of X-Wings, but it’s possible in principle.
This pushes the problem of finding some suitable causal nexus back one step: whatever sent out the causal agent that made Luke’s fighter rise, Yoda’s mind, for instance, might still be something supernatural, it seems. But then, how does Yoda’s mind tell the causal agent to go and tell the X-Wing to rise? That’s the same problem as before, and if it meant before that the only conclusion is that the causal agent is something physical, then that means that Yoda’s mind must be physical, too, and thus, that only the physical can interact with the physical.
Try as I might, I see no way around this. One could imagine that the causal agent sent out by Yoda’s mind is both supernatural and natural, but if it then consists of two parts, how would one part let the other know it has been influenced in some way? If something is in part natural, it would seem that it must be in toto natural, or else, not really one unified thing, since its supernatural parts could never influence its natural ones and vice versa.
It’s a bit the old question of how ghosts should be able to both walk through walls and knock vases of the windowsill – you can’t really have something both interact and not interact with the physical, yet that is what’s demanded if you want to have it undetectable, but still able to influence reality.
So, I would argue that this – that the supernatural either doesn’t exist, or has no effect on us or anything that in turn has an effect on us – is the default stance to take, to be revised (and replaced by copious amounts of head-scratching) only in the face of empirical contradiction, however that’s supposed to come about.
Handwaving? Hardly. While nothing in the human body is understood perfectly, endorphins are quite well understood. Just because you don’t understand them doesn’t mean medical science doesn’t. Trying to claim that they’re handwaving is simple willful ignorance.
But none of the drugs have to invoke mystical energies or things we know do not exist in the human body as explanations. These things are being investigated so they are understood, unlike acupuncture.
Sorry to hear that.
Of course I did. I made a California joke in response. I may live here, among the fruits and nuts, but I’m really from New York.
I’m almost certain that Maeglin understands endorphin release just fine. What he’s pointing out is that using the ‘endorphin release’ dismissal you yourself are trying to claim that you understand scientifically how acupuncture works when for the most part the studies on the topic are rather sparse.
Actually acupuncture is being investigated too.
Fine. You are giving yet another example of what Lenny Bruce called a non-sked theology. If your god is part of nature, then I totally agree with what you are saying. However the traditional Western god is not part of nature, but somehow above and outside of it.
Tsk. This objection was already covered in the part you quoted.
Then, as I said, the set of supernatural things is null by definition. You’re a nature fundamentalist.
Science has a theory, provisional like all others, that all things are subject to natural law. Where I am an outlier among atheists is that I accept that this is provisional. In many discussions about what would convince us of the existence of god or the supernatural the majority opinion seems to be that no matter how strong the evidence is for something outside science, it can’t really be outside of science. I agree that the evidence required would have to be very extraordinary, but given that evidence I’d be willing to accept that something odd was going on.
In real life supernatural refers to the set of things made up in stories which don’t meet the laws of science. The term is useful in that respect. There are no actual supernatural things, as far as we can tell. No dispute about that. The question is what would happen if one of these made up things showed up in reality.
As for definitions, yes they are always arbitrary, especially when applied to natural things. Look at species. But agreeing that the boundary between natural and supernatural would be blurry is different from saying that a supernatural thing is an oxymoron - in the sense that things have to be natural. That is true provisionally, and I think the probability it is true in actuality is very, very high, but let’s not say it is absolutely true. That’s a statement of faith.