The Supernatural?

Great Debates
221

Your reasoning actually makes some sense, as far as it goes; but then you seem to only want to use reason to a certain point and then abandon it. As already pointed out, there are 2 obvious reasons why your logic doesn’t hold. (1) If you hold that all existent things must have a creator, then since the creator exists, it must have a creator, which in turn must have it’s creator, which leads to an infinite regression. (2) If God can be eternal, why can’t the universe be eternal?

A slightly less obvious reason why your logic doesn’t hold is that time itself is a property of the universe. Big Bang theory holds that at the “beginning” of the universe, all matter is squeezed into a single point of infinite density. At that point, there IS NO TIME, there is no distance, and there is no concept of cause-and-effect. That’s not to say it’s impossible for anything to exist outside our universe, but whatever other realms may exist cannot have been the “cause” of our universe, at least not the way we understand the concept of cause. You are attempting to take the concept of time, which is a property of our universe, and insisting that it transcends our universe, which it does not. Asking what came “before” the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole.

222

Leroy, I believe it was used to show that unless people apply their intellect, their power of abstraction they have no access to the World as it is. All they see is what it “seems” to be like.

We can easily be fooled by our senses. Our intellect is what helps us weed out the flase from the true.

Emotions and the 5 senses are essential to our survival. But without the intellect, we would not be able to stretch ourselves beyond the limits of Now. Things are not always what they seem at first glance. A mirrage in the desert vibrates in our spirits. It is real. It happens. But it is not what it seems…

223

bolding mine:

I would second this as basically what I was trying to say earlier. Basically, either the rules of logic hold for the universe, or they don’t. But if they don’t, no one will be able to prove, or know, the universe. After all, if one is convinced others are deceived, and this deception can be actual, it is impossible to tell that you are not the one being deceived (and, indeed, both may be true, even if the points of view hold directly opposable truth conditions, since logic does not hold!)

224

Logic has never been true, and never will be.

It is logical to assume the bumble bee can’t fly.
A massive steel ship can’t float.
A TV holds the program it’s playing.
A heavier than air craft can’t fly, etc.

Logic will get you nowhere, experience will.

Just because something appears logical to you doesn’t mean you understand it.

The only, only way humans learn is through experience.

The spirit world is experienced daily by millions, perhaps billions of people. They do it naturally through their emotions and inner senses, some might call that intuition. The spirit world can be seen and interacted with on the level of growth one has.

There are NDEs, OBEs, visions, lucid dreams, and tools to help.
The writings of these experiences go back to the beginning of recorded history. You have to ignore a lot of history to be a skeptic.

I furnish you controlled studies by scientists, documentation by scientists, thousands of individual experiences. You offer me no proof whatsoever, only opinions and theories. Show me the biological memory in the brain, prove something.

Love
Leroy

225

Leroy,
You don’t understand the concept of logic at all. Logic isn’t a set of assertions (“Massive ships can’t float”). Logic is a process by which we deal with these assertions.

-If A then B
-If B then C
Therefore: If A, then C.

The above is a sample of simple propositional logic. As you can see, we have removed the assertions (propositions) themselves, replacing them with abstract symbols.

Can you prove to us that the above procedure is wrong and “get us nowhere”? You’re on very very thin ice, lekatt. so thin you’re about to fall through…

226

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It is EXACTLY where I was.I recognise the the peeling wallpaper, crumbling foundations and brick windows.

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What spirit world?You cannot make such an assertion about a place you cannot demonstrate to exist.

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Anyone ever see that episode of The Outer Limits where that guy is trying to escape these spider aliens who have killed his fellow crew members and get this medicine to earth to save his family.Just as he escape the infested ship in a lifepod the episode ends with him lying on the floor of the ship mumbling delusionally while spider aliens pump he and his crew mates full of neurotoxins?

Wrong.In Plato’s cave analogy the person in the cave is the spiritualist.He never leaves the cave because he is convinced the shadows on the wall are “fierce creatures”(i.e. boogeymen).SInce he never leaves the cave he never realises the falsity of his beliefs adn even if he WERE to leave the cave after spending his life in there, the light from the outside world(i.e. reason) would be blinding.He would attempt to avert his eyes and return to the comfort of his cave where he could go on believing the shadows were fearsome beasts.

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They say nothing that requires proof.We ask for rational justification of your claims.You provide none.We conclude that there has not been any rational justification present to warrant your assertions/inferences.

The burden of proof is STILL upon you and you cannot get around that.

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Theories are explanations of facts/observed adn demonstrable phenomenae.They have nothing to do with “wild hunches”, “unproven guesses” and the like.You seem disappointed that your most reliable argument was yanked out from under your feet when scientists looked up from their research long enough to point out that the common usage of the word “theory” is in error.

You don’t walk around the streets with wooden placards that read “The End is Near!” do you?

227

Wow. I’ve been following Lekatt’s posts for so long now, I thought I was prepared for anything, but that…

You do understand that just saying something is “logical” isn’t the same as using logic, right? No of course you don’t.

What happened Leroy? Were you frightened by some mad scientist as a youth?

Nothing you’ve said in this or any other thread has amounted to anything other than “I say this is true, so it is,” and then link to your website again. Come on. At the very least find some new sources.

To be a skeptic isn’t to ignore anything. It’s to try to sort the evidence from the falsehoods and look for proof. You’ve never given any.

Guess what? To use your own words, YOU LOSE.

228

First Thanks to TVAA and ethic for thought provoking responses to my post. Also sorry for not responding earlier, other things intervened.

Again I think the problem is equivocation. We are using the phrase “natural law” to mean two different things. you seem to be using it to mean any means by which any event happens in any concievable universe. With this definition you are correct that an event that happens contrary to natural law is a meaningless proposition. I’m using Natural law (or more properly, physical law) to mean the sort of general impersonal universal principles that science investigates.

One problem is that in this particular universe, both definitions of natural law coincide. There has been no convincing evidence for any phenomena which cannot, theoretically at least, be reduced to the laws of physics. Thus no supernatural phenomena exist (that we know about). I was just speculating on what a supernatural phenomenon would look like in some imaginary universe. In some sense its a little like arguing about the mating habits of Jabberwockys.

Again, on your definition the magics of middle earth or the miracles of Jesus would be examples of natural law. On my definition they would be outside of physical law.

On some other issues, Isn’t the “first cause” argument a philosophical chesnut that has been discarded as long ago as Kant. Furthermore modern science gives us many examples of acausal events, for instance radioactive decay.

Also, as far as John Edwards goes, didn’t South Park already deal with this.

JE: “Maybe I can speak with the dead.”
Stan: “No, you can’t.”

I mean, I’ve seen frauds before, but, well, come on.

229

Damn… I never should have brought up the Allegory of the Cave when I wasn’t remembering the lesson of it properly.

Godless is correct about the conclusions one should draw from “The Cave”. In my earlier post where I claimed that the cave is where we now are and the outside is where we strive to be, I should have said that the cave is where SOME of us reside… a place they refuse to leave even when they have some evidence that the Truth lies elsewhere.

I stand corrected. I am also quite willing to stand corrected (as I suspect most of the people in this discussion are) if any real evidence is ever presented to prove the natural existence of NDEs, ghosts, gods or unicorns. Short of such evidence, I stand by my rationality.

230

I think equivocation is indeed a big problem in this thread. But my point is specifically that there are no “impersonal universal principles” that can be known. We can only observe what goes on through the deamon riddled trickeries of our senses, then attempt to describe those phenomena using patterns. Essentially, in this view, science is not EXPLANATORY but merely DESCRIPTIVE.

Some patterns seem so steadfast that we proclaim its description to be an “impersonal universal principle”. But all it means is that we have never observed any instances where the pattern is broken. There’s a subtle but substantial difference.

Supernatural occurances are just events that don’t fit into our descriptions.

The human will, the capacity to act freely, is more problematic to describe than anything that we normally call “supernatural”. But it’s not supernatural, is it? It’s very natural I would say. And any residual Humians that would like to convince me otherwise are just wasting their words. That’s why we have to abandon causal models almost all together when it comes to the “soft” sciences and opt for words like “possible outcomes”.

231

ethic I’m not sure if I understand your distinction between explanations and descriptions. When scientists discover some startling phenomenon they come up with the best explanation they can. Look at the development of the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom for example. When Rutherford saw Alpha particles bouncing back from gold foil he didn’t simply describe the event and leave it at that, he explained the event by theorizing that the Positive charges in an atom were clustered in its center.

I agree, of course, that we are limited by our sensory experience, and the history of science has shown how foolish it is to regard the theories of the moment as the final word. However our successfull descriptions of nature have all been based on the idea that there are a set of fundamental laws that determine the course of nature. What these laws are is something we will keep exploring, but that they exist seems to me to be a fundamental preconception of science.

Thanks also for reminding me about human will and conciousness in your last post. the role of conciousness in the universe is a difficult issue perhaps suited to a thread of its own, with one camp claiming conciousness can be reduced to electrochemical interactions in the brain and another camp claiming it is an irreducible component of nature. Perhaps this is a subject for a different thread.

I don’t think I’m doing a good job of explaining what I mean by natural law, or physical law. I’ll try to read Feynmann’s Character of Physical Law tomorrow and see if that helps. (I’m sitting on a grand jury and have plenty of time to read)

232

Science takes existence for granted (as is not only reasonable but logically necessary). Once we do that, we naturally seek to describe that reality, which inevitably leads to “laws”. If there’s any consistency in the behavior of the universe (which there must be, for a variety of complicated reasons), then accurate descriptions of its behavior will appear to contain principles.

233

The funny thing is, there were so many things in my post that Lekatt could pick up and run with, yet he couldn’t help but willfully misinterpret the meaning of “logic.”

Furthermore:

is an absurd statement. In a world where logic does not hold, one cannot even evaluate the truth value of a statement such as “logic has never been true.” In other worlds, “Logic has never been true” is a logical proposition in itself.

i.e. you lose.

234

Borgia,
When most of us explain something in scientific terms, we apply the second usage listed at www.webster.com:

Science, in this light, deals with causative models (what I have called EXPLANATORY SCIENCE). This has lead to excessive reductionism and the idea that we could encapsulate the Universe into one eloquent equation. If we could just find the root cause of all things, if we could just unify everything into a Simple Theory of Everything, then…

I mean, even Einstein supposedly said “God does not play dice”! Whether Einstein said it or not is irrelevant. It’s emblematic of an attitude regarding cause that is still prevalent despite the Uncertainty Principle having shattered any hope in the reductive effort. The initial success of reductionism is now biting us in the tail end. Even disregarding quantum mechanics, the further you probe into any causative models, the more frustrated you get. Eventually, you hit the intrinsic end of any such model: what is in the mental space between causal connections? And, additionally, when you begin dealing with multiple factors, even in a Newtonian model cause becomes an unmanageable multilinear enterprise.

If you asked me “Why does the cart move when I push it?” and I answered “It moves because you push it”, would you be satisfied with my explanation? But in all fairness to the truth, it is the most reasonable explanation of all! In its gung-ho manner, it chops off any further reductio ad absurdum. Sure, it’s self-referential. But that’s because the question is somewhat silly. Some may claim it’s not because you can explain it using forces, muscles, electrical impulses, synaptic transmission and yada yada yada. But then we end up with God and “because he willed it” or wavefunctions and “because they collapsed”. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with “I willed it” and “I pushed it”.

What is the alternative then? After all, reductionism has been quite useful. The alternative is to view science as what I call DESCRIPTIVE, as purely a modeling enterprise.

We can imitate nature, from nuclear reactions to cybernetic components to linguistic systems. The point of the scientific method becomes to assist us in creating as elegant descriptions of what we perceive as possible so we can mimick nature. And there’s nothing wrong in using layered descriptions (systems and sub-systems). Cause is redefined not as an absolute THIS THEN THAT (necessary connection) but simply the potential of two incidents being in mental juxtaposition. That potential should never be considered 100%. Although it can through experimental data approach the level of necessity (1 on a scale of 0 to 1), in Humian tradition, we should never be fooled to think we know the future with absolute certainty!

For what we call the “supernatural phenomena”, the consequence is that they are not absurd in the face of some misplaced Principles (spatial proximity of cause and effect being one of them). We need a little humility before the mysteries and splendors of Nature. Let’s not be condescending with the certainties of explanations, but fraught with the uncertainties of descriptions.

And let’s not dismiss the paranormal at first glance based on some Universal Principles that can’t be known since the future is ultimatly just a toss of the old coin…