No, not for sure: how would we make a guess about which category to put something into?
For example, suppose that, in experimenting in the kitchen, I discover two properties of food:
Dried peaches, when baked in an alkali batter, turn emerald green; and
Dried apricots, when baked in an alkali batter, turn into live bunny rabbits.
I do not know the mechanism for either of these phenomena. How do I decide whether to guess that either one is supernatural or natural?
Obviously, additional testing might lead to a better guess. But it seems to me that your definition means that, when confronted with a phemenon whose explanation I don’t understand, my initial response should be to consider it as supernatural, no matter how likely it seems that I’ll find a natural explanation.
I’m pretty frustrated by this question: it suggests that you’re not hearing my argument. In what way am I ruling out a set of hypotheses? Can you provide an example of a specific hypothesis that I am ruling out by not calling either #1 or #2 a supernatural event, if it occurs? Keep in mind that I’ve said repeatedly and explicitly that I am defining the word supernatural such that the word does not apply to existent phenomena; defining the word in such a manner makes the word inappropriate but leaves potential explanatory mechanisms untouched.
The set of unexplained phenomena with a potentially supernatural cause is a subset of all unexplained phenomena. Most of these (in fact all to our knowledge) do not have propeties which violate known laws, but just are not explained by them.
Here’s why I disagree. The reason that falsification is not as important a part of science as some people think is that when confronted with experimental results that look like they would falsify a hypothesis scientists don’t usually throw out the hypothesis that quickly. They look for minor tweaks that would include the new result, or some evidence of experimental error, or even fraud (see Piltdown man.) Hoyle’s adherence to the Steady State theory is an example. What I’m saying is that at a certain point, with very strong evidence, it might be time to stop tweaking purely naturalistic hypotheses and at least consider supernatural ones. The more avenues of inquiry the better. As I showed in my example, there are many ways in which you can study thngs which seem to be supernatural.
Is your definition of supernatural include the property of not being subject to any sort of law or determinism? If supernatural things are totally random, then I would agree that trying to study them is pointless. However, that is not the typical definition of supernatural.
Do you mean that natural is defined as something which can be described, even indirectly and partially? If so, I will cede that under this definition there is no supernatural. But it also makes God natural.
Not at all! The supernatural hypothesis comes up only when all natural ones are ruled out, and the data indicates a violation of known ones.
In your example, the first case would be studied by checking chemistry, and seeing if the color change would be explained by known or possibly discovered properties of the ingredients. (Having the color change to yellow with pink polkadots would be more interesting.) In the second, the first thing you’d do is look around for a magician, or Allen Funt. (Host of Candid Camera for you youngin’s. ) Assuming that this is repeatable, you’d measure the mass of the mixture before and afte the process. If it changes, you’d isolate the mixture to avoid the addition of mass from the air, perhaps. You might even measure energy in and out. (Though that much mass addition would require bombloads of energy.)
If at this point you still are seeing something interesting, then you start hypothesizing. Is magic any less likely than the hypothesis that the Enterprise is in orbit and is beaming down bunnies to play with your head?
Am I correct in concluding that you would consider faster than light communication without the exchange of energy natural because it would be detected as happening? I never meant to imply that you were ruling out any hypotheses, just that you were ruling out assigning the tag supernatural to any hypothesis for which there is physical evidence. Is that what you mean? In other words, there is a 1-1 and onto mapping between naturalistic hypotheses and physical effects, and no phyical event could ever have a supernatural cause, and no supernatural mechanism can ever have a physical effect. Is that your definition?
No and no. My definitions of natural and supernatural are of no importance. What I’ve been saying is that the distinction between natural and supernatural is without relevance to any research program. How does calling any phenomenon one thing or the other lead you to differing experimental procedures or different interpretations of results?
I simply dismiss the idea that mystics are more likely to be wrong than other types of people. If you want to say “People were wrong, and other people believed them sometimes even though they were wrong.”, I’ll readily agree with you, but it happens all the time, people are wrong about lots of things. Look at how hard it is to get people to agree about global warming. When we get past the point we are at, and can observe global warming in retrospect, we will sort out who was right and who was wrong, but all of the opinions that don’t accurately forecast global warming will be wrong, yet political decisions are made based upon the predictions of many scientists who will turn out to be wrong.
What do you mean by “magic”? You can’t fool me, to paraphrase a famous old lady: it’s realities all the way down. If magic works, then magic is natural.
(Of course, you’re correct that the magician hypothesis is most likely, and the “Daniel’s gone bonkers” hypothesis is also pretty likely; I’d explore those first.)
You are correct that I rule out the tag supernatural for any phenomenon for which there is physical evidence, just as you (I presume) rule out the tag “nonexistent” for any phenomenon for which there is physical evidence. I find this to make the term more useful: for one thing, it helps folks avoid the temptation to throw up their hands and say, “Nope, can’t be answered!” If something exists, I see no reason to believe that we cannot study it using the tools of science, even if the existent thing appears to wreck our most cherished theories.
One of my science professors in college told me that when theory and data fight, data always win. I think that applies here. I might theorize that ghosts are supernatural, but when I see a ghost, I don’t get to use my theory to deny what I saw; instead, I need to formulate a theory that accounts for the phenomena. Doing so may require me to change my understanding of the cosmos, but it doesn’t require me to label anything as supernatural.
Penicillin is a magical potion that will cure the demons that are infesting your body. At least that’s how a tribal villager would understand it.
Certainly, but I think you’re kind of painting an arbitrary line of respect, as though scientists are more often right than science fiction authors or mystics, which I dispute. The Scientific Method certainly helps verify that which is true, that isn’t up for debate, we are in full agreement on that, but there are plenty of scientists who have been wrong in the past who got a lot of credit for a while.
And you are ignorant of some of the things they were not ignorant of. Do you know how to properly skin a squirrel? Would you know which plants growing where you live are edible?
They DID invent science, over the course of thousands of years. They used trial and error, the same way scientists do it now, the biggest difference is the level of sophistication.
Dawkins is not the only prophet. Don’t flagellate the metaphor.
Our cells do receive stimuli and based upon those stimuli we make decisions, and that impacts our will certainly. However, we are discussing the physical world and it’s interaction with consciousness. I am using the word “meme” to explain something to you. I am using the term in a slightly different way than Dawkins did. I have read Dawkins on memes.
If you are exploring natural hypotheses, and you come up with data that say, violates the law of conservation of energy/matter, you doubt the data, and look for loopholes. If after doing this you can’t explain it, you might explore a mechanism where for this particular event, conservation is violated (which is supernatural in my book.)
If you propose a natural mechanism where conservation is violated, you throw out most of science. If you propose an orthogonal supernatural explanation, natural science is untouched, and you partition away the nasty part.
By this definition I can agree that the supernatural is effectively non-existent, since whenever we see the effect of it you say the underlying cause is natural by definition. But remember I never said that the tools of science could not study a supernatural (by my definition) phenomena.
I agree with your professor. But your theory is that you could come up with a natural framework to explain everything you would ever see. Good theories are not ad hoc, but use a single model to explain all in their purview. Newton’s Laws got discarded because they didn’t work at relativistic velocities, relativity even works at slow speeds (though the difference in time predicted may not be measurable.) I’d hate to propose a theory where conservation laws held some times but not others.
Pure naturalism is an excellent theory, and it is not a matter of faith because we test it every day. It becomes a matter of faith if it is assumed to work in every conceivable circumstance. My objection really is that I hate faith. I’ve always responded to accusations that science is a religion by saying that in true science, everything is tentative, even materialism. The strongest case for pure naturalism is that all the supernatural events, and angels, and ghosts, and psychics that populate movies, TV shows and books have never really happened. I respond to the supernaturalists by agreeing if X Y or Z would happen I’d accept the supernatural, so all they have to do is show me X, Y or Z and stop arguing hypotheticals. They either then trot out Rhine or Honorton or Geller, or go away and stop bothering me.
No, no, a thousand times no! My definition is that any framework for what I see is necessarily natural. There’s no theory involved at all; there’s simply a dictionary involved.
If my explanation of an event comes down to its causation by invisible unicorns whose horns radiate peace and light, then by my definition, that’s a natural cause. There is no theory which I reject by virtue of its being supernatural; rather, if the theory is correct, I classify it as a natural theory.
This isn’t a matter of faith. It’s a matter of semantics.
Sticking with telepathy as our model, which I like because unlike, say, talking to the dead, it doesn’t presuppose a particular cause for the phenomenon, how about a made-up example of a testable “supernatural explanation”? Just pointing at the word “supernatural” doesn’t do it for me.
Your question has led me to maybe a better definition of supernatural.
We can describe telepathy, we might be able to measure signal speed, and signal strength even, and find sources of noise, but we wouldn’t be able to explain it. And perhaps the defintion of supernatural that makes sense is not subject to reductionism. Any natural phenomena I can look deeper into (even if it is indirectly like the Big Bang.) I can break an object down to atoms and beyond, I can measure forces, I can even look at brain activity related to thoughts. But something like god or telepathy just is as a primitive.
If we found telepathy particles, for instance, then telepathy becomes natural. Things can move from one domain to another, as they have throughout history.
I’d want to keep the part of the definition about violating natural laws also, to make sure no one thinks unexplained is equivalent to supernatural.
I’m not sure how this is a “better” definition of supernatural. To begin with, what you propose is entirely hypothetical - there is no evidence that telepathy is a real phenomenon - but if it were shown to be real, it would still be a previously unexplained natural phenomenon. It would be no more supernatural than nuclear fission was before Lise Mietner.
I agree that there must be some difference between the words “supernatural” and “unexplained” (otherwise one of them can be dispensed with), and (again) I suggest that the definition of supernatural must imply something not just unexplained but somehow unexplainable. Personally, I don’t buy the idea of a real unexplainable phenomenon. In any case, using this definition, things cannot " move from one domain to another."
Presumably, in physics, at some level the phenomena also just are, as a primitive. Problem is, whenever (so far, at least) someone thinks we are at that level, someone else keeps finding another level of complexity, explanatory of the level above. How do you know when you’ve hit bottom?
Sure it is hypothetical. And I agree that all hypotheses that telepathy exists have been falsified. I’ve tried to keep god out of this discussion, but the root was the claim by some that god is either natural (and thus not really a god) or supernatural, and thus does not exist. Others claimed that since god is supernatural science cannot study him.
I don’t believe god exists, but not for these reasons.
Unexplainable seems to work. Things moving from one domain to another is a function of our lack of knowledge, not a change in the nature of the thing. If we find the telepathy particle, and move telepathy to the natural, it just means that telepathy was always natural, and we were mistaken. I’m trying to think of an example of something that might move the other way - maybe if reincarnation and thus souls were shown to exist. Our consciousness, which is now natural, would be somewhat supernatural.
Lots of stuff in the past was considered supernatural (rainbows, the wind, the sun) but have become natural from increasing knowledge.
By banging ever higher energy particles together! Maybe we can make gods not be supernatural by banging high energy gods together - possibly in the High Energy Magic Lab.
Can you explain why a natural God is not a God? I agree that if God is defined as supernatural, and supernatural is defined as nonexistent, then we’ve got a problem; but I don’t see why God must be supernatural.
If that’s the plan then we’ll never hit bottom, since no one will be building the infinite energy supercollider. Isn’t it funny that we are spending this much time discussing the properties of what we agree is nonexistent? Liberal should be pleased.
Doesn’t seem that a “natural god” should be impossible, but it would be a rather thin and unsatisfying god as gods go. It would be lacking in so many of the really cool god-tools: no omnipresence, no omnipotence, having miracles limited by physical constraints, and one wonders how it could create the universe if it were a part of that universe.
I think there are shop rules mandated by the God’s Union, and a natural god might not be allowed to join.
