“Supernatural” strikes me as a meaningless term. There are things that are real; there are thing that are not. If God is real and interacts with the universe, science can study him/her/it. If God is not real, or does not interact, then it can’t be studied because there is nothing to study.
Outside our own consciousness and pure abstracts like math, indirect methods are all we have. So far, science has done quite well.
A bizarre statement. If it’s produced by a machine, there is no God involved at all.
Whos to say its not the Great Spagetti Monster or some aliens from Mars causing the stimulation? Why does it have to be your God causing it, if anything?
That’s nice. Nevertheless, it has a definition, and has had one since even before English adopted it.
Is two real?
That is apparently a rut out of which you are unable to climb. It is not the case that science can study everything. In fact, science is doing you absolutely no good whatsoever here. What is required here is not science, but logical reasoning and the ability to put together cogent inferences. Doubtless, you will declare that logic too is a branch of science, but it would seem that nothing can be done about that.
Have for what? Learning? Acquiring knowledge? Proving things?
Quite well at what? So far, it isn’t even clear what you think science is, other than everything. I would say that science has done quite well at testing falsifiable hypotheses. I would say that it is incapable of doing anything else.
Nonsense. Suppose arguendo that Jesus did indeed heal the blind man. In doing so, He used mud to rub on his eyes. Would you argue that because there was an intermediary agency — e.g., mud, machine, etc. — that the healing was any less miraculous?
You have me confused with people who are declaring that science can make claims about the supernatural. I have in fact asked the same question you just asked, although with a different vocabulary. How can science possibly determine the supernatural cause of any event? Nice user name, though.
Ah yes, the Holy Grail of philosophy. We can know things by merely thinking hard about them. This approach hasn’t worked to reach any firm conclusions in philosopy in something like 2500 years and it doesn’t seem to be working here.
While I think Ramachandran’s point would be valid regardless of the type of brain stimulation involved, I just wanted to point out that, IIRC, Ramachandran’s research was on temporal lobe epilepsy. The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation research you’re probably thinking of was spearheaded by Michael Persinger.
Persinger’s research was way overblown by the popular media. Attempts to replicate his original results have been mixed or unsuccessful, and even in his own experiments, the majority of his subjects reported vague and variable sensations or no sensations at all. Hell, Persinger himself denies ever having had any religious or mystical sensations while under transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Just because it has a definition doesn’t mean it makes sense.
Yes.
Pure logic isn’t very useful for proving anything outside of abstracts like math; when dealing with the messy real world, there’s too much of a chance you missed something. And yes, science can study anything that has an effect in the physical world, including a hypothetical god.
Yes.
It’s done well at learning about the nature of the world; something nonscientific methods have done badly at.
Where’s the “miracle” in this case ? This is more like rubbing mud on a healthy man’s eyes and declaring it a miracle.
On truely fascinating thing about this thread is that the Powers That Be seem to think that an advertisement on humor writing workshops would be consistent with its participants’ interests.
Logic, like math, is not a part of science but is rather a tool used by science. Logic can be used to explore the implications of a hypothesis. I’m not claiming that formal logic is used (or I’ve never seen it used in a paper - it might be.) But science is far more than logic, and the natural philosophers use of logic as opposed to experiment for science was a failure, in my opinion.
So you are defining the generation of falsifiable hypotheses out of science? Also the collection of observations and data?
The accusation that anyone considered the evidence for the neutrino evidence of the supernatural is either a strawman or evidence that you don’t quite get my point. No one is positing a “supernatural of the gaps” which would jump from unexplained data to the supernatural. You also keep going on about optical illusions. Here is a sketch of a process for identifying the potentially supernatural.
[ul]
[li]Collect unexplained observations[/li][li]Confirm observations - check for experimental error, illusion, fraud, etc.[/li][li]Check for existing naturalistic hypotheses to explain observations. [/li][li]Can a naturalistic hypothesis for the observations be created?[/li][li]Test the hypothesis. (The neutrino example falls in here.)[/li][li]If all natural hypotheses get falsified, or if they conflict with known theories, and if any new hypotheses are more complicated than a supernatural hypothesis, develop a supernatural hypothesis[/li][li]Test the supernatural hypothesis by continuing to search for natural hypotheses and by continuing to observe potentially supernatural events. (The physical impact of the supernatural.)[/li][/ul]
As always, different researchers may go a step too far in this process. For the sake of argument, let’s allow the telepathy hypothesis to be called supernatural. Rhine clearly thought that he had observational evidence for this hypothesis, and thought he had gotten to my last step. He actually hadn’t, since there was evidence that his observations were flawed, and that his hypothesis could be and was falsified by additional testing and analysis of the results. Now, if evidence of telepathy actually was found, the next step would be to look for a natural explanation of it, though searching for signalling mechanisms. If none had been found, if faster than light information transfer could be demonstrated without the power expenditure required by information theory, wouldn’t a supernatural hypothesis be preferable over a “maybe we’ll understand it someday” hypothesis? This does not mean that we wouldn’t keep looking for a natural hypothesis, which, if found, would eventually falsify the supernatural one.
But always assuming that there is a natural hypothesis, no matter what, is a bit more faith than I’d like to see in science.
I’ve been trying to formulate what “a supernatural hypothesis” to explain a phenomenon would look like, and I’m coming up a total blank. How about a hypothetical example?
I’ve been thinking more about this. I wish you’d advanced an opinion on it, so I could see where you were coming from; but from my perspective, “two” is real, inasmuch as it’s a property of real things. As such, it can be studied by scientists as a property of real things. Scientists trying to understand whether an egg cell is fertilized might observe the numerical property of the cell; if the test tube contains egg cells with the numerical property of two where previously it contained egg cells with the numerical property of one, then they may draw a scientific conclusion about the egg. Similarly, scientist may study the width property of things as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry.
The number itself is not the object of scientific inquiry, since a property is not a thing. But the thing with the property is a thing, and many properties of things may be studied.
Sure. Say Rhine had actually conducted valid experiments, and got repeatable data indicating that there was something that looked like telepathy happening. Say person B seemed to be able to read person A’s mind while A was looking at Rhine cards. Say we’ve measured everything we can, and there seems to be no energy emissions from A to B.
The obvious hypothesis is that by some mechanism B is reading A’s mind. But there is an alternate hypothesis, that B is actually guessing the cards directly. You might set up an experiment in which you tell B which deck to look at, then put that deck in a room where it is mechanically flipped with no one observing, and show A another set of cards, and see which one B guesses. You’d want to do brain scans on B to see if a part of his brain lights up. You might want to see if he could perform while drunk. You might want to figure out some way of seeing if the signal is being transmitted at light speed, by sending someone to the moon.
All the hypotheses being tested are details, but the experiments could reveal that this is actually natural, or give evidence that it isn’t, but does have rules.
Another example - people test the efficacy of prayer. They don’t do a very good job on it, and it is difficult to set up controls, but if you think prayer works and has a supernatural component, that is looking for a repeatable physical effect of prayer.
I can’t think of any supernatural thing impacting our world that I can’t define an experiment for - though it seems lots of people dismiss the utility of this out of hand.
I guess what I’m not clear on is how we would distinguish a supernatural cause of telepathy from a natural cause that whose mechanism we don’t yet understand.
I’d rather say there is simply no point, not that it can’t be done. The number 2 is perfectly definable, repeatable, and static, unlike the physical world. Two will always be 2, so there’s no point in “testing” to se if it’s changed.
If the universe were words, two would be an adjective, not a noun, and adjectives can’t be direct objects. That doesn’t mean adjectives aren’t part of the grammar; it’s just that they fill a role different from that filled by nouns.
I don’t really think that two by itself can be studied by scientists (I’ve argued otherwise in the past, but really I think that what was being studied was two as a property of things); can you give me an example of studying two by itself?
Simply observe all the single objects that placed together are two objects; a simple enough experiment. We can’t grab the number two and look at it, but we can’t do that to quarks, either. Scientists don’t bother because it’s too basic to need science.
I agree that this is a valid experiment; indeed, it’s similar to the one I’ve decribed before (although I ended up describing similar experiments with neonates as the obervers and us observing the neonates). The thing is, you’re studying the property of two that things have.
In this case, that’s an important distinction, because I’m saying that science can study anything that exists and for whose existence we have physical evidence. Two is not a thing; it’s a property. Science studies the properties of things.
Nothing can be studied in isolation? Well, of course not. But when you study coconuts, you’re studying things; when you study their width, you’re studying a property of coconuts. There’s an important distinction there, the one roughly equivalent to the difference between a noun and an adjective.
