So when you study some matter a) how do you decide that it has been affected by a spiritual agent diddling about with the natural order? b) if supernatural explanations are acceptable in science, how do we avoid falling back on them every time we have difficulty in coming to a natural explanation of a phenomenon and c) if such supernaturally affected matter does exist, just what can we learn by studying it?
Alec
evolutionpages.com
We’re operating in a historical context in which science has fared extremely well, but it didn’t
have to be that way. Just because naturalistic explanations have fared so well up to this point and there is no reason to think that won’t continue in the future doesn’t mean that it is
logically necessary that strictly natural explanations always work, if one admits the logical possibility of supernatural entities. And in fact, many atheists try to make the case that there is no (physical) evidence for supernatural entities. This assumes that if there were a supernatural entity messing around in the physical world we could detect evidence of it and infer its existence, otherwise the atheists’ claim is meaningless.
And there are such hypothetical cases, sharp discontinuities from the regularity we normally see in nature which make it impossible (or virtually) so to obtain a parsimonious explanation. So I’ll be hypothetical, and assume a case where a supernatural entity is affecting the natural order and show how your questions will be answered, with of course the caveat we don’t get “proof” but only inference to the best explanation. If the stars followed general relativity except for, say, December 25, and then inexplicably everywhere on earth you looked they spelled out “God is Great” in the sky (in many different languages), and then mysteriously resumed their normal courses on December 26, what would you think? Moreover, the message has been documented in history, as occurring in the extant languages at the time.
We could postulate some strange
ad hoc “December 25 exception” to GR which has all stars (or starlight, to be exact) moving where they go. But this is no explanation at all - the explanation is just as complex as what is explained, and has no explanatory power - any motion of the stars could be explained by such a device.
We could postulate a very strange space-time curvature which cause the starlight to bend in just the right manner to see “God is great” every December 25. But would cause that? You’d have to have almost as many entities (or maybe more, who knows, I’m not an expert in GR) to cause the right curvature. Again, no explanation.
We could postulate some new physics. But again, where’s the parsimony? Yes, new physical theories have been made to explain things previously unexplainable (e.g. blackbody radiation, Michelson-Morley, etc.) but these things were repeatable and predictable.
We could give up on any explanation, like we do for random events in quantum mechanics. Yet that’s unsatisfying too, because there are messages in various languages read by the inhabitants of the earth.
Clearly the most parsimonious explanation is that some supernatural entity wishes to communicate with us, has the power to move the stars (or at least starlight), and is using it to do so.
So, the answer to a) and b) is that to avoid an argumentum ad ignorantium (we can’t see how a natural explanation would work, so none must be possible) we must have a positive reason to think so, meaning a lack of a possible parsimonious explanation. Yet this isn’t always a clear-cut issue. Let’s I have a scatter-plot of variable Y vs. X, and they’re unrelated, I get just a bunch of noise around the mean. Yet I can always find
some function that fits. But if I’m tailoring the function to the data that’s “cheating”. Yet if the data more or less fit a sine-function we’d recognize a pattern. Hmmm.
The answer to c) is hopefully we can learn something about supernatural entities.
It is too close to “trick or treat” time. The really little kids are so cute trying to trick me as to whom they really are.