Thoughts in a Haystack

The (to me, at least) obvious problem with that definition is that "modern science" is a moving target.

One of the hallmarks of scientism is the improbable claim that our present picture of the cosmos is just a few tweaks away from being complete... unlike every previous picture in human history.
 

It's almost as if science was ... inspired.
 

I remember a doctor commenting on the debate about alternative or complementary therapies and conventional treatments by saying something along the lines of "There is medicine that works and medicine that doesn't. That's all"

As I see it, there are 'things' that, if they are something other than formless chaos and thus have 'natures' we can observe, however indirectly, that are amenable to scientific investigation. Anything else, if it can be said to exist at all, is irrelevant.
 

john pieret does not exist....
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http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/543672-inhertitance-of-acquired-behaviour-adaptions-and-brain-gene-expression-in-chickens

atheists, we're gonna cut off your heads...

THE HIGH PRICE OF REVOLUTION

http://www.youtube.com/user/xviolatex?feature=mhum
 

How many heads for chopping off do you have, Pieret? You're like a frickin Hydra over there.
 

You're like a frickin Hydra over there.

It's not hard to keep one's head when nothing but imaginary steel is being brandished.
 

I now realize that the phrase "as described by modern science" at the end of our definition is distracting, because it makes it look like yet another moving target that will shift in response to future scientific discoveries. The intended emphasis was on "beyond impersonal matter and energy" of course. Of course we don't revise our metaphysics every time we discover something new, but that is because we never find something "beyond impersonal matter and energy". Quantum physics has revolutionized our understanding of causality and determinism, but it's still about inanimate particles with spatiotemporal location and their mediating physical forces. Nothing has ever been found to be "outside" that picture, an no serious scientists doubts that gravity or dark matter will turn out to be incorporated in the same basic framework.

Consider electricity as a historical example: many people used to view it as a supernatural phenomenon (moving through solid objects, invisible force, somehow connected to life and death). Electricity was later recognized to be "natural", though not by way of trivially extending the scope of the term, but because it turned out to be reducible to familiar dead physical stuff. But that is a contingent discovery.
 

But if you reject their definition of the "supernatural", then what is there to discuss? You are talking about different things, and I don't know what.
What would be a reasonable definition of "supernatural"?
 

oops, Maarten hit the submit button slightly before I did. My comment was intended for John.
 

Maarten:

First of all, I'm honored you have considered my amateur efforts at philosophy and repeat my opinion that your paper raises valid questions about MN as it has been stated. But ...

Nothing has ever been found to be "outside" that picture, an no serious scientists doubts that gravity or dark matter will turn out to be incorporated in the same basic framework.

Yes, that is doubtless correct. And our experience is certainly a good reason for scientists to take that attitude. Neither version of MN was, originally, obvious. But once experience showed us just how useful science (and MN) was, there was no reason why the practice of science could not be adjusted to intrinsically preclude the use of "supernatural" explanations. It is both practically and logically valid to limit science to the "natural." The fact that no serious scientists doubt that gravity or dark matter will turn out to be incorporated in the same basic MN framework seems to me to be evidence that science has (justifiably) adopted an a priori assumption of MN.

Corneel:

As I've said elsewhere, the "supernatural" is that set (quite possibly empty) of phenomena and forces that are not what we call "natural." The tough part is defining "natural." As far as I can tell, the latter means those phenomena and forces that occur with such regularity as to appear to us to be lawlike or, in Maarten's phrase, "impersonal."

It's the contention of IMN supporters that limiting science to the assumption that what it is studying is the result of impersonal, lawlike nature is a lesson so well-learned by experience and so logically valid that it has become a philosophical assumption of the process of science as it is practiced today.
 

P.S. Maarten, I'm really interested in why you think PMN is a better response to IDC than IMN. Could I possibly get a copy of "Grist to the mill of anti-evolutionism"? I would not quote or comment on it if you wouldn't want me to. You could send it to jtpieret AT gmail DOT com.
 

John said:
As far as I can tell, [natural] means those phenomena and forces that occur with such regularity as to appear to us to be lawlike or, in Maarten's phrase, "impersonal."

Thank you for response. There are a few things that pop into my head:

Regular on which timescale? In a previous thread, Chris (Schoen) told me supernatural events could not be recognised as something not conforming to existing scientific models, because it could be a natural phenomenon that is unknown to us (which sounds reasonable to me). We cannot call something supernatural if it occurs only once, because we have to assume it might happen again, right?

"Impersonal forces" sounds like a good criterion, since most people think of the supernatural as the domain of intelligent agents (e.g. most religions do so). But on what grounds do we exclude the action of "space aliens or time travellers", who appear to be "natural beings"?

I am sorry, but I just cannot seem to get my head around this concept. What do people mean when they talk about the supernatural?
 

John,

I should thank you for your interest in our paper! If you think our commitment to naturalistic explanations is grounded in past experience, I think you're pretty close to PMN. Your position is close to Michael Ruse's: he thinks MN is an a priori principle, but still he sees it a lesson from history. What about this question: in the extremely unlikely event that dark matter or gravity would be caused by entitites outside the said material framework, is there any reason why science would have to remain silent about it?
 

[QM is] still about inanimate particles with spatiotemporal location and their mediating physical forces.

I'm not so sure this is accurate. It is difficult to say how a "particle" without dimensionality or mass can have "spatio-temporal location."

Consider electricity as a historical example: many people used to view it as a supernatural phenomenon (moving through solid objects, invisible force, somehow connected to life and death). Electricity was later recognized to be "natural", though not by way of trivially extending the scope of the term, but because it turned out to be reducible to familiar dead physical stuff.

Doubtless many people did believe this, though I might quibble that these beliefs tended to predate any systematic concept of what electricity is. We have no word for it (in English) before the 19th century.

But if you are going to refute IMN you have to ask if any scientists believed this when they set out to explicate it.

At any rate I think your proposal is hobbled by a too-weak definition of naturalism. If we discovered that there was a kind of non-physical "stuff" that we could explicate and predict the behavior of, would we continue to call it supernatural, going forward? Or would we say it was part of the lawful, natural world? (Dark matter is a pretty good example, since we have to seriously stretch the definition of matter to include it. Likewise anti-matter.)

MN is "provisional" in the sense that we don't know what we are going to discover next. In this sense we are all advocates of PMN. But this does nothing to engage the question of whether there is another realm beyond the natural, that cannot or will not observe natural laws.

If we were to "hypothesize" such a realm, how do you propose we test its existence against the null hypothesis that everything has a natural explanation?
 

Corneel:

"Impersonal forces" sounds like a good criterion ...

Except, how can you determine that they are "impersonal" if you cannot empirically investigate what a "personal" supernatural force might do?

But on what grounds do we exclude the action of "space aliens or time travellers", who appear to be "natural beings"?

We don't, most of the time. We simply ignore the possibility mostly because we have (or imagine we have) sufficient "impersonal" forces to explain phenomena. If we wanted to consider the possibility of such natural beings, we would have to do what we do when we want to consider the possibility of, say, prehistoric human agency. Many stone tools we identify could also have been made by impersonal forces, such as the action of fast-running rivers. We look for such things as collections of stone flakes, tool marks on the supposed tools, association with other evidence of human activity, such as campfires, and so forth. But to seriously consider space aliens or time travelers, we'd have to confirm their existence and know something about their abilities and motives, the way we have with prehistoric humans.

This is the problem with supernatural beings. We can rule out a god that made the Earth 6,000 years ago as a scientific proposition but can we scientifically rule out the Omphalos proposition (that a god made the world 6,000 years ago but made it look old)? What empiric evidence could possibly bear on that? Sure, we can philosophically discount a "trickster god" but that's philosophy, unrooted in empiric evidence, not what I would call "science." Unable to bring empiric evidence to bear on the abilities and motives of such a being, we can only philosophize, not empirically investigate.

What do people mean when they talk about the supernatural?

Actually, they mean many things and (in some sense) nothing. Some gods are small and as petty as we are. Others are ineffable. Ultimately, it is the unknown and the unknowable.

Maarten:

I think you're pretty close to PMN.

I don't think PMN and IMN are mutually exclusive. I think all good philosophy has to be rooted in experience but that doesn't mean it is limited to experience. We can and should organize our experience into logical systems that transcend mere trial and error.

What about this question: in the extremely unlikely event that dark matter or gravity would be caused by entitites outside the said material framework, is there any reason why science would have to remain silent about it?

No, IF science had any way to demonstrate that entities outside the material universe caused dark matter, instead of some unknown material cause. That's what we disagree about. I can 't see how the empiric evidence of the material world can demonstrate that there is something outside the material world.

By the way, thanks for the article. I won't comment on it or quote from it until it has finished review and it appears on your website.
 

This comment has been removed by the author.
 

Chris,

I'm not an expert in QM, but it seems that even a point particle lacking dimensionality still has spatio-temporal location. Take any electron in any carbon atom in the top of my finger.


"At any rate I think your proposal is hobbled by a too-weak definition of naturalism. If we discovered that there was a kind of non-physical "stuff" that we could explicate and predict the behavior of, would we continue to call it supernatural, going forward? Or would we say it was part of the lawful, natural world? (Dark matter is a pretty good example, since we have to seriously stretch the definition of matter to include it. Likewise anti-matter.)"

I didn't want a definition of naturalism that simply encompasses every single thing scientists should discover in the future. If we want the term to have any meaning, there are some things we have to exclude from its reference domain. I'm not sure why dark matter "stretches the definition of matter", as you yourself have written that "whatever it is made of, and however it interacts with the rest of the material world is purely speculative, an untestable hypothesis".

"If we were to "hypothesize" such a realm, how do you propose we test its existence against the null hypothesis that everything has a natural explanation?"

This is similar to the point John is making. How could we ever demonstrate the existence of something outside the material world? We have given some specific examples in our paper (a variation on the Benson study), but you're right that I should have tackled Clarke's third law, as this keeps turning up in discussions. Maybe I can never logically rule out super-savvy space aliens, and in that sense I have not "demonstrated" SN entities, but that doesn't mean that the balance of probabilities will always tilt in the direction of space aliens. As soon as you admit that there's a balance of probabilities involved at all, it's just a matter of stacking things at one side (firework displays by God until you're convinced). Consider this analogy: is science capable of "demonstrating" an ancient earth? Beyond reasonable doubt, yes, but science can never strictly rule out the Omphalos hypothesis. It depends on what you mean by "demonstrate".
 

I didn't want a definition of naturalism that simply encompasses every single thing scientists should discover in the future. If we want the term to have any meaning, there are some things we have to exclude from its reference domain.

My own view is that this debate over where to draw a line between 'natural' and 'supernatural' is irrelevant. Science can only address that which it can observe, about which it can obtain information, however indirectly. There may well be phenomena beyond the range of our power to observe such as parallel universes that have absolutely no connection with or influence in our own. They are both irrelevant because they are not required to explain phenomena in our universe, yet they are natural like ours if they have form and law-like regularity.

The Wikipedia entry for "Nature" - which I quote, not as an authority, but simply because it encapsulates my own view - describes its origins thus:

The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth".[1] Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord.[2][3] The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since. This usage was confirmed during the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.[4][5]

Put simply, we try to understand phenomena by describing and explaining their 'natures' or essential and defining properties or attributes. The confusion arises where 'natural' is conflated with 'material' or 'physical'. For example, science is grappling with the nature of human consciousness even though it has no observable material form other than its association with the substrate of the physical brain. Besides, as Richard Lewontin wrote in the correspondence following his review of Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World in the New York Review of Books, contemporary physical theory has blurred the distinction between the material and immaterial:

It is true, as Booth says, that matter ain’t what it used to be, but then neither is materialism. Einstein’s equation of matter and energy makes the materialist’s life easier, not harder, because it brings under the aegis of elementary physical explanation phenomena that would otherwise be in the realms of mystery. By “materialism” we mean the claim that all the motions and states of the physical (including the biological) universe form a closed world of causation, solely under the influence of a small number of known measurable forces. As I pointed out, this claim requires us to accept that these forces have some counterintuitive properties, our intuitions having been formed by the experience of our gross senses. The fact that “matter” can be turned into “energy” is one of the less difficult ones for us to imagine because our ordinary experience seems to tell us (quite erroneously) that this happens every time we burn a piece of paper. And if any doubt remains that the conversion of mass into energy can be accomplished at will by the work of human hands, a trip to Hiroshima will settle the matter.
 

I appreciate these past few posts - very interesting. I don't mean to sidetrack the discussion and forgive me if I've missed it somewhere, but I wonder if there some actual, practical examples of unexplained occurrences being studied that would demand that supernatural explanations be included at least provisionally?
Not the prayer studies, as those are claims about the supernatural and don't actually deal with specific events, and seem to me to focus on general statistics. And not necessarily dark matter or gravity as I don't believe any serious scientific time is being spent on studying out whether the supernatural is involved.
I'm wondering if there's some actual, specific collection of instances that are right now unexplained but being studied where the supernatural should be considered as
That may not be a fair question, though. If not the explanation why would be interesting too.
Again, I don't mean to sidetrack the discussion, but I wondered if there were practical applications right now. Thanks
 

And please excuse the poorly composed question - serves me right for thinking deeply without coffee.
 

@Ian,

You raise an excellent point. If BBB are defining naturalism as a synonym of physicalism or materialism, then maybe it would make some sense to talk about a "provisional" naturalism, since science may discover modalities of nature that are non-material. I would argue, however, that this kind of "naturalism" has already been refuted by QM, which shows that at the elemental level there is no such thing as matter, only waveforms that we sometimes call "particles" for convenience, but which have no mass and no structure.

Obviously it would be silly to call QM "supernatural," though, so we'd be well advised to drop that usage and return to the definition used by philosophers over the last half century, as the claim that everything is "linked in a single web of causal relations" (in Richard Rorty's words.)

Put this way, it easier to see why the non-natural (supernatural) would be a "science stopper," since science can't make allowances for phenomena causally quarantined from the known regularities of nature. It must, a priori, assume a single web in order to function, which is why MN is "intrinsic" to it.
 

"QM, which shows that at the elemental level there is no such thing as matter, only waveforms that we sometimes call 'particles' for convenience, but which have no mass and no structure."

No, Chris. In QM, you have particles whose behavior is more properly modeled by equations other than those of classical physics, but unless those particles are photons, they have mass. The mass of an electron is even a parameter in the Schrodinger equation. As for the particles having no "structure," I have no idea what you mean, since the particles aren't supposed to have an internal structure but rather are treated as points, albeit points whose location and momentum cannot be known precisely. Matter still exists in QM, it's just that it behaves counterintuitively. Don't go Deepak Chopra on us.
 

But unless those particles are photons, they have mass.

I stand corrected on this.

However, I believe it is still accurate to say that such particles are not extended in space, and that they are structureless, which puts them in conflict with the philosophical concept of matter, which has always (in the Western tradition) relied on being somewhere and being made of something. Perhaps this is a bit of tangent, and I know my command of this subject is primitive. But it is instructive how blithe we can be about the absence of these properties, just three generations after the Copenhagen interpretation, such that we can say these particles merely behave "counterintuitively."
 

"However, I believe it is still accurate to say that such particles are not extended in space"

Actually, that's not quite right. A particle's wave function is very much extended in space. Remember the atomic orbitals from high-school chemistry, some of which were spherical, some of which were more dumbbell-shaped? Those are wave functions. The wave function of a free electron looks more like a traveling wave, which too is extended in space.
 

OK, I'm going to stop talking about QM now, since I clearly need to read up on it. I was under the impression that the orbitals were potential, not actual, locations, analogous to the circular appearance of fan blades in motion. There's a difference between being extended in space, and having a pathway that is extended in space. But I'm not going to man this particular barricade without brushing up on the topic a little more.

Also, Maarten, if you're lurking, I have a reply to your last comment on the way.
 

"I was under the impression that the orbitals were potential, not actual, locations"

That impression is about right, actually. The thing is, wave functions (orbitals included) are instrumental in describing how non-classical particles behave, and often in practice it makes more sense to speak of things like electrons as if they were waves extended in space, especially if one is talking about things like electron diffraction.
 

The reason I asked my question is I'm trying to understand what need this is meeting. Current MN, it seems to me, describes what could be characterized by "I have no need of that (god) hypothesis."
So beyond the need of some to extend science, as John as pointed out, to beat theists over the head, I'm wondering what current work is crying out for this? I suppose I'll need to wait for the paper.
 

Maarten,

I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to respond to your last comment.

I didn't want a definition of naturalism that simply encompasses every single thing scientists should discover in the future. If we want the term to have any meaning, there are some things we have to exclude from its reference domain.

I understand you are trying to evade a tautology here. But in trying to save naturalism from being drained of meaning, you've exposed science to the same fate. To illustrate this, take your example of "firework displays by God until you're convinced." If such a conviction were to be considered scientific, it would have to be accompanied by something more than a broad folk concept borrowed from Stone Age scripture. We would need to articulate some basic terms and principles--omnipotence, omnipresence, for example--and speculate on how to account for their apparent violation of thermodynamic law. And then we'd need to expose these ideas to methodical scrutiny. Without these steps, we have a Deus ex Machina, but not a hypothesis.

I don't think it's too high a standard, given the understandable skepticism of the supernatural in the scientific community, to establish the following standard: if you are able to formally hypothesize that a "god" created those fireworks, with sufficient precision to get published in Nature, then your conviction that a god did it could begin to be considered scientific.

Maybe I can never logically rule out super-savvy space aliens, and in that sense I have not "demonstrated" SN entities, but that doesn't mean that the balance of probabilities will always tilt in the direction of space aliens.

But on what are these probabilities based if not a presumption of IMN? I can't imagine what "probability" could even mean without a presumption of IMN. When naturalism becomes provisional, probability theory is deprived of its evidentiary value.

At any rate, I still don't see how PMN gives science any assistance in understanding the world.
 

Least some common sense left
 

I really liked your article.