Thoughts in a Haystack

I really do intend to say more about the paper, "How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical Misconceptions About Methodological Naturalism," by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke and Johan Braeckman.

An unfortunate lack of infinite time and energy has prevented me from clearing this whole subject up for everyone.

In the meantime, however, Sean Carroll, at Cosmic Variance, has weighed in on the subject, in reply to Chris Schoen's "Is "Dark Matter" Supernatural?," with what Chris rightly calls “a thoughtful (and goddamned civil) response.”* Jerry Coyne largely agrees with Carroll, so I thought I'd spend some time on Carroll's conception of the problem.

I don't think Carroll's attempt to classify the potential effects of the supernatural into three categories (the “silent,” the “hidden” and the “lawless”) is particularly helpful for reasons that will have to await a further deposit of time and energy into my account.

Instead, I'd like to focus on what actually would happen if, as Carroll contends, “the best explanation scientists could come up with for some set of observations necessarily involved a lawless supernatural component.”

Chris has already answered this and I agree with him that “studying lawless phenomena (whether chaotic or capricious) with science is logically insensible.” But I'd like to take it from a slightly different angle.

In passing, I'd note that it is hard to imagine just how we'd ever get to the situation that Carroll proposes. The point I believe Chris was making about dark matter is that we have no particular reason to believe it exists, except that it is a natural explanation for the phenomena that we observe that would explain the phenomena and that suggests ways that science could further study the cause or causes of the phenomena.** In short, it is an example of the operation of what the supporters of IMN would call the a priori assumption in science that natural phenomena have natural causes. Carroll acknowledges this but calls it a “preference.” That just raises the question of what we should call something that is universal among scientists and the violation of which is consistently deemed not to be scientific, outside philosophical discussions such as these.

After all, an objection to Newton's theory of gravity that was raised immediately was that it proposed an “occult” force that acts at a distance with no known mechanism. For some 300 years we have been looking for a mechanism that enables gravity to do that, without success, but that has not stopped us from continuing to try. At what point does the scientific community throw up its collective hands and say that any phenomena is “supernatural”?

More importantly, what would happen if they did? Would the normal routine of science -- further observations and experiments, the publishing of results and peer review and criticism – continue? Would scientists propose Goditons and quantum spirituality and try to test them? If so, then they would fall afoul of PZ Myers' criticism that they would then be proposing “natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties” that can no longer be thought of as “supernatural.”

And if the scientific community didn't do those things – if it agreed that the cause of the phenomena is supernatural and nothing further can be said by science about it – how could we characterize the situation other than as science having “stopped,” at least as far as the causes of that phenomena are concerned?

The real question, then, is how we should characterize the decision to call a halt to scientific investigation of a phenomena. Those supporting PMN would say it is a “scientific result.” Those who support IMN would say that, no, it is a metaphysical conclusion that, at least in this particular instance, science does not and cannot work, not an actual result of a scientific investigation, which, after all, has been called to a halt.

Another way to put it is that, a priori, we know that the only way to conclude that the cause a phenomenon is supernatural is by calling a halt to the scientific study of that cause.

That sounds like IMN to me.

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* Incidentally, Massimo Pigliucci and Jerry Coyne have made up and promised to stop sniping at each other and I too will try to restrain my snide side ... at least when it comes to this subject.

** See my discussion of the two objectives of science in my previous post on this subject.

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Update: For another, slightly different, take on this issue, see Steve Novella's description of why "anomaly hunting" is not science in his article, "Ghost Hunting Science vs Pseudoscience."
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