Psycho Economist

I personally agree. But the original post deals with an extreme, irrationally tenacious belief in naturalism, and I felt I needed to address that case.

fando

In support, I'll repeat my own post: The author's definition of naturalism is inconsistent according to luvluv's post. It's not the philosophy that we know as naturalism, but the naturalism that "wants to preserve nature, not metaphysical naturalist." Later on, luvluv describes the author attacking the 'naturalistic paradigm' which is supposedly has "a tendency to claim all mysteries as 'future knowledge' thus absolving them of the need for humility or from the possibility of certain aspects of existence being beyond human understanding."

Personally, I don't quite understand what the heck the author is talking about. Either luvluv needs to elaborate or the author is clearly attributing invented meanings to known concepts in an effort to sound legitimate.

wade-w

Very well put, Richard. I've held that position for as long as I can remember.

Vorkosigan

The word "supernatural" has no real meaning.

Except, of course, to billions of theists, fiction writers, ESP researchers....

Starboy

If in nature we observed on lets say 1 out of 1,000,000 instances phenomena that implied that human life could not exist, then one possible explanation would be that reality doesn't matter to our existence. The current state of affairs is that everything we observe is consistent with reality being important to our existence. So if there is a super nature, contrary to all claims otherwise, it appears to be irrelevant, unless of course you think that a rich fantasy life is important to mental health.

Starboy

Wyz_sub10

Well, I don't, but my 13th level Rogue/Sorcerer does.

RichardMorey

My position is that they are fooled by the very language they use. Just because you can use the word does not mean it is satisfactorily defined. And like I said, just because the currently understood natural laws do not have a place for a deity or phychic powers does not mean that if they were ever shown to exist we wouldn't include them in our future perception of nature. We would have to. It is not nature that is 'wrong' it is our understanding of nature that would be shown to be incomplete.

The division of the universe into supernatural and natural actually seems to fall into:
natural: what we do understand
supernatural: what we don't understand

There is a lot of arrogance in dividing things that way - as if itself nature cared about our current understanding.

Goliath

luvluv,

Your thread title asks: "Can naturalism be falsified?"

Yes. To do so, it suffices to show that something exists that is supernatural.

Good Luck!

Sincerely,

Goliath

luvluv

fando:

I said that the author was a naturalist in the sense that he wants to preserve nature, and that he was upset with the metaphysical naturalists.

Maybe I should just say materialists to avoid the confusion?

Goliath:

My point is that if you are committed enough to the philosophy of naturalism, you could simply say of any phenomenon you do not understand: "Oh, science simply hasn't explained that YET, but it will."

And you could keep saying this forever, regardless of the question or the progress of science.

I actually think a perfect example of this is the human mind. I'm not dogmatic about it, and a supernaturalistic account of the workings of the mind is not essential to my faith. But simply as a layman who has casually read about the issue, I don't think there will ever be an exhaustive, fully realized, purely naturalistic account of the workings of the human mind. I don't think you'll ever get hope or inspiration or joy down to the movements of molecules. That's just my opinion. But I also feel that no matter how bleak it looks, a committed naturalist will continue to say "We'll figure it out one day". Thus it seems to me that naturalism is immune from falsification.

RichardMorey

You err when you equate "naturalism" with the idea that everything is explainable by science. Though the two often go hand in hand, they are separate ideas. Perhaps there are laws that our methods cannot uncover. These laws would still be natural, but unexplainable by science.

(..reminds me of people who say "Jesus will come back someday...")

We could. There is no way that I know of determining whether we will know all that there is to know, and so the best way to go about things is to assume that things are knowable. If we fail, so what? The benefits of the continuation of the scientific endevour far outweigh the risks of working on it in vain.

And I actually think that this is a great example of an argument from incredulity, and is therefore meaningless.
See above. Also, the logical principle of identity (A=A) would seem to be unfalsifiable. Do you reject identity?