Starboy

Hi Oolon,

I agree with all your points but I hope you will not mind if I amend your last sentence to read:

“It is therefore no” scientific “explanation at all.”

I do think that if religion served no purpose it would not exist. Just because it has a purpose that I have no need of doesn’t mean that others do not. I become militant when practitioners of religion do not understand and respect my right to think and feel as I wish and do not have the good sense to leave me and science alone. This very aggressive nature of Christianity is its most alarming aspect, to the point that I consider it a threat to the nation if not mankind.

Starboy

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Sure, I agree. But I never said it may not serve a purpose. I said it is no explanation. My point was a deeper, epistemological one.

As I said, there is no such thing as the supernatural. But a supernatural explanation, by definition, entails bringing in that which is, in its very essence, unverifiable. It simply cannot be verified or investigated -- if it could, it would be natural not supernatural. This means we cannot obtain knowledge about it: it is unknowable. And so a supernatural ‘explanation’ explains, replaces in our understanding, the known with the unknown. And an explanation that rests on the unknown is not an explanation. Obviously. “Why did that happen?” “Don’t know.” Surrounding it in mystical gobbledygook does not improve the quality of the answer.

Hence, as I said, a supernatural explanation is no explanation at all.

Cheers, Oolon

Xyzzy

I disagree (of course). I understand this is more of a semantic point, but I don't believe that provably finding a capricous and alternately benificent/violent God could ever be considered "natural".

Yes, I've read the same science fiction that you have, where God is discovered, and in reality he's just as constrained by the laws of the natural world as we, or perhaps constrained by a different set of knowable and ordered laws. But that's not exactly what we're talking about here.

The word "natural" loses a lot of its meaning if we use it to describe absolutely any phenomena, particular phenomena that are at extreme variance with the known laws of the universe and can not be understood or integrated, but only observed. They would stick out like an extremely sore thumb against the background of natural phenomena.

Oolon Colluphid

If you say so...

I strongly doubt it, old chap, since I rarely read science fiction. A bit of John Wyndham, Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury, and Larry Niven’s Ringworld, is about the extent of it. I generally take my fantasy straight, sans technological garb .

Why not? It would at very least be constrained by logical impossibilities. But even if totally omnipotent, it would still be part of how the world is.

-- that have never even been demonstrated, ie we’re only talking hypothetically anyway --

-- laws which we do not impose on it as absolutes which it must obey, but which rather are codified out of our own empirical investigations; such laws and understanding may therefore be incomplete or plain wrong (however unlikely this may appear) --

Nope. Even if we remained forever at a loss to explain them, they would still be something happening in the natural world. They would simply be anomalies that we cannot explain. No need to invoke a supernatural-of-the-gaps.

And since the ‘laws’ of nature hold most of the time, if such things were demonstrated, we would have to try and find our how our understanding of the world was flawed, why the laws are not apparently universal and applicable everywhere after all. If such things could be thoroughly verified as real, no matter how anomalous, then our understanding of the universe would simply be incomplete. We compose hypotheses and theories to fit how the universe is, not the other way round. And the “the known laws of the universe” are simply the ultimate we have in theories.

IOW, if ‘supernatural’ phenomena were real, what we know would be wrong. So we would have to adapt our theories to take account of it.

Sure they would. But to repeat, if it happens in the universe (which it is science’s mission to investigate)... if, by definition, it’s out there in nature, then it is natural. It doesn’t matter how weird it seems. Need I mention things on a quantum scale... or even living on the surface of a vast spinning rocky spheroid? Is it supernatural that photons show interference patterns when fired through slits... even when they’re fired one at a time? (I’m sure there must be a law against it.) Or does it mean that our understanding is incomplete?

Cheers, Oolon

Stephen T-B

(This is turning out to be so excellent I'm temprted, as I have been tempted by other threads, to print the whole lot out and keep. I think Infidels is just wonderful forr throwing up stuff like this.)