E_muse

It would be interesting to hear what people make of this arguement. You made need to register to read it though.. doesn't take long.

<a href="http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1995/jan/opin_950109.html" target="_blank">http://www.the-scientist.com/yr1995/jan/opin_950109.html</a>

Clutch

Tercel, Wrong. Your view is methodologically fraught, in the absence of some account of the principles by which you decide when to abandon naturalistic explanation.

Ah, I see; it’s when “specific circumstances suggest to [you] that methodological naturalism is not specifically appropriate”! Excellent! So clear! I can see why you were twitting and insulting the folks who thought there might be a teensy problem of vacuousness here.

Tell me, does someone blow a whistle to tell you when to say “Supernatural” rather than “I don’t know”? Let me guess – these intuitions of supernatural appropriateness... they seem to come when you’re considering the miracle claims of the religion to which you’re antecedently committed? And never when you’re reflecting on, oh, say, the massively attested ascension of Mohammed, or the miracles of David Koresh, or the miracles – supported by thousands of living witnesses – of Sai Baba?

Remarkable. Someone less attuned to the obviousness of your methodology might mistakenly observe the convenient substitution of “Supernatural!” for “I don’t know” in cases that support your religious ideology. Such a person (let’s call him, say, Metaclypse) would point out that supernatural explanation is hence a label for a gap in knowledge, and not a bridge for the gap. But you’ve sure showed why that’s all wrong. It’s because sometimes specific circumstances suggest otherwise to you.

Clutch

E_muse, At least wholly inaccurate and indefensible? Hey, I'm just glad it's not worse!

You're not quite getting the point, in any case. The claim in this thread, as I understand it, is not that believing in God means you can't give good explanations. It's that your good explanations never include God as a mechanism. Notice that Newton never says that (e.g.) gravitational action at a distance is explained by God's invisibly pulling objects together! He just sought a lawlike description of the phenomenon, and where he couldn't explain it in terms of the Mechanism of his day, he left it unexplained. To the extent that he showed such high methodological scruple, it was by resisting whatever urge he may have had to say "Every case of gravitational attraction is a case of God's working a miracle".

Moreover, notice that Newton saw God's role as an initial creator -- and Newton never offered a physical explanation of the origins of the universe, nor even focussed upon this as a great question calling for an answer. He took the Steady State model for granted. Because that's just how goddidit? There is reason to think that, to the extent that Newton did envision God playing a causal role in the physical universe, it did lead him to ignore scientifically open possibilities.

[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

Pomp

Tercel (and other theists),

Clutch does raise an interesting point, even if he does so rather confrontationally. Can you describe for us the methodology you use to determine when "specific circumstances" warrant the conlcusion that methodological naturalism is not appropriate? In other words, how do you determine which events are not in principle explainable under meth. naturalism?

britinusa

I've just come across this thread. Very interesting. I haven't read through all of it yet, but one thing on page 1 did jump out at me:
SanDiegoAtheist, in response to a previous post by Tercel, wrote the following: Tercel replied: But surely this is the point SanDiegoAtheist was making. A few centuries ago people applied their "common sense" and concluded that the "most likely" explanation for a supernova was that is was a divine sign.
[BTW A "divine sign" from whom? Odin? Isis? Zeus? The ancient Jewish warrior-deity, Yahweh?]

Tercel addresses supernova example:
You mean like the origins of the universe?

Tercel again:
And how is a supernatural event identified?...
This is a "useful rule"?

More:
You mean like people walking on water and decomposing corpses springing back to life? That's OK, nothing like that has ever happened. Unless you have some well-documented evidence, and not second hand testimony from highly gullible and superstitious people who lived and died millennia ago.

[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: britinusa ]</p>

Clutch

PB,

Confrontational? There's no damned way I'm going take that from a no-good... Oh. I mean, nolo contendre.

Tercel

Your sarcasm is not particularly appreciated.
I didn't write about this, becuase I didn't see it as the topic under discussion. The only reason I even included the sentence you quote was because I thought someone might be silly enough to say "well if you say you accept methodological naturalism, how can you ever accept miracles?"

No: I use my brain. Those without one might have difficulty working out when a supernatural explanation is appropriate though and need the whistle.

Very funny... not.
If you're only going to make stupid, unfounded, and completely irrelevant accusations of bias in my judgement then I suggest you don't bother posting further because I won't be bothering to respond.

I have already discussed somewhat the difference between a God of the Gaps explanation and a warrented supernatural explanation. This looks to me like exactly the same thing under another name.

To paraphrase my previous argument:
Calling something "supernatural" as opposed to "I don't know" is clearly only going to be warrented when we do know that it is supernatural. We can know it is supernatural if we know it isn't natural. We can know it isn't natural if we know what is natural and know that this isn't it.

In general, for the vast majority of the time, reality obeys the natural laws. (Otherwise they obviously wouldn't be "laws") Using methodological naturalism we can learn what those laws are and learn what is natural. Once we know what is natural, we can identify what isn't natural when it does occur. Thus identifying particular cases of the interference of the metaphysical supernatural is actually dependent upon the earlier application of methodological naturalism to understand the natural world. -A person who didn't know what naturally happened could never have sufficient reason in calling something "supernatural". (And we call it "God of the Gaps" when someone does this sort of thing)

Tercel

Tercel

As I mentioned in my respose to Clutch, the single most important principle is, I believe, 1) that the event contradicts our current knowledge of the natural. Other, useful criteria include 2) the occurance of the event inside a religious context (eg the instantaneously healed person was being prayed for at the time) and 3) unrepeatability.

I suppose that (3) might seem very similar to (1). I add it only to distinguish new scientific discoveries (in the very rare cases that they actually contradict existing knowledge) from supernatural events. (It should be redundant anyway because of (2) since new scientific discoveries aren't usually made in a religious context)

HRG

Tercel,

what exactly is this "it" ? A perception, or an actual event ?

If you restrict yourself to perceptions, I agree with you. But just to say that an actual event occurred requires the assumption of naturalism to link our perceptions with the real event.

There may be perceptions which would force us to abandon our default assumption of naturalism (but I don't think there have been any actual ones). But in this case we would only be able to say that something supernatural had occurred - but not what.

Regards,
HRG.

MadMordigan

the single most important principle is, I believe, 1) that the event contradicts our current knowledge of the natural. Other, useful criteria include 2) the occurance of the event inside a religious context (eg the instantaneously healed person was being prayed for at the time) and 3) unrepeatability.

This sounds more like a methodology for marketing, not a methodology for gaining reliable knowledge.