Science destroys Supernaturalism

By STEVE ZARA
Added: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 02:31:21 UTC

It's time to abandon the supernatural as anything worth discussing. The reason is that the supernatural is not only extremely hard to pin down in terms definition, but it's beyond science and beyond evidence. That isn't as a result of some positive properties of the supernatural, but because it's what the supernatural is intended for: it is supposed to exist beyond the physical world we commonly experience. It's forever beyond the horizon.

Why is it forever out of reach? The problem is that we have no idea what the physical world consists of, and there is no sign that we will reach any conclusion any time soon. It's also a problem to decide what "physical world" means anyway.

With these uncertainties, should there be a worry about the limits of science? No. Many statements about science insist it uses principles of naturalism, or is restricted to the physical, material world. Such definitions are only set up in attempt to justify the idea of a non-physical non-material world that is beyond science, an idea which makes little sense when looked at in detail. Science really is very simple, and yet based on one of the most important ideas to have ever occured to humans: that there is an objective reality against which hypotheses can be tested, that to find out if something is real we have to test against objective reality.

Science isn't about truth - there are many ways to find truths, including maths and philosophy. Science is about something different; it's about trying to find out what's real. For example, mathematics has come up with countless different possible geometries of the world, each of which contains truths (such as that ratio of the diameter to the radius of a circle on a flat plane is Pi). But, to find out which of these truths applies to reality, we need science.

That is all science is. Science doesn't require philosophical belief in naturalism. If there are parts of reality that don't give reproducible results then science can't tell us directly anything about what goes on there. But neither can any other method of investigation. When it's said that science involves methodological naturalism, all this means is that scientists go into their laboratories hoping that they can get reasonably repeatable results so that they can do enough statistics on the data to come to some conclusion. Scientists don't usually have to sign up for philosophy classes before being employed.

But what anyway is "naturalism"? It's too vague to be useful. It can be thought of as the belief that only mindless matter and energy operate in a physical universe. But what about anthropology? Or psychology? Are they supernatural subjects? Clearly not. Also, what does "physical world" mean? Perhaps it means matter acting in a mechanical way. But does that describe the uncertainty of quantum mechanics, with its strange entanglements of particles? There are phenomena that might as well be magic, such as magnetism. Anyone who has played with magnets has surely been awed by the strange feeling of repulsion of similar poles. What's happening? It can't be explained without relativity, and quantum mechanics. There are virtual photons whizzing back and forth between the magnets. But does that really help it seem less magic?

With "natural" being so uncertain, having any real sense of what "supernatural" might be is going to be very hard. So see that, let's consider an important supernatural religious idea - miracles. The subject of miracles was dealt with well by David Hume, but I'm going to go further in my rejection of miracles.

Miracles are rare events that are supposed to indicate an intervention in the physical world by supernatural beings. How would we check that someone or something was responsible for a phenomenon that was considered supernatural? The first thing we would need is more evidence of the phenomenon: some second-or-third-hand reports aren't enough. However, something strange happens to a phenomenon when it's repeated often enough to study in a laboratory. The flavour of the supernatural beging to wear off. In order to be sure that someone or something is responsible for an event we need to determine mechanism, so we can be sure we are talking about causation and not correlation. If we can determine mechanism, no matter how odd, even if it sounds like the language of magic, we end up with what appear to be laws. At this point the supernatural nature of what we are dealing with seems less and less. That's because miracles aren't mundane. If they happen daily and we know the recipe, they become part of the world. It isn't the case that supernaturalism can't be investigated by science. It's that supposed supernaturalism when investigated by science becomes naturalism. If alchemy were true, and was used in the industrial synthesis of gold from lead, would it still be called magic?

In the map of the territory of theistic reality the natural world is a large island. Around that Island is the supernatural sea. Surrounding that sea, encompassing everything, is God. We are on that island, and have only just started exploring. We have never seen the coast, let alone an oasis of magic. But, theists insist it is there. They keep telling us that the sea is over the next set of hills, and occasionally we see a flicker in the distance, but it's always a mirage and vanishes as we get close. The Map keeps getting bigger. It started the size of a world, then a galaxy, and now it's of a vast universe. But still, we see no coastline, and we never will, because believers in the supernatural have regularly re-drawn where it's supposed to be. For them, we are still in an Aristotelian reality with the spheres of heaven, but now those spheres have been shifted to outside the universe, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Let's destroy the idea of the supernatural. It's all part of the religious goalpost-moving game. The supernatural isn't a belief, it's a desire - a desire for there to be more to this world than the everyday, for there to be a "behind the scenes" so that feeble humans can have power over vast and heartless nature.

There is no supernatural, there is no celestial sphere outside of time and space, there are no cheat codes in reality.