Alien epistemology
Am I being too obstinate and nitpicky about accepting (notional) evidence for a god? People are whispering in my ear to that effect, but I don’t think so. I’m not saying “No evidence would ever convince me no matter what” – I’m saying “I don’t at present see how anyone would know it was a god and not just a very surprising Something that we didn’t know about before and still have no idea how to explain.”
I’m having a hard time figuring out what kind of evidence would force me to accept the label “god” for a novel and surprising something – even if it were very very very surprising. Maybe I just haven’t thought hard enough. Maybe various kinds of cognition and action would convince me that this new entitity could only be called a god…
Unless I said that an entity couldn’t be a god if there were evidence for it because it’s central to my definition of god that it is always Hidden.
Perhaps if I invented a new and exciting word for it – would that be good enough? I wouldn’t want to be both gnu and obstinate. That would be bad.
I am an agnostic Gnu Atheist because I am not so obstinate that I wouldn’t accept incontrovertible evidence for (a) god(s.) That I can’t for the life of me figure out nor imagine what that evidence may be is what makes me functionally an atheist. I will say this, that the evidence so far presented anywhere that I have been able to find has been insufficient to demonstrate said supernatural power-entity(ies) and that is what makes me an atheist as well as an agnostic.
I am also agnostic about invisible dragons in the garage and if I were to be confronted with said dragon, I would say “cool” after having myself checked and making sure that it leaves footprints.
As someone who kind of sort of took that position, I guess I should respond.
Imagine a being shows up. It says its name is Joe, and that it is God. You challenge it to prove it, and it says, “Name something a God could do, and I’ll do it.” You do for a while, and it always succeeds. This goes on for a few years.
It simply seems to me that complaining that this being might be a non-God being that is simply beyond our present ability to explain is a bit… beside the point. If it quacks like a duck, we might as well conclude its a duck. What’s the point of doing otherwise?
Reggie Finley (infidelguy.com) often uses the following train of thought: Even if I personally can’t think of any evidence that would convince me that a god exists, an all-knowing and all-powerful god would surely know what evidence it would take to convince me of its existence, and would have the power to provide that evidence. So, the fact that I have never seen such evidence shows that, if such a god actually exists, it must want me to be an atheist.
Basically, although this line is typically used against theist claims that atheists are closed-minded, it also answers the epistemological question about whether or not it is possible that there could be sufficient evidence for belief in a real god. If a potential being cannot provide evidence to convince every skeptic of its existence, then it is either a) not a god, or b) deliberately keeping skeptics in the dark, and so unworthy of any sort of reverence or worship. In either case, without convincing evidence, atheism is justified.
But Patrick, by Ophelia’s definition of god, the very fact that Joe shows up to prove he is god is proof that he isn’t.
Perhaps it’s an ontological argument against the existence of god – defining him out of existence.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Alien epistemology http://dlvr.it/85dl7 […]
Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I think I’ve finally found something that could settle the God or Alien question.
What if this being that showed up and did miracles etc also proved, scientifically and logically, that naturally occurring abiogenesis was impossible given the laws and matter in the universe? And that this thing, whatever else it was, was responsible for life. I think that would convince me that it was a god. Or at least that there was a god. (This being could still be an advanced alien that was created by that god).
Now, I do fully expect that we’ll have abiogenesis explained in purely natural terms at some point. So this idea probably has a limited shelf-life.
Perhaps a convincing proof of God would have to combine repeated objective empirical evidence with the sort of subjective God-in-mind-meld experiences critical to religion. Instead of Patrick’s idea of a “being” named Joe showing up, what if you suddenly felt the presence of another person in your mind ? This “other” felt-presence can read your wishes and manifest them as you conceive them, speaking to you through the medium of thought. Furthermore, this ghostly Other is also apparently doing the same thing to everyone else in the entire world, so that we are all hearing the same voice in our head, and can check and confirm it with each other as well as see the results of our/the Presences mutually enacted psychic powers.
This Presence seems to know everything about you, and you are filled with a sense of peace and happiness. Everything it does, seems perfectly reasonable — not just to you, but to everyone. It explains history — our own and that of humanity — in ways we can understand. This was to teach this, this was to show that, and so on. You might not agree, but you can see the Point of It All.
The supernatural category is a confusion of the inner world of thought, feeling, and intention with the outer world of object, force, and event. So I think objective evidence like moving stars around or granting miracles to the good would need to be supplemented by some strong subjective internal evidence of Pure Mind or psychic abilities in a way that makes you feel vitally connected. You’re a part of it, it’s a part of you, and your internal dialogue is comfortably relating to its internal dialogue. It’s the strangest thing, but it feels familiar.
Would that at least get a start on bringing in the God-ness of God? I think we’d be moving away from Big Powerful Alien. The critical thing now is that there be the intersubjectively confirmed consensus of external evidence, lest we all think we have gone privately mad. Collective madness as a possibility would probably be ruled out by the physical evidence — and the fact that all the miracles would be nice, good, reasonable ones — or at least no shockers.
What would convince me? Personal revelation. A dramatic change in consciousness accompanied by the realization that something extraordinary had been revealed to me. Now, I wouldn’t expect that to convince you. You’d be inclined to invoke mania. Psychosis. Drugs. But this wouldn’t be about you. It’d be about me.
Any student of history should understand that gods don’t just show up and try to explain themselves. They reveal themselves. And those to whom the gods reveal themselves are not, at that moment, inclined toward critical thinking. They’re manic, psychotic, or wasted.
The concept of the “supernatural” is so ill-posed I can’t think of any situation in which it would make sense to me, or any display that would convince me of the existence of “gods.”
My post about it:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-there-cant-be-evidence-for-god.html
(Thanks for the link to my previous one!)
Ken Pidcock wrote
But a personal, private revelation shouldn’t convince you, because you yourself can’t rule out those natural, non-God alternatives. We don’t have to deny the mystical experiences to seek other explanations. That’s why I think there would have to be some serious combination of both the subjective and objective aspects — group revelation, if you will — before I would be convinced. Or, at least, convinced that God is on the table as a live option here.
I’m happy to leave off the word “supernatural” if it’s going to trigger panic and chaos and revulsion. Turns out God is a natural God after all; nature is just stranger than we thought. By a lot.
There is no coherent definition of a god that doesn’t end up being a short label for “really powerful being”. A really powerful being is not a god as understood by anyone before they’re forced to winnow their vague idea down into something tenable.
I don’t know what would convince me that a god exists. None of the examples I’ve seen in this discussion come close to actually being evidence for a god.
My position is simple. I’m 100% positive that no gods exist. My mind is made up. I’m perfectly willing to change my mind if a reason to do so ever arises. If you think there’s a contradiction there, or that my mind is closed, you’re simply not comprehending.
So, yeah, Ophelia is pretty much dead-center on this issue.
I’m not sure what folks are aiming at when they ask atheists what would count as evidence that Gods exist. Are they expecting atheists to give the conditions under which their atheism would force them to convert? If so, I don’t doubt that everyone can give an irrelevant story of when their backs would break. (Speaking for myself, I would tend to give up rather easily if given an unequivocal sign or two.) But I don’t understand why that’s an interesting report except as a game to test the relative limits of our stubbornness. If we’re just talking about where everybody would draw the line for themselves, then it’s a question of mere judgment, not knowledge.
If we want to talk about when it would be truly justified to convert, then the answer is: when the entirety of the evidence we have points to a supernatural explanation. So, for instance, if I lived in the city of Sigil (Planescape), then I would not be justified in sympathizing with atheism — I would be crazy to be an atheist, actually. Atheism would be the worst possible explanation for the workings of the world.
Sastra, Ken: the problem with your description – someone inside your mind – is that it’s indistinguishable from psychosis, at least to anyone else. For all we know it’s a commonplace occurrence.
Newton, unwilling to rely on his mathematical inventions, or too lazy to do the work, supposed that God kept the planets in their orbits. Laplace did the drudge work and ground through the calculations and was able to declare that he didn’t have no need of that there hypothesis (Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là). A different result would have called for a different conclusion. Biology, of course, concurs in finding no need for supernatural intervention.
What I would find convincing is an arbitrarily accurate prediction of the future, although even an all-powerful god might not be capable of predicting the outcome of quantum events (or even human behavior, under some conceptions of free will). If someone could predict the Dow next Monday, the S&P the following Friday, the box office for the next big release at some unspecified date, I’d at least be inclined to follow whatever investment recommendations were offered.
(If God is a Trafalmadoran who can see to the end of time, then Calvin was right; even if we’re free, in His eyes we’ve already made our decisions and sealed our fates, &c. This conflicts with my understanding of physics, which strongly implies that the future is indeterminable, and which also seems to be a common consensus.)
Sastra, Ken: the problem with your description – someone inside your mind – is that it’s indistinguishable from psychosis, at least to anyone else. For all we know it’s a commonplace occurrence.
Newton, unwilling to rely on his mathematical inventions, or too lazy to do the work, supposed that God kept the planets in their orbits. Laplace did the drudge work and ground through the calculations and was able to declare that he didn’t have no need of that there hypothesis (Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là). A different result would have called for a different conclusion. Biology, of course, concurs in finding no need for supernatural intervention.
What I would find convincing is an arbitrarily accurate prediction of the future, although even an all-powerful god might not be capable of predicting the outcome of quantum events (or even human behavior, under some conceptions of free will). If someone could predict the Dow next Monday, the S&P the following Friday, the box office for the next big release at some unspecified date, I’d at least be inclined to follow whatever investment recommendations were offered.
(If God is a Trafalmadoran who can see to the end of time, then Calvin was right; even if we’re free, in His eyes we’ve already made our decisions and sealed our fates, &c. This conflicts with my understanding of physics, which strongly implies that the future is indeterminable, and which also seems to be a common consensus.)
Teleportation would also be a pretty convincing trick.
My own thinking on this question has altered over the course of the debate. I used to be more along the lines of Jerry Coyne’s 900 foot Jesus being a good proof of a religious God.
I now think we must be careful to ensure we are all talking about the same ‘type’ of God. A traditional religious God – all knowing, all powerful and benevolent or “good”, upon closer examination turns out to be a bit of a square circle – it is essentially a logical impossibility. Therefore I realize that before I begin to think what evidence is sufficient to convince me of God I should do a sort of Jefferson bible treatment on aspects of the God. Im this case what I discard is not the supernatural elements but the logical contradictions.
The God that remains is what I use in my test and in thinking about that God I realize that while evidence in its favor could hypothetically happen (think apparent miracles) I have to admit that it is impossible to distinguish this evidence from our sneaky ET interloper. Essentially this gives us a balance of probablilities and in theory the more we advance in knowledge then the more difficult it will be for ET to fool us.
@BadJim
“What I would find convincing is an arbitrarily accurate prediction of the future”
I think that is an excellent answer – I hope it gets widely discussed.
I think what would convince me of a god would be seeing all the idiots who claim to be doing god’s work while inciting violence, subjugation, bigotry, and all that, simply vanish from the face of the earth.
We’d have practically no politicians in the US, but those left could probably get the job done just as well.
” A traditional religious God – all knowing, all powerful and benevolent or “good”, upon closer examination turns out to be a bit of a square circle – it is essentially a logical impossibility.”
So if a being shows up that is a logical impossibility does that mean it’s god or does it mean our logic is incomplete? the problem we have is that there cannot be a definition of “god” that satisfies everyone. Maybe if such a being created another universe and let us watch?
But as any fule kno, god is “ineffable” (the ABC and Murphy-O’Connor both said so) which kind of makes definition of it impossible.
But, Sigmund, I don’t think your ‘traditional’ god is really a god at all, except in a ‘theologically correct’ way… Actual Christians tend to be more concerned with Jesus or, if they are Catholic, with Jesus and Mary and a variety of demi-gods known as saints, and they don’t worry so much about God and the logical inconsistencies involved in being omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and good. They are mostly content to let him abide ineffably in some ineffable otherwhere. And as for those many people who are, say, Buddhists, or cargo cultists, or polytheists or syncretists of one kind or another, or ‘ancestor worshippers’, or Hindus or Jains or Confucianists or Taoists, well, I don’t think many of them would be all that interested in a god who is essentially a philosophical abstraction. I do think we need to take account of what people actually believe and how they actually conduct the religious part of their lives.
bad Jim wrote:
No: I thought I had been clear that psychosis would be ruled out by the addition of factors which could be checked objectively, by others. And I added in the “someone inside your mind” aspect in the first place because I think this part would be necessary to rule out the Powerful Alien objection.
I’m coming at the “what sorts of experiences would change your mind and persuade you that God exists?” problem from multiple directions. I agree with PZ (and Ophelia) that no single, sudden “miracle” ought to be enough to do it, given a careful habit of entertaining natural alternatives. But I disagree with their position in that I think an analysis of what the basic concept of “God” normally entails opens up the possibility of a cumulative case being made, given a sufficient variety of evidence:
1.) Repeated, demonstrable “miracles” which simply do not fit into our current bottom-up model of reality as constructed through science.
2.) Internal, subjective experience of a Presence in your mind to which you feel intimately connected.
3.) A combination of #1 and #2: repeated, demonstrable evidence that everyone else is having the same sense of an internal “Other” which displays the psychic ability to not only read minds, but to move physical objects through the apparent power of its intention alone — and this “Other” in the mind is “revealing” to every individual the same facts which, though not previously known, can now be verified by all.
4.) These 3 factors all present, and all involving what you — and everyone else — interpret as positive goods: peace, harmony, kindness, benevolence, understanding, etc.
In order for a “Being” to qualify as God to us, it seems to me that there would have to be a complicated inter-relation of many experiences, both internal and external, objective and subjective, public and intimate. Yes, we need to verify and cross-check among others — but you simply can’t leave out the Irreducibly Mental aspect of God, and the requirement that thoughts and values be seen as significant nonembodied agents or forces. Nor can you leave out the need for an intensely personal connection with said Being, or the sense of fulfillment and approval it gives to you and others.
But add all 4 of the above together, over time, and I suspect that “God exists” is now a reasonable working theory. What do you think?
The problem with the “infinite attributes” I mentioned on another thread – it requires a theory of the system or a supertask to verify them. So how would one know one is confronted with a “tri-omni” (or even single-omni) being? This is where the presuppositionalists *almost* have a point. The mistake is thinking that the “theory of god” passes any sort of external tests – it isn’t merely that one can have a purely deductive theory of the attributes (which I’ll grant ex hypothesi).
Of course, some people think pure deduction can get somewhere. Silly, and wrong even in pure mathematics. Some theist told me breathlessly once that he had a valid argument for the existence of god. He quieted down when I reminded him that “A, therefore A” is a valid argument scheme. Not a persuasive or even necessarily a sound one, of course.
I think evidence for a god suffers because it is what I would term an exclusionary diagnosis. If you proceed from methodological naturalism as the scientific method necessitates, something supernatural would be the last explanation posited. I don’t think Ophelia’s position is obstinate, it’s grounded in skepticism.
Jon Moles #23 wrote:
If Ophelia’s position — and yours — is grounded in philosophical objections to the term “supernatural,” then throw the damn term out. A sufficiently radical change in our understanding of nature would be indistinguishable from supernaturalism. Okay then. God is not supernatural, and there are no supernatural forces or powers. We have stomped and spit on the very idea of anything being ‘supernatural.’ Kick it away and start fresh.
What scientific and personal evidence would it take to convince you that nature is best described by a theory of mind/body dualism?
And if this is the new, well-established working theory — does theism now seem more plausible?
Yes, that’s the issue all right – I can easily think of evidence that would cause me to agree to a radical change in our understanding of nature, but calling it ‘god’ is a whole other step. It’s a political step – it’s conversion, as Ben says.
Ophelia, do you agree that if an omniscient god would have certainly know what evidence would convince you of its existence, and an omnipotent god would certainly have the power to present that evidence? You may not know right now what that evidence might be, but the god would, being omniscient. And any objection you might think of that would keep you skeptical would of course also be countered by this evidence, seeing as how the god would be able to know your objections before you make them, and know what would convince you despite all the objections you could think of.
If we set the minimum criteria for ‘god’ as being of such knowledge and power to be able to achieve this feat, then we can say that there certainly would be some criterion of evidence which would convince you, even if you don’t currently know what that criterion might be.
I think it’s more of a personal step, than a political one. Although believers like to frame it the other way, the concept of God is wrapped up in a need for human approval — specifically, the approval of the individual who has labeled something “God.”
I used to ask theists an interesting question in order to watch them implode: “What if you’re right, and God does indeed exist — but it turns out that the more you understand and relate to God, the more disappointed you are? Connecting with God on a fundamental level is depressing, dull, and fills you with a sense of pointlessness, even horror or dread. And yet, it is God. Would you still feel under an obligation to worship it, seeing yourself as unworthy of appreciating God? Or would you now reject it, and decide follow your heart against God?”
What I usually got, of course, was a refusal to answer the question, or take it seriously. There was repeated insistence that no, God is not, could not, be like that. They would not even entertain that hypothetical. (And yet, apparently many of them could readily conceive of Bad People in Hell feeling like that about God: that is, after all, why they were damned/damned themselves in the first place.)
Thus, my multi-pronged approach for a Convincing Proof of God , where you are involved in the pleasant and fulfilling mind-meld aspects of God at the same time all the objective empirical evidence is piling up. Wouldn’t the combination of the 4 factors in my post at #21 meet at least some of your objections?
A personal step is what believers major on, of course, so I don’t think that helps on the ontology, cf the psychology, I fear.
As other commenters have noted, that a supernatural explanation is an oxymoron has still to be refuted by anything Jerry et al have said, so I cannot see that Ophelia is wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact; the more examples they give, the more I’m convinced of it.
Great debate, though, and thoughtful comments. We must all continue to think this through. I feel like there’s an answer out there, but I could be wrong!
Jon Moles:
I don’t think this is a basic principle of science. It’s something we’ve learned provisionally, using science. Evidence is what has made us discount the supernatural so dramatically, and increasingly over time. The materialist monist story just gets better, and the supernaturalistic dualist story just gets worse. We now have better materialistic explanations of all the stuff that people assumed for thousands of years that dualism was necessary for—e.g., life, minds, purposes, emotions, morality—so dualism is pretty well dead among people who understand those issues.
Evidence could change that, too.
One piece of evidence that would freak my materialistic ass out would be lucky charms or cursed objects that demonstrably brought good luck or bad luck, at levels well above chance, in all sorts of subtle ways that don’t involve a major violation of normal causality—e.g., people with St. Christopher’s medals generally being lucky enough to avoid traffic accidents, get missed by bullets, and never get caught in an avalanche, struck by lightning, have their plane crashed by turbulence or wind shear, etc., despite taking no other special precautions.
I don’t think many people understand what an enormous problem that would be for the materialist paradigm. It would require undoing the butterfly effect, and would mean that small, low-level, mindless things like air molecules bumping each other were sensitive to their possible consequences for extremely high-level properties like what would even count as good fortune, eventually, for some individual in some particular circumstance who will be carrying a lucky charm. It would require something very much like omniscience, so that a butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia meadow doesn’t get your beach house whacked by a hurricane a few weeks later, when you will be in it, and will have your charm with you, just because you wouldn’t like that. (How could air molecules understand that you even exist, much less what you like or don’t, much less how what they do now would eventually affect your well-being, very indirectly and in chaotic combination with an astonishing amount of other interacting stuff?)
That would be a much bigger challenge to the materialist monist paradigm than, say, a wacky new form of matter or energy, or a basic violation of conservation laws. Monistic science can and does survive finding out that apparently fundamental laws aren’t actually laws and aren’t actually fundamental, but if we found out that low-level mindless things were sensitive to their eventual high-level consequences, that’d be something else entirely. We’d at least have to go back to the drawing board for a good long think.
I didn’t mean to suggest that conversion is, or must be, a merely political or personal process. The fact is, conversions (and deconversions) can be factually motivated. To the extent that they are, they’re epistemically interesting, and hence the sorts of things that we can assess through a combination of evidence and inference. So while I sympathize with Ophelia, I think that I’m largely on Sastra’s side here (though the positions don’t seem very far apart really).
The main point of contention appears to be what we might call “the principle of bullshit” — since religious claims waffle, they’re not the sorts of things that can be evaluated in terms of evidence. While this is motivated by a correct description of the content of religious claims, I don’t think it is a useful point to make in this context. The only way to defeat a bullshit claim is for us to round up all of the most plausible interpretations of the claim, and then show how each interpretation is false.
Hence, that will mean that eventually we will have to get around to showing that the best explanation of the evidence does not include reference to any Gods, and hence theistic claims are improbable. And to the extent that you’re arguing in terms of facts, you must also think of yourself as open to criticism on the basis of the evidence. Fair’s fair.
If the principle of bullshit is right, then that means that the idea that religious claims express some kind of unique content is in error. So, any theists who say “The Bible must be taken as an allegory” are wrong, and any who say “The Bible must be taken literally” are wrong too. It’s either one, depending on the mood of your interlocutor.
Sastra, yes, the multi-pronged approach does seem to meet my objections. 4 is the kicker. You know that ad that’s a kind of pop version of the lion lying down with the kid? The one with giraffes and lions consorting happily at a watering hole, and meerkats climbing sociably onto a croc, with a goofy little song in the background – “Coz we get along/yeah we really do” and then a voiceover saying something shatteringly obvious to the effect that when there’s nothing to fear then that’s good. That’s the kind of thing that would make me think the agent should be called “god” – a sudden permanent end to natural selection (with no resulting overpopulation, famine, ecological degradation etc etc). The lion lying down with the kid.
Then this god would have to build in an anti-boredom mechanism so that everyone didn’t just get used to the new dispensation and start wanting platinum bicycles or something, but that’s a detail.
Heh – Ben, no, I know you didn’t; I mostly just seized on the word. But I agree with Sastra too, and was saying so while you were typing, so there we are.
It’s this ad, in case you don’t know it.
I have to confess, I love it, and it gets to me. I hate the reality of animal life.
I know, go ahead, tell me what a sap I am.
Paul W. #29 wrote:
Agree. An atheistic, materialistic, natural universe is an uncaring universe, in that human needs and desires have no special central place in the scheme of things. Nature is neutral, and does not distinguish between good people and bad people or bend itself around to satisfy our emotional requirements or reflect our hidden essences. Science proceeds on the assumption that the same physical actions will get the same physical results, regardless of the State of Grace of any experimenter. Imagine what it would look like if it didn’t?
It would look a good deal like what the paranormalists sometimes claim when their experimental results can’t be replicated: skeptics don’t get the right results because the dice (or the cards or the stars or the inanimate object-of-some-sort) will not behave the same way for different people even under the exact same conditions. But if this were true, I would think this rule would still be regular enough to be tested.
Awwww. Nice commercial. Yes, a world like that, where Thumper the Baby Bunny calls out to his Friend Owl to come and play with him and Bambi.
I can’t say you’re a sap, Ophelia. Not when I have a sleeping-kittens-calendar next to my computer. Every year I purchase one and inform the clerk behind the counter, with look of great seriousness, that I am only buying it because I checked the preview photos on the back and was relieved to discover that all of the kittens are still cute this year. When they are not, they will have lost a customer.
I have yet to have any of them catch on and laugh. I must look like I’m the sort of sap that would be genuinely concerned about this possibility.
And the caring is what it would take to convince me, it seems. The refrains in gospel songs and the like, that always get me – “no more trials, Lord; soon be over.”
But then (unless I were too awash in bliss chemicals to think) my mind would snag on all the millions of years of suffering in the past, and I would wonder why just this generation, why not until now? And then perhaps I would decide I was just in some hospice doped up to the eyeballs. So maybe it wouldn’t convince me after all. That god damn brain in a vat.
Haaaaaaaaaaaa Sastra!
I suppose they all just figure that you might really be that sappy and if so it would be simply crushing for them to laugh, so they manage not to. Quite sweet of them!
Mark Jones:
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that a supernatural explanation is an oxymoron, and I’m wondering if it hinges on assumptions about explanations.
The supernatural isn’t generally about ultimate explanations—it’s about proximate explanations, using irreducibly teleological or mental essences. (Of life, love, truth, or whatever high-level thing you’re “explaining.”)
A supernatural explanation isn’t generally a satisfying explanation of the kind we prefer in science—it usually just pushes things back a step and leaves a similar unexplained mystery—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t an explanation, or that it isn’t true.
So, for example, goddidit could be an explanation for the existence of the universe. Maybe some superior being did create the universe on purpose, and did it in a particular way for particular reasons. If so, that would be very annoying, because it would pose bigger questions than it answers, e.g., where did that come from, and how and why did it do what it did.
Such an explanation would be an explanation, and could even be true. The fact that it would leave us with a annoyingly bigger mystery doesn’t change that. “Pushing things back a step” is the right scientific thing to do, if you have good evidence that such a step actually occurred.
Proximal explanations are okay in science. You don’t have to explain everything all at once, and we generally don’t, and sometimes theories get more complicated when we find evidence that reality is more complicated than the simple theories can explain. The simplest explanation isn’t always right, and sometimes it’s clearly wrong.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose we lived in a simulation like The Matrix, in which the laws of nature seemed pretty much like the ones we actually do see, but with certain bizarre exceptions that violate the low-level “laws” but exhibit high-level regularities. (E.g., favoring some people, thwarting others.) We might infer that the apparent “laws” of nature were actually just defaults, and that some intelligent agent(s) had the ability to override those defaults in obviously purposeful ways. The fact that such intelligent agents would be much more complicated than the apparent “laws of nature” wouldn’t matter much. If they obviously do that sort of thing, we obviously need a theory like that.
It wouldn’t explain the intelligent agents with superpowers, but as a scientific theory of the apparent violation of the laws of nature, it wouldn’t have to; proximal explanations are fine, even if they raise obnoxious new questions, if there aren’t other, simpler theories that account for the data.
Supernatural explanations are different than Matrix-like explanations, though, in that they generally are unsatisfying in a different, more profound way.
With a Matrix-like explanation, you can easily imagine a naturalistic overall explanation, e.g., that maybe our universe is artifical, but was created by beings who are explainable in naturalistic terms, such that our world ultimately is too. In itself, a Matrix-type explanation wouldn’t necessarily threaten naturalism.
Supernatural explanations are different. They generally involve high-level (mental or teleological) essences that are assumed not to reduce to brute (nonmental and nonteleological) stuff. Supernatural explanations do generally tend to push issues back a step, and then stop there. They assume that god, for example, is just supernatural, and can just do things like simply willing things to happen (maybe even ex nihilo creation), with no reductionist explanation of how that happensm, because that’s just the kind of being he is. His essence is inextricably bound up in the irreducible essence of Creativity and/or Mind and/or Goodness and/or Morality or whatever. Reductionist explanations need not apply; God is not just a machine made out of suitably organized mindless stuff, like a mere powerful alien or supersmart nerdy Dungeon Master. He’s God.
That is not a satisfying kind of explanation in a more basic way than the Matrix-type explanation is unsatisfying. The latter is unsatisfying, but leaves open the option of applying materialism at the next level down, and cashing out the mystery in the usual scientific way. Supernaturalism doesn’t. Explicitly or implicitly, it assumes that mental or teleological properties are basic and irreducible—they just are, and that’s the way it is.
But even that doesn’t make it necessarily false.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s false. I’m pretty darned sure of it. It’s worse than false, if you understand the psychology of why people find such beliefs intuitive and just accept them; it’s positively hokey.
Still, I think we mainly know that empirically. We are unsatisfied by such irreducible essences because we know empirically that things like life and mind and morality are pretty clearly reducible to brute nonmental nonteleological stuff. Living things are machines, minds are basically computational processes in machines, and morality is just one of the informational things they do. Assuming that they could involve irreducible essences is pretty clearly, but a posteriori, an intuitive category mistake.
Still, I think that the big reason we exclude supernatural explanations is that we’ve learned from experience that reductionism does work. The complicated high-level things we see we see (like minds and perception and communication) are much more complicated than they appear, and are made out of lower-level stuff in a mechanistic way.
Science surprised a lot of people by reducing more and more complicated high level stuff to vast amounts of really dopily stupid nonmental nonteleological stuff. It was not obvious that that was possible, until it happened. (e.g., Newton was a dualist; he didn’t believe his own clockwork universe could explain mental and spiritual phenomena, and wasted a whole lot of time on alchemy and occult shit.)
I don’t think that believing in irreducible essences is necessarily incoherent; it’s only “unsatisfying,” and science has just taught us to expect more—we can reduce high-level stuff to low-level stuff.
I don’t think that’s a logical necessity. So far as I know, there’s no reason to be sure that the universe is a simple place, at bottom, governed by simple nonmental nonteleological principles. It’s hard to imagine any irreducible high-level stuff that’s consistent with what we think we know from materialist science, but I think it can be done. It’d be terribly unsatisfying, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it untrue—just implausible and hokey.
For example, consider Luck, as I discussed above. Imagine it turned out that there really was such a thing as Good Luck and Bad Luck, which would upend the materialist paradigm.
With a lot of effort, I can imagine a materialist explanation for that. I can imagine that our universe is the solution to a problem running in a superadvanced alien’s quantum computer, which basically quantum computes all possible materialistic simulations of a universe like ours, but settles on a solution in which Good Luck and Bad Luck happen unusually often. All of the other possible causal networks interfere and fall out, leaving a universe just like ours, where things generally obey the obvious physical laws, but with a statistical bias uncanny Luck in certain kinds of cases. (St. Christopher’s medals or whatever.)
That’d be a hell of a computer and a hell of a program, and it seems wildly improbable, but possible.
With even more effort, I think I can even imagine a supernaturalist universe like that, which is incredibly farfetched, but not incoherent.
The simplest version is to imagine the kind of universe the superpowerful alien’s computer would select in the above example, and say that that’s just the way reality is, no alien or computer needed, and with no answer to the question of why it’s that way. (As there’s no intelligible answer to the question of why there’s something rather than nothing at all, in normal causal terms. There just is stuff, and it just is like that.) Of course such a non-explanation is unsatisfying—it would just be a recognition of a regularity in “nature” (very broadly construed ) to include the strange confluence of apparent naturalism (narrowly construed) with irreducible “supernatural” luck.
A somewhat less farfetched version would be to say that there are two categories of natural laws/entities/influences that interact, such that a similar combination of regularities settles out “naturally” (broadly speaking). There’s the simple kind of basic material stuff that interacts to produce multileveled complexity, and some other stuff that has irreducibly high-level regularities. The two sort of resonate or something, so that irreducible stuff and high-level patterns in reducible stuff tend to cooccur, and influence each other a little bit.
I think that’s still really farfetched, even crazy in light of how well reductionism works, but not necessarily false. Supernaturalism isn’t obviously incoherent, and many people who think it is are mistaken in their reasoning. Being bizarre, poorly evidenced, and wildly farfetched and hokey just isn’t the same thing as being incoherent or impossible. It’s not incoherent—or at least, nobody’s shown it to be that I know of—it’s just wrong.
Maybe there is some argument I don’t know about that supernaturalism is truly incoherent and necessarily wrong, but if so, I’m pretty sure there aren’t many people who understand the issues at that level, and that is not why “we” (atheist scientific materialists) disbelieve in the supernatural. We disbelieve in it because it’s wildly unparsimonious, very poorly evidenced, and just flat hokey.
In lieu of a really compelling argument that supernaturalism is incoherent per se, that means that there could be evidence for the supernatural—our reasons for disbelieving in it are evidential and rational, and if that evidence and reasoning was shown to be wrong, we could change our minds. It’d really take some doing—it’d be like convincing us the world is flat after all—but it’s apparently coherent and logically possible.
what’s happening with ophelia ? Is she turn mad, or is she sick and afraid of dying. That should be a great victory for all those rotten believers who like somebody who agree with them after torture. I can’t follow the discussion here. Sorry.
The problem is that we have absolutely no idea what “mental stuff” or “teleological stuff” is. It actually makes no sense at all. We have not the slightest evidence of mental processes being anything other than biology, and not the slightest evidence of teleology: we don’t even know what evidence for teleology would be (could someone please show me a test-tube full of “meaning”?) .
We have to start from where we are – with centuries of evidence for a material world, and nothing else. We can’t just use words like “mental stuff” without having at least some vague idea of what that means, and we don’t. Anyone who talks about “mental stuff” needs to demonstrate that we have thoroughly sorted out what “non-mental stuff” is. You need to know the extent of non-magic before you can say you have seen magic.
Ophelia is absolutely right, and I hope she doesn’t budge an inch! The supernatural really is bad science, bad philosophy, and bad politics. Heck, it’s even bad theology, as it’s a ‘god-gap’.
Sorry for double post – got a site error.
Noooooo, it’s a ghost in the machine.
Given Sastra’s 4-prong set – along with the brain-in-the-vat/Matrix problem, which it can’t solve, because however well confirmed it is, the fact remains that the subject could still simply be hallucinating…
it seems to depend on the condition of the subject’s mind at the time. So…if when all this happened I still had the kind of mind I have now, I would keep reverting to the possibility of hallucination. I wouldn’t be able to help it. The ‘god’ described would be so much more astonishing than the possibility that I was lost in a hallucination that – if I still had the kind of mind I have now – I wouldn’t be able to find the god more likely than a hallucination. But if I didn’t, then I don’t know.
I think that’s a real stumbling block for the party that says “Yes X Y and Z would convince me.” If they really did see a 900 foot Jesus – they would wonder if they were hallucinating. That’s the kind of people they are!
I’m tempted to say that if I saw any evidence of god, such as a giant beardy in the sky or a guy in white robes raising the dead, I’d probably think I was having a psychotic break rather than being presented with real evidence of godhood – except I’ve had two psychotic breaks and in neither case did I realise I was psychotic until afterwards.
So if I see evidence of god so persuasive I think I’m going nuts then I’m not mad – it’s just aliens!
Paul W. #38
Blimey. That’s a long post :-).
A lot of it is about the nature of explanations, which I mostly agree with, and would simply say that explanations, from my point of view, are about reducing information content. It doesn’t relate to my comment, but that’s probably because I didn’t expand my point.
My point is simpler, and not related to the coherence or otherwise of supernaturalism.
I don’t see how once something is explained, it’s any longer supernatural (I’m talking about the ontological supernatural notion, not the psychological one). I need a compelling argument to show how something explained is supernatural. As I said before, no evidence I’ve seen suggested so far comes close; in fact, it’s made me more convinced of this point.
Hmmm. “It’d really take some doing”. I’m really puzzled what level (or perhaps type?) of evidence it would take a scientist to accept a Goddidit argument, if she’s spent her career pointing out how silly it is to do just that!
Sastra, I apologize; apparently I read your initial post too quickly and missed the key point. I like your four criteria as well.
Apologies to all for the double post. I have no clue how that happened.
And that’s it exactly! That’s why supernaturalism is incoherent.
What would we do if we saw something we didn’t understand that seemed miraculous? We would investigate it, to try and find an explanation. But what does that mean? It means we look for causes and effects. Reproducible causes and effects. What happens if we don’t find such reproducible causes and effects? We are left saying “we don’t know how this works”, NOT “this is magic”.
What’s more interesting is what happens if we do find reproducible causes and effects. Typically, papers get written, and some company finds a way to make money out of it. It becomes mundane.
There is so much stuff in the world that we treat as everyday that would surely qualify as supernatural even a century or two ago. As Feynman said, there is no way to explain magnetism to a layman. But, everyday magic ceases to be magic.
Supernaturalism is potentially boring stuff homeopathically diluted by rarity.
Well, in simple terms, you can’t prove a negative absolutely.
But to put it in more detail, atheism is gibberish. It really is. And there’s a really good reason for that. It’s because theism is gibberish. The problem is in the definition of god. Not only is it something where people have individual definitions for, but the individual definition changes to suit the needs/desires of the holder.
So you can’t “prove” atheism because theism really has nothing it can prove itself. In any case, mark me down with the people who say that EVERYTHING is natural, and if we had magic in the world, it would exist under certain rules and expected behaviors. Same thing with “gods”. Nothing would be able to go outside those rules, and if it did, that would because our understanding of the rules isn’t good enough, not because of a deity that creates the rules. More than likely.
I think I should add one point here. Several people have argued that the “supernatural” cannot exist for the simple reason that once something is proven it automatically becomes part of the known or “natural” world.
I see this as a bad argument – it’s really a shifting of the goalposts.
Look at it this way, try an analogy – suppose a society offers a million dollar prize for the discovery of an unknown ape species and you decide to take up the challenge. You head off to the forests of Borneo and after months of painstaking work you actually manage to photograph, document and even capture a never-before described ape that has characteristics of both orang-utans and gibbons. You take it back and turn up at the headquarters of the society that issued the challenge and are told: – “Sorry, but that ape doesn’t count since it is now ‘known’ rather than unknown”.
There are many things that we would describe as supernatural claims that could hypothetically be proven – for instance poltergeist activity. It’s the whole basis of the Randi million dollar challenge. To say that “the supernatural” is so unclearly defined that it is impossible to even test is wrong since there are plenty of things that are commonly recognized to fall within the bounds of the term “supernatural” – psychokenisis, psi, ghosts, predicting the future, miraculous healing, etc.
OK, if any of these are proven to exist then they will move into the natural realm but the basic point of proving supernatural claims is not to prove that “the supernatural” exists but to prove that the specific claim (psi etc) actually has a basis in fact. If someone passes the Randi test – say a dowser or mind reader – won’t validate all supernatural claims – only that the particular activity they claim is true in their case.
There are probably aspects of our current technology that would be considered supernatural by previous cultures (wireless technology, electricity, X-rays etc). If you described the effects of these these things to our ancestors they would no doubt think of them in the same way we think of ‘supernatural’ claims. Now we have good reason to believe that most current claims of the supernatural are actually false or mistaken rather than unknown forces that we simply haven’t defined but I think it is rational, rather than exclude any possibility of the truth of these forces, to at least leave a hypothetical possibility that one or more of the things commonly recognized as ‘supernatural’ might one day be discovered to have at least some basis in fact (this is my strict scientific agnosticism coming through rather than a belief or hope in the paranormal).
I agree that Sastra’s 4 prong requirement in #21 seems a good summary. An identifiable entity that produces repeated, consistent ‘miracles’ and basic happiness, lack of suffering etc. for everyone fulfills the general definition of ‘god’ for me. It wouldn’t have to reach the precise ‘omniscient, omnipotent’ claim that mainstream Christianity makes.
@Ophelia in #43: yes, if that happened, you might think you’re permanently hallucinating. But, if all that happened was consistent, you’d also have to consider that the average human being just can’t hallucinate so well that everything hangs together. And it’s also possible you, I or anyone are hallucinating right now, and ‘reality’ is completely different.
Finally, I think “unless I said that an entity couldn’t be a god if there were evidence for it because it’s central to my definition of god that it is always Hidden”, as Emily in #4 perhaps makes more obvious, is a repeating of Douglas Adams’ joke disproof of God with the Babel Fish:
But they don’t define the supernatural. They just describe phenomena. (But anyway, what is “miraculous” healing supposed to mean? It simply means healing that we haven’t an explanation for).
What I’m trying to get at is that “supernatural” simply means “forever beyond explanation by ‘natural’ laws”. It’s not a coherent position. It’s trying to prove a negative. It’s an attempt to stop further investigation. It’s a “Magicdidit” answer.
Barney – yes – and I would also be wrestling hard with the hallucination possibility, because even though one doesn’t realize one is hallucinating when one is, as Shatterface points out, one also has a very hard time believing one is hallucinating when one is not.
I wouldn’t be convinced I was hallucinating, by a long shot – I’m just not sure the possibility wouldn’t intefere with my being convinced of the new evidence for a god or the supernatural. Being convinced is what the question is about, at least in Jerry’s wording.
I think my condition would be one of amazed and stymied ????????????????? I wouldn’t know what to think. On the other hand if it were Sastra’s 4-pronged set, it would be one hell of a good trip, so I would also be enjoying it like mad. I’d be out playing with the animals all day.
Steve Zara:
There’s a difference between merely paranormal and supernatural. Telekinesis and telepathy might easily be paranormal but not supernatural, or supernatural, depending on how they worked. Ghosts would be stronger evidence for dualism and supernaturalism, and predicting the future would be better still. Certainly, any of these things might be “naturalistic,” but some would be much bigger challenges for naturalistic explanation than others.
Predicting the future would be a lot like Good and Bad Luck, which would be a huge challenge, as I described in #29, above; you might be able to find a very, very weird naturalistic explanation for it, but it’s a prima facie challenge to the reducibility of high-level stuff to low-level material stuff. If somebody could actually make high-level predictions that generally worked in the face of lower-level chaotic noise, that’d be seriously spooky, and we’d have start taking some ideas seriously that we dismiss out of hand now. (E.g., “downward” causation, with high-level stuff affecting how low-level stuff works, in combination with backward causation in time, because low-level stuff would apparently be sensitive to its eventual high-level consequences. I for one would certainly start reevaluating my materialist, bottom-up assumptions.)
If what you mean by ‘natural’ is reducible to nonmental and nonteleological stuff, that’s about right, but that’s a meaningful and coherent idea. If you mean something much different from that, I’d say it’s quite wrong. The “supernatural” isn’t just any evasive port in a storm to deny naturalism.
Yes it is, if you mean the bit about irreducibility to the nonmental/nonteleological. There’s no internal logical contradiction in believing that something is irreducible, or in explaining other things in terms of things that are themselves irreducible. It’s just unsatisfying if you’re expecting an explanation of those things, too. (Think about how far science has gotten explaining things in terms of material causation, without explaining why there is mindless material causation at all. Proximal explanations are okay.) What it’s “incoherent” with is the preponderance of the evidence, which is just not what the unqualified term “incoherent” means.
How so , and how is that a problem for the claim being meaningful and coherent, but unprovable and empirially just whack? Think of Russell’s teapot in orbit around Mars. (This is exactly the kind of issue it’s supposed to illustrate.) It’s not a meaningless concept—its meaning is quite clear. It’s not an incoherent concept, either; there is no logical contradiction in the very idea of a teapot orbiting Mars. It’s just absurdly farfetched, which is a very different problem.
I think one big problem in these recent discussions is that people keep running together the basic idea of the supernatural with particular bizarre claims and apologetic dodges of orthodox Western monotheism—e.g., that God is a necessarily existing being that created the universe ex nihilo. That may well be an incoherent claim, or just a bald and implausible assertion, depending on how it’s phrased, but that has nothing necessarily to do with the concept of God or of the supernatural. Yes, theologians and apologists do weave incoherent stories, but that doesn’t make the concepts of the supernatural or God per se incoherent. It means you have to catch them when they do bogify the basic concepts to support particular theological agendas or to evade falsification.
(For example, I think most theists could cope just fine if they found out there was a supreme supernatural being that was eternal and coexisted with an eternal physical reality, without the former creating the latter. It’s a peculiar theological and apologetic fixation that God is supposed to somehow “explain” why there’s something rather than nothing at all, but that is not actually central to religion as most people believe and practice it. Actual religion is just not much concerned with ultimate explanations, and the worship-worthiness of a god doesn’t depend on Him being the creator of everything. If there was actual evidence for the supernatural and particularly for God, it wouldn’t be a big concern—as actually it hasn’t been in most religions in most cultures at most times, and hasn’t ever been for most Western theists most of the time. Likewise, as Barney observes above, it just doesn’t really matter if god is literally omniscient or omnipotent. What matters is that he’s powerful enough and knows enough to find him uncanny, fear him, defer judgment to him, beseech him for favors, etc. Infinite perfections and medieval obsessions like that have little to do with actual religion, and never really have had anything to do with how the religious rubber meets the cognitive-emotive road. It’s a theological sideshow.)
No and yes. The concepts of the supernatural per se (or God per se) was not invented as a dodge to evade falsification, as a lot of atheists seem to assume. It was a legitimate attempt at proximal explanation. (Of mysterious observed and purportedly observed phenomena in terms of hypothetical agency, etc.) It just happens to have been pretty well falsified, and we have better and more far-reaching explanations now. The people who cling to it anyhow have elaborated it in various ways—none of them necessary features of the supernatural per se, or of God per se, and all of them doing violence to the basic ideas. (The supernatural and God were invented to explain and/or justify purportedly observed things in the world. The ideas of intrinsically unobservable, unfalsifiable stuff that you believe in on “faith” are just wacky, tacky symptoms of fear of falsification.)
Don’t confuse the basic idea of the supernatural, which is coherent and provisionally falsifiable, with the various defensive dodges that make unfalsifiable nonsense of it. Keep your eye on the ball of what “supernatural” actually means when people say it in earnest. If you don’t, you’re falling into the apologists’ goalpost-moving trap.
Yeah, that’s what it ends up being, especially in the hands of apologists, but that doesn’t make it meaningless, or incoherent, or even evidently false in itself. There is no a priori reason to expect everything to reduce to nonmental, nonteleological causation, and in principle there could be evidence that would at least call that assumption into question. There is good a posteriori reason to expect things to reduce materialistically—given how successful we now know that materialism can be, proximal supernaturalist explanations are implausible and unsatisfying—but that’s different.
By the way, Paul – as Mark said (# 45), that was a very long comment, and so is the new one. I like your thoroughness, but there’s a limit – I really don’t want comments that are long articles. They’re out of proportion. Sorry, but I’d appreciate it if you could compress.
Paul-
I don’t think you are actually dealing with the supernatural. What it seems to me you are dealing with is different classes of natural phenomena.
For example
That’s nothing to do with the supernatural. There’s plenty in science right now that seems irreducible – certain aspects of quantum mechanics for example.
That’s not the claim at all. It isn’t that God and the supernatural were invented for that purpose. It’s because the nature of the concept of the supernatural means that this is how it has ended up.
I think we aren’t dealing with the right thing either when we talk about falsification in this way. It isn’t that the supernatural status of individual phenomena can’t be falsified, it is that the very idea of the supernatural can’t be falsified.
It’s easy to come up with potential phenomena that have been labelled as supernatural – precognition for example. But once precognition had been discovered and was studied in the laboratory, for how long would it still keep the “supernatural” label?
The supernatural is not irreducible nature. It isn’t what we don’t know about. Supernaturalism is about transcendence. It’s about a truer world beyond our, where things like morality and beauty have real existence and so on. Whatever we find in this world, whatever we understand, that’s not the supernatural, and it will never be.
The supernatural is nothing more than the human desire to want more than the reality we live in.
Steve, you have altered the definition of the word “supernatural” to make your argument unassailable.
According to websters dictionary supernatural means;
1 : of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil
2 a : departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature b : attributed to an invisible agent (as a ghost or spirit)
The “supernatural” you are talking about is essentially the apologist definition of God – a definition designed to be be impervious to evidence. It is not the supernatural that I am talking about which should have effects on the real world – the sort of thing that could in theory win the Randi million.
Steve, you really, really ought to read Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. I don’t think you know what supernatural means, and what it has always meant, and why people tend to believe in it. It’s certainly not just a dodge to evade falsification. That comes later.
I could regurgitate Boyer’s ideas here some more, but I’m evidently already pushing it being as long-winded and repetitive as I’ve been.
I agree with Sigmund that you are shifting the goalposts. You’re following the apologists’ false trails, and we shouldn’t let them move the goalposts, much less move them ourselves.
Oops sorry, I realize that you acknowledged this.
I responded to the wrong statement, sorry.
Sigmund:
I agree, but how is that incompatible with the position you disagreed with in your first paragraph? (If we discover one of these things to have some basis in fact, they would be considered part of the natural world.) I don’t think anyone has argued that ‘natural’ has to be limited to the forces we currently know of.
Paul:
Like you said in another thread, it’s not coherent with what we know from science. Why not consider it provisionally falsifiED?
Steve:
I don’t know what you mean. How would you expect to be able to falsify “the very idea,” as opposed to falsifying the idea that any actual instances are likely to exist?
I do think that the supernatural is falsifiable, and has been pretty well falsified already. That’s why we don’t want to move the goalposts, or let anybody else move them—we’ve won, by any reasonable evidential standard of provisional scientific knowledge, and we want them to admit it.
Lightning isn’t supernatural, Vitalism is evidently false, and mind/body dualism is pretty clearly false at this point. Certainly traditional substance dualism is dead in the water. Nothing that the supernatural was invented to explain seems to actually exist, so the supernatural is out of a job in explaining reality. Not because it’s incoherent, or intrinsically unfalsifiable, but because it is coherent, does make predictions, and has been falsified.
That’s the real point of what Sastra and Ophelia were saying about the commercial with the animals. Reality is just evidently not like that. The universe is not benevolent or malicious, or interested at all. it’s supremely indifferent. There are no powerful beings lurking around interfering with it in caring ways. That’s pretty obvious at this point.
The fact that many people regard the supernatural as unfalsifiable shows that they don’t understand falsification.
Falsifiability is not really a direct, local property of a particular hypothesis. It’s a matter how far you are willing to go to preserve a favored hypothesis despite a lack of confirming evidence and an abundance of disconfirming evidence.
Rather than accepting that your hypothesis is falsified, you can generally tweak the background assumptions to salvage the hypothesis. That can be the right thing to do, up to a point. You don’t throw away a good explanation just because it makes a few bad predictions—you look for interfering factors that might explain prediction failures in a few instances, and try to fix the background assumptions that were wrong. But you can only go so far tweaking background assumptions before you’re just in denial about the fact that your hypothesis was wrong.
For example, the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe is pretty well falsified, but if you’re willing to add a few unjustified axioms to physical theory, you can put it right back in the center. You can always assert that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that the universe moves about it in just such a way that it looks just like it’s not the center of the universe. A theory like that isn’t much more complicated, mathematically—you just need a few relativizing axioms, so it’s only a little more complicated—but it’s utterly bogus.
That’s what they tried to get Galileo to do—to say that the Earth is actually stationary, even if the math works out the same as if it moved, so that no observation can ever refute geocentrism. That’s what the accommodationists are trying to get us to do with the supernatural, too—to ignore the fact that the supernatural has been falsified already, and pretend that the supernatural is complicated in certain ways that conveniently make it observationally equivalent to the natural—we just can’t tell which is right. That’s utterly bogus, too.
That’s what the “God of the gaps” issue is about. Unless you bogify the concepts of the supernatural, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If the supernatural existed, we’d very probably have found it by now. Instead, we chipped away at the plausible domain of the supernatural with materialist explanations until there was nothing left at all.
That’s why merely methodological naturalism is bogus. Every time we explain something naturalistically that was previously explained as supernatural, we are undermining at the purported evidential basis for believing in the supernatural. We have falsified the supernatural and God over and over and over again, in the last few hundred years.
As I’ve explained before, whether something is merely paranormal or supernatural depends on how it works. Supernaturalist theories have a different structure than naturalistic ones. I can imagine precognition that turns out to be naturalistic, and precognition that doesn’t, as I can with Luck. Explaining that would take a while, though, and this is too long already.
windy,
Funny, I wrote and posted my last reply to Steve before I saw this.
As I say there, I DO consider the supernatural to be provisionally falsified, and that’s why I don’t want the goalposts moving. We’ve basically won, and I think we should get credit for it.
Yes, and you also mentioned it before, sorry for not acknowledging that. I guess what I was trying to point out is that people like Ophelia and Steve focus more on the present situation (at least that’s the impression I have), what is left after the old ‘supernatural’ concepts were provisionally falsified, so from their POW it’s useless to begin with “could there be evidence for the supernatural”. Does that make sense?
I think the problem here is one of different points of access.
I read Reza Aslan complaining that new atheists don’t refer to say Sartre and Camus. It always struck me as a funny charge. Much of philosophical thinking of any merit is roughly since Nietzsche and post Kierkegaard post-theistic. Sartre and Camus don’t discuss the existence of deities simply because it’s a done deal. It’s settled. Same with Peter Singer and others.
The only reason why we still debate the question is because many people have not followed the process. Hence why we still discuss the onthology and epistemology of deities rather the phenomenology and psychology of their social construction.
I don’t know what you mean. How would you expect to be able to falsify “the very idea,” as opposed to falsifying the idea that any actual instances are likely to exist?The idea is that there is a different nature of reality that allows transcendence to make sense. It’s like ID, which I’ll come to later.Instead, we chipped away at the plausible domain of the supernatural with materialist explanations until there was nothing left at all.What domain? Was there ever a plausible domain? That’s what I’m contesting.The fact that many people regard the supernatural as unfalsifiable shows that they don’t understand falsification.I don’t agree with this either. I think the current nature of what is considered to be supernatural has become (deliberately or otherwise) unfalsifiable. It’s as unfalsifiable as the idea of Intelligent Design. The concept will always be there, no matter what explanations we find, as there will always be a gap for it.As I’ve explained before, whether something is merely paranormal or supernatural depends on how it works. Supernaturalist theories have a different structure than naturalistic ones. I can imagine precognition that turns out to be naturalistic, and precognition that doesn’t, as I can with Luck. Explaining that would take a while, though, and this is too long already.I think that this is where my main disagreement is. I think naturalism has probably become close to useless, because we have no idea what we are actually dealing with. Indeed, this is probably the basis of Hawking’s recently publicised idea of “model dependent reality” – he thinks we have to resort to dealing with models of reality as against the nature of what lies beneath. Personally, I don’t agree (I think it’s too soon to give up), but if we were left with a “model dependent reality”, what on Earth would supernaturalism or naturalism mean? I’m not too “strident” about this. I quite like Ophelia’s approach to naturalism. But to me, “naturalism” is not really that defined at all. It’s more about an approach to dealing with reality, it’s about not giving up, and looking for mechanisms where we can.
Steve said:
” I think the current nature of what is considered to be supernatural has become (deliberately or otherwise) unfalsifiable.”
I think you are wrong. What YOU are defining as supernatural probably fits your statement but the term ‘supernatural’ covers so many different things that at least some of them are falsifiable – hence the fact that the Randi Million Dollar Challenge can function (there has to be a claimed effect to test).
Steve Zara:
I think what you are calling the supernatural is like assuming a cow is spherical for the sake of making the math work.
Cows are not spherical, and the supernatural is not unfalsifiable.
When normal religious or superstitious people believe in the supernatural, they don’t believe in an intrinsically hidden, utterly ineffable mystery.
They believe in things like a life force, souls, ghosts, gods, Karma or Fate or Luck, etc.
It’s like prescientific people believing that the Earth was stationary. They didn’t think the Earth was stationary because nobody could disprove that; they believed it because it actually seemed like the Earth was stationary.
Similarly people don’t really believe in dualism just because it’s not provably wrong. They believe in it because they think it’s intuitively pretty evident that it’s right. All the apologetic theology is just a red herring, and a weak excuse to go on believing stuff that seems right on intuitive evidential grounds.
People don’t believe in things for negative reasons. They believe in them for positive reasons.
I think that’s clearly true of run-of-the-mill religious believers and superstitious and wooey people. They think there’s commonsense evidence for what they believe. They think they and others have had various experiences that only make sense on the assumption that they have souls, and/or that spooky dualistic entities do manifest themselves in freakier ways from time to time.
Even Karen Armstrong believes that. She thinks that mystics have had real experiences and intuited Deep Knowledge that is inexplicable in terms of cognitive science, and she thinks that quantum physics is corroborative evidence for irreducible mind over matter.
None of these people believe that the supernatural is really unfalsifiable, on a proper understanding of the term. They think there’s positive evidence for it, that science somehow can’t look at or evaluate. They don’t understand that if there can be positive evidence for something, there can be evidence against it, and that the latter is what’s actually true.
I can’t think of anybody who’s actually religious or superstitious or wooey just because they think nobody can prove them wrong. It’s always about misinterpreting things as positive evidence. That’s what makes dualism and supernaturalism work, and that’s what’s actually wrong with it.
windy:
It seems to me that we all agree that science already seems to have reduced all the alleged supernatural stuff to plainly natural stuff, and it would at the very least require some really very extraordinary evidence to make the supernatural even plausible, much less particularly “convincing.” For most purposes among ourselves, we’re basically in agreement and could just move on. I don’t think any of us has any practical worries that actually good evidence for supernaturalism or God is going to turn up. (If any did, what we say about it now wouldn’t matter much—I don’t think many people would really just shut their eyes and say it’s impossible in principle, and many wouldn’t, so we could sort it out then.)
The reasons that I nitpick the “details” are that the whole thing started of as a philosophical discussion of what could even count, theoretically, as good evidence for the supernatural, and because the details do matter in how it’s valid to criticize others’ views—especially since we get a lot of uncharitable criticism from other atheists, e.g., Massimo Pigliucci and Philip Kitcher. If we’re going to defend ourselves against people like that, we need to know exactly what we mean by “supernatural” and “falsification,” and have our ducks in a very neat row.
Hmmm… I guess the upshot of the last paragraph is that I should probably give it a rest here, since I don’t seem to be able to compress things enough, and go over to Massimo’s blog and disagree with him there.
Somalian pirates are the angels if you compare them with Libyan pirates! And QADDAFHI has right, all these brainwashed pirates threat whole EU especially SweCIA because SweCIA under control of the Jewish CIA, which systematically import criminal negroidal vampyrized migrants