I wrote a bit about this paper by Boudy et al. when it was only a manuscript, but now it’s been published in Science and Education (reference below, free online). It deals with the constant accommodationst refrain that science is absolutely wedded to the notion of “intrinsic methodological naturalism (“IMN”; the view that it is an a priori rule when doing science to rule out the supernatural). As I wrote yesterday, since the supernatural is off limits under IMN, all supernatural claims, including those about God, ESP, precognition, and so on, become immune from empirical investigation.
That is palpable nonsense. Science can, and has, constantly tested supernatural claims. Refuting creationism is the premier example. So why do accommodationists constantly make the erroneous claim that science can’t test the supernatural? Boudry et al. explain it in their paper. (“IDC” below refers to “intelligent design creationism”).
Perhaps some will object, saying that the supernatural encompasses things that are by definition immune to empirical investigation. And you can define “supernatural” that way, but that is not only tautological, but doesn’t comport with how most people see the idea.
All theistic religions make claims about how a deity interacts with the world in certain ways, and those claims can be investigated, at least in principle, with the tools of science. We can’t, of course, disprove the existence of God. But we can make that existence less (or, unlikely, more) probable by examining the ways that His adherents claim that he acts, or the things they say about His nature. But on to the quote of the week:
In a way reminiscent of Hume’s Dialogues, theist and non-theist defenders of science have advocated IMN as a way of dissociating science from atheism and consolidating a truce between (evolutionary) science and religion. The received idea seems to be that, as [Robert] Pennock writes, confronting supernatural claims with science ‘‘inadvertently help[s] the ID cause’’ (Pennock 2003, p. 156), because it links evolution with atheism. By contrast, relegating the supernatural to a different domain provides reassurance to religious believers and allows science educators to retain the support of theistic evolutionists and religious liberals in the battle against anti-evolutionist forces. Understandable as this may be in the context of the ongoing efforts of IDC advocates to sneak their pseudoscience in to the classroom, it is seriously misguided. First, excluding the supernatural by fiat fuels the old accusations of metaphysical bias, and allows IDC proponents to cast themselves in the role of open-minded truth-lovers. Second, the letter of IMN conflicts with actual scientific arguments against supernatural design, a discrepancy which IDC proponents have been quick to point out. Third, IMN does a disservice to the epistemic status of science, inviting the view that it is just one way of knowing among other, presumably deeper ones. Fourth, it fails to appreciate the threat that the naturalization of science poses to religion. Pennock’s concern about the perceived conflict between science and religion is a legitimate one, but muddled philosophical reasoning will do little to avert that conflict. Science educators should not equate evolution with atheism, but neither should they pretend that the conflict between science and religion is wholly imaginary. Most religious believers would find out for themselves in any case.
For these reasons, and for the philosophical shortcomings we have reviewed elsewhere, scientists and science educators would be well-advised to reconsider their standard strategy in dealing with supernaturalist pseudoscience. Reconciling science and religion on the basis of IMN happens at the expense of philosophical and scientific integrity, and it is therefore misguided. It leaves the public with the impression that evolution by natural selection appears to win the scientific debate only because supernatural designers were already carefully excluded from the outset. This is the philosophical crack into which IDC theorists are currently trying to drive their ideological wedge.
The next time you hear an accommodationist say that science can’t tackle the supernatural, just respond by giving a dozen or so examples where it has.
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Boudry, M., S. Blancke, and J. Braeckman. 2012. Grist to the mill of anti-evolutionism: The failed strategy of ruling the supernatural out of science by philosophical fiat. Science and Education Online DOI 10.1007/s111910=-012-9446-8
Over at Sandwalk Larry Moran has apost on a similar question:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2012/06/whats-wrong-with-michael-ruses-view-of.html
In it he refers to Peter Slezak’s review/critique of Michael Ruse’s “Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science” (2010). It is behind a paywall but available free online here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-1A0LCI3U6XMGJiNmZmYWQtMjg1MS00OTk5LWIzNzYtMDIxNjhjZWE1MzJi/edit?hl=en_US
Quite a good article. Slezak is at the School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales.
Though science can determine that an event was caused by natural causes, and though science may not be able at any given point in time to determine what the natural cause of an event is, science cannot ever demonstrate that an event was caused by supernatural causes. The very term “supernatural cause” is incoherent.
Imagine God himself appearing before you and offering to demonstrate to your satisfaction that he was uncaused. There’s simply no such demonstration possible.
Well, science can determine that an event occurred, and possibly how it occurred, but “caused by natural causes” doesn’t have anything to do with that. “Natural causes” is just a label that is arbitrarily applied by people and the meaning of that label can vary widely person to person. Reality just keeps on keeping on regardless of how people want to try and label or categorize it.
Ditto for “supernatural causes”. Whatever the causes of the event are, as determined by science, they are what they are regardless of the label we apply to them. If some people want to label them “natural” or “supernatural” so be it. It may be useful for communication to use the labels if everyone uses the same definition for them, but that has no effect on the reality of the event.
Just a personal opinion, but I don’t think “natural” or “supernatural” should be used when having these kinds of arguments with believers and accommodationists. Using either term concedes their view that there is a valid category of phenomena other than that which can be examined by the methods of science.
Indeed!
I prefer “magic” myself, because it can be given a precise and testable definition. I.e. magic does work on a system in a non-causal way or in other words without using energy. This can certainly be examined.
And if it is causal, it is by definition a part of our universe.
While I’m at it, I note that it may take out deist claims on “parameter settings”. Presumably that requires some form of magic to affect a change out of whatever natural mechanism unfolds laws. Certainly that would be the case if those are set by anthropic selection.
Remains Miller’s quantum woo, adjusting events to look like a random fluctuation.
While quantum mechanics rejects hidden parameters, I also think that it is plain rhetoric to say that it can “look like” a fluctuation. Presumably statistics will be skewed however imperceptibly (in finite cases we can’t always distinguish between a pseudo-random and a random sequence), hence there appears the ability to do work without having had energy input, hence quantum woo is magic.
I think it covers everything except non-interactive gods. They would effectively be their own universe for all we care.* Seems ridiculous to call them gods, or think that they should influence our ideas then we just admitted they can’t influence.
———-
* Not really, since all multiverse theories have worldlines between universes. So there is still just one system in the usual models.
Good point. I had not thought of that previously. If their god fiddles with reality frequently via manipulation of quantum fluctuations, the signal could in principle be strong enough to detect. I guess the believers will then argue that their god fiddles only infrequently and therefore the signal is too small to detect.
I also wanted to say that magical claims are routinely believed to be testable, see the discussion on Randi’s work. Excluding religion would be special pleading.
But then I got interested in what we can say on deism. =/
I feel like this claim that science inherently cannot investigate the supernatural is just fun with semantics. Science cannot prove or provide evidence for the non-existence of any specific entity except through expectations of how that entity should interact with the natural world. It’s trivially true that science can’t offer any information about anything that either doesn’t interact with the natural world, or is claimed to interact with the natural world in such a way as to be indistinguishable from standard physical interactions. Talking about the existence of things that do not interact with the universe in an observable way is meaningless because real things are defined by their observable physical characteristics and how they interact with the natural/physical world. This is why defining what we mean by “god” is essential in any argument.
If a physicist predicted some new fundamental particle (e.g., the penn boson) that has properties X, and it was shown that no such particle exists with properties X, we would say that the penn boson doesn’t exist.
Theists don’t abide by these rules, though. They make claims about their gods (i.e., recent creation ex nihilo, answers prayers, etc.) and when those claims are disproven, the “sophisticated” ones just change the properties associated with their god, the less sophisticated just ignore the science.
I understand the penn boson has a higher rest mass than the sord boson… 😉
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I’ll just note that while it doesn’t preclude testing supernatural claims, provided they don’t revolve around all of reality being rearranged to hide the action of a supernatural deity under natural causes, it does preclude supernatural claims from being proposed by sciencetific methods.
I disagree. The whole basis of the James Randi 1 million dollar challenge is to use science to determine whether these kinds of claims have any basis in fact.
Imagine a psychic passed the test – she really could get testable information that she couldn’t possibly know (for instance if she could always guess the winning lottery number or which team was fgoing to win and by what score in any sport) then science will have demonstrated evidence for the existence of a supernatural cause. We might choose to call it something other than supernatural – perhaps some new force or extra-natural ability, but the principle remains that science helps us determine whether claims of supernatural causes have any supporting evidence.
I see your point, but once someone shows off psychic abilities you’re saying it would be a valid scientific hypothesis to propose that those abilities do not have a natural explanation? I don’t think science ever leads you to a supernatural explanation otherwise it becomes a self-defeating enterprise.
To me, if someone wins the James Randi prize all they’ve done is show hitherto unknown natural phenomena.
The reason you exclude supernatural explanations is they don’t go anywhere, even if they’re true, it wouldn’t explain anything. If someone else wants to propose them, you can address the claim but I don’t think the scientific methods ever leads you to those ideas itself.
“Supernatural explanation” is an oxymoron.
“I don’t think science ever leads you to a supernatural explanation otherwise it becomes a self-defeating enterprise.”
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_In principle_, science could lead to a supernatural explanation. Your argument here is a fallacious argument from consequences in that you do not wish science to be self-defeating. Fortunately for you, no such supernatural explanation has ever _in actual experience_ been led to by science.
I.e. that science has never supported supernatural explanations is a result, not an assumption nor a methodological limitation.
“Supernatural” is a self-defeating term. If supernatural forces have influence on the “real world”, then they can be measured. Anything that is measurable is subject to the scientific process and therefore no longer “supernatural.” 😛
Absolutly! You hit the crux of the issue. Claims made without natural explanations are simply faith. If detractors choose to supply natural explanations than the theory of god can take its seat alongside the theory of gravity.
No, “supernatural” is only a self-defeating term if it is defined as “that which can never be measured by the scientific process.” That’s not a necessary component: it’s an immunizing strategy which would be eagerly jettisoned the minute a scientific process consistently measured a claimed supernatural (i.e. pure mental) effect.
+1
It is certainly true that science (and history) can disprove !*specific*! supernatural claims!! Once that is done, many forms of accomodationism tend to fall into ever more refined forms of “god of the gaps”, for example saying science cannot explain consciousness, a sense of meaning, love, etc. (or this particular miracle). Many have noted that these gaps have a way of continually shrinking as the horizons of science expand.
I suppose in some sense religious viewpoints that are not dualistic, postulating some sort of non-transcendent, immanent, or panentheistic deity may ultimately persevere in the face of modern science more easily. Dan Dennett has noted this strategy, classifying religious folk into two types, the “supers” (supernaturalistic) and the “murkies”. (I think he should have said “misties”, but that’s a quibble.) As Dennett has pointed out, it’s hard to pin down a notion of a God who is the “Ground of Being” or identified with “the serendipitous mystery of creativity”.
Dawkins has said that in many ways he is more comfortable with the way that fundamentalism is less obscurantist. However, I myself find the other camp less !*obstructionist*! which is a bit more important to me personally. That leaves us with Sam Harris’ question if the camp of what he calls “religious moderates” creates a problem by immunizing religion across the board (and by extension radical Islam) from criticism.
We don’t particularly care to make the distinction that we can test and reject specific claims. We just note that magic is always rejected then put to the test, and that science believes there is no magic.
To treat religion differently would be to yield to their special pleading for no good reason. In fact, it would be bad, as Boudy and Harris describes.
I don’t think you can be a “magical moderate” or “magical agnostic”, at least not for long. Neither should we expect a robust population of religious such. That it exists is telling.
“test and reject specific magical claims”,
By privileging faith, the ‘murkies’ don’t just provide cover for those supernaturalists who have clearer, more robust claims. They also perpetrate the irrational prejudice against atheists, who fail to acknowledge the significance of faith in faith.
What distinguishes a murkie from an atheist? Ask them, or watch them explain the difference to each other. It basically comes down to a deep-seated belief that they’re fundamentally better as human beings, ethically, emotionally and aesthetically. And there is no recourse from this charge — since they are just too high-minded, heartfelt, and, above all, humble, to want to argue about it.
Such an accurate description that images of such individuals paraded through my mind as I read it. To keep things simple, I often refer to such people as Sanctimonious Pricks.
In their pathetic attempts to counter the charge that Intelligent Design Creationism is religion, not science, the proponents of IDC are usually careful not to state explicitly that the Designer happens to be the God of the Bible. At least in theory, they leave open the possibility that a highly advanced alien civilization is behind the design. That means that IDC is officially not reliant upon the supernatural. Therefore, it is nonsense to maintain that ‘confronting supernatural claims with science ‘‘inadvertently help[s] the ID cause’’ (Pennock 2003, p. 156),’ because the ID cause pretends to be a non-religious, non-supernatural one.
Or is demonstrating ‘irreducible complexity’ a way to establish that the supernatural exists? But then the ID folks themselves will have to admit that the supernatural can be tested through science.
Either way, IDC and claims about interactions between the supernatural and the natural world can and should be tackled by science.
“In their pathetic attempts to counter the charge that Intelligent Design Creationism is religion”
I thought they gave that up after the Dover trial. They even started listing apologetics works by William Lane Craig on their list of peer-reviewed science publications.
“..scientists and science educators would be well-advised to reconsider their standard strategy in dealing with supernaturalist pseudoscience.”
If science educators took Boudry’s advice and renounced IMN and accomodationism, I’m wondering what the fallout would be in terms of public support for science and funding for science education. Clearly the major science organizations think there would be hell to pay if they didn’t take the accomodationist line. Can we reassure them that they’re wrong, and thus get them to drop the ruse (!) that science can’t critique the supernatural?
One thing that might help is to advertise the fact that science is open to the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, even if there’s no current evidence for it, http://www.naturalism.org/Close_encounters.htm To admit this keeps naturalism consistent with its own epistemic foundations in science, and makes naturalists non-dogmatic fallibilists about their worldview. And who doesn’t like a non-dogmatic fallibilist?
“… the fact that science is open to the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, even if there’s no current evidence for it, …”
But it is also a fact that science is open to the possibility of the existence of leprechauns, Santa Claus, a flat Earth, … – well anything. Just because there is currently no evidence for something does not preclude the eventual accumulation of new evidence. Still, we are entitled to draw provisional conclusions from the evidence currently on hand.
Yes, perhaps better to say “open to the *bare* or *logical* possibility”. And I agree that we can have strong confidence in the claim for the non-existence of things for which there’s no evidence, even if there’s a logical possibility they exist.
“I’m wondering what the fallout would be in terms of public support for science and funding for science education.”
While I’m not feeling alarmist about it right now, I do think this is a legitimate concern. It sometimes occurs to me that during the Cold War scientists were at least partially immunized against the wrath of believers and anti-intellectuals by the terror that if we didn’t fund our scientists the Soviet scientists might get the upper hand. Better the godless scientists you control than the godless who are controlled by godless communists. Without such a sense of existential threat that can be fended off by scientists, I have wondered if there might be scenarios where the U.S. electorate would turn strongly against science funding. I suppose people see the connection between iPhones and science well enough to want to keep that going, but I occasionally see signs that are worrying.
Boudry’s work is impressive, I believe his doctoral dissertation, “Here be Dragons”, is available for public download here:
https://biblio.ugent.be/input/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1191287&recordOId=1191286 (pdf)
The article linked to in Dr. Coyne’s post is the 2nd chapter of the dissertation, and the first chapter of the dissertation is what was linked to in Dr. Coyne’s 2010 post on Boudry. And of course Dr. Moran over at the Sandwalk has discussed the articles that make up Boudry’s dissertation before, well worth downloading the entire thing.
As a side note, I tried the get a hard copy through interlibrary loan through my campus, but they weren’t able to fulfill it (NOT because of any copyright issue). All for the best, since the download is keepable.
There might be a reason that science doesn’t allow miracles to be included as part of natural science. I don’t think it would be to much to ask that if you claimn to be the creator of the universe you should present to the sceptic an empirical explanation of the process by which you pulled this feat off.
I suspect the problem is actually at the natural/supernatural distinction, which (philosophically) seems not actually to be where the demarcation line for “science” is.
Science isn’t so much about studying the “natural” world as the empirical world — in the most general sense of “experience, and whatever may be inferred as causing it”, not merely limited to where experimental methods are readily applied. In so far as the “supernatural” produces experience, the experience may be studied, and science attempt to produce explanations. (Note that in the philosophical sense of science, “X happened” is a completely scientific explanation for X happening; it’s merely not necessarily the one most probably correct.)
Translating some of the math back into English, the problems with various types of supernatural include that (1) it doesn’t actually explain, so that you can’t even infer back to “X happened” after the fact save by additionally assuming “X happened”; (2) so far as it does explain, the explanations have been shown as probably correct than alternatives; and (3) positing the supernatural as a category leaves you unable to infer the difference between a hawk and a handsaw.
Hmm… I’m not sure that “X happened” is actually an explanation for X happening.
This is an important text, at least for me:
Ah yes, that has been gnawing at me for a long time. I hadn’t managed to verbalize it as succinctly. It is then the old theological accommodationist NOMA, just in another more pernicious guise.
On this:
If we cast that in a generic form, we would have something like:
“We can’t, of course, disprove the existence of a system. But we can make that existence less (or, unlikely, more) probable.”
It doesn’t makes much sense. The first sentence can be read as “disprove” in a mathematical sense, since the second refers to probabilities.
A better generic claim would be:
“We can’t, of course, always observe and test the existence of a system. But we can generally do this, up to and including exclusion (no-go) theorems of unobserved systems.”
For an example of the latter, we have anti-gravity and no-cloning theorems which comes out of the property of gravity and existing quantum systems.
A favorite of Ben Goren is the observation that any form of magic would enable a perpetual motion machine of the first kind, as it produces work without energy input.
So thermodynamics “disproves” magic, and we get back to specifics. If we want to bump up the exclusion, we know that the universe is thermodynamically closed, it is zero energy.
So a testable hypothesis is that the whole universe is TD and there is no magic, religious or otherwise. Srzly, it is a valid hypothesis, and it is far better than not going there – it explains why we see no magic, why science can be effective, and why religious fairy tales are so ridiculous – they _are_ fairy tales.
I guess I can’t agree that it would be impossible to “disprove” here, because it acts like an ad hoc and theological claim as much as “intrinsic methodological naturalism”. Or so it seems to me.
I could agree that saying that it is possible to “prove” (test) this exclusion can be impertinent, premature, not worth the effort or plain erroneous (if it can be shown to be). But that is different.
Btw, if Ben Goren is the originator to the idea of hooking up magical events to a perpetual motion machine to show the impossibility of magical belief, we should call it Goren’s Angel.
Personally I would like it.
– Maxwell’s Demon is superficially causal but subtly breaks the thermodynamical time arrow of the universe. It constitutes a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.
– Goren’s Angel is outright non-causal. It constitutes a perpetual motion machine of the first kind.
I don’t think a perpetual motion machine would be a good example of “magic” — nor would it fall under the category of “supernatural.’ Not unless it was seriously connected to or dependent on mindlike desires or categories.
It’s not enough that something violate natural laws: it has to violate natural laws in the right way.
“Magic” has to do with the belief that supernatural occult forces unite all objects and events into networks of meaning and intention — and these forces can be manipulated for one’s benefit by rituals involving symbols. In magic all things are seen as intimately connected to each other by sympathies and antipathies grounded in a mystical realm of pure meaning which both underpins and surpasses the natural world.
A perpetual machine which produces work using “mental energy” — or one which is powered by tapping into a force of natural goodness which permeates the universe — could be said to be using magic.
If something is immaterial, how can it be spoken of?
Depends on how you define “immaterial”.
Does energy count? Do you admit a Hilbert room dimensions?
Or do mean it literary, that it can’t “be spoken of”? Then I would suggest religion isn’t talking about immaterial things.
These are the number one take away lines for me. Wish I had come up with such a clear statement of these ideas.
There’s always this stupid claim of “linking evolution to atheism”. That’s all in the heads of the religious and it was a lie started long ago to scare religious people away from the biological sciences, or at least evolution. It is the religious who invented the non-existent link and it is the religious who promote it. It’s just one more lie told by preachers.
It’s not a stupid claim. Evolution is one more demonstration that we don’t need the god hypothesis.
Yes, but that isn’t what MadScientist is pointing to. You are pointing to supporting evidence and MadScientist is pointing out that there isn’t a causal link.
A person that believed in a hands off god such as a deist could also fully accept the facts of evolution. Christianity of course takes a serious plow due to its reliance on a book produced by people that had no revelation. Not necessarily the fault of those producing the book, they had no way of knowing (except that they really should have suspected) but, those that can’t see the problems with the book today are at the least deluded. With the exception of the mor[m]on book producers which were clearly frauds from the beginning.
plow was intended to be blow. Maybe plow works though.
I can’t see how inquiry is ever about anything BUT the nature of things. Even claims regarding what we might call supernatural or magic. How many of these claims are independent of an assumption that the thing which occurs, occurs because it is the nature of things like that to occur in that way. Prophecy, prayer, healing touch, dowsing, and the like, when examined closely, are all supposed to work in a certain way, which is just another way of saying that they have a specific nature.
No matter how deeply we delve into the nuts and bolts of say gravity, in a very real sense we are limited to the descriptive. Why does mass attract mass? Its just its nature to do so. We can speak at length about its distortion of space-time. OK, why does it do that? Well that’s just the nature of mass-energy and space-time.
Of course naturalism dominates inquiry.
If a thing doesn’t have a nature of its own, what could there possible be to learn or say about it?
What could it ever mean to say a thing can’t be investigated because it doesn’t possess a nature of its own? And isn’t that just what we mean when we say supernatural?
“Refuting creationism is the premier example”
How exactly? By demonstrating that something can indeed come from nothing?
Never you mind worrying about that Kevin if you think that the very first Thing was a know-it-all universe creator. How disingenuous will you get?