After Tanya Luhrmann published an egregious op-ed in the New York Times claiming that she melted a bicycle light with her mind (mentioning Michael Shermer’s experience with a dead radio that mysteriously played music on his wedding day), I first posted my own critique of Luhrmann’s woo and then wrote Shermer to let him know he was mentioned. Shermer, in turn, wrote a letter to the Times (“Unsolved, not supernatural”) criticizing Luhrmann and arguing that if there was no clear naturalistic explanation for the melted bicycle light—or other weird woo-ish phenomena mentioned by Luhrmann—we should simply suspend judgement until we find one.
Four days ago I called attention to Shermer’s letter, by and large agreeing with him on all but one point: I argued that there could indeed be supernatural phenomena—ones not explainable by the laws of physics but perhaps by divine action, though those phenomena could still be detected by natural means. (In fact, that’s the only way we could discover they existed.) Nevertheless, I contend that supernatural phenomena could arise by, say, God changing the speed of light, or moving stars about with his mind to spell out “I am a yam!” in the sky, and, at least in principle, those things could defy our understanding of the universe.
Shermer disagrees on that one point, and sent me a “response” which I’m glad to post here. You can be the judge of whether the term “supernatural” is useless, since there must be a natural explanation for phenomena we regard as spooky. That is, even if God moves stars around with his mind, he must do it in a way that we could understand through physical law. (I believe Sean Carroll has made this point before.) I am prepared to admit I’m wrong if readers can make a convincing case that Shermer is right—a case based not on semantics but physics.
The one point I’ll make before putting up Michael’s note is that even if God has to work through physical law, there could in theory still be a God, a personlike bodiless mind. And even if that god must work by using physical law in a way that, in principle, we can comprehend, this would still show that there are supernatural beings. But perhaps people disagree with that, even in principle.
At any rate, here’s his response to me:
*******
Response to Jerry Coyne
Michael Shermer
When I say that “there is no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural,” I mean that these words are just linguistic placeholders to talk about something for which we do not as yet have a normal or natural explanation. Analogously, when cosmologists talk about “dark energy” and “dark matter” they don’t mean those words to be an explanation, only linguistic place holders until they figure out what exactly is causing the as-yet unsolved mysteries (rotation of galaxies, accelerating expansion of the cosmos). But whereas cosmologists do not stop searching for the underlying mechanisms of the observed phenomena just because they have a label, religious believers and New Agers treat words like “paranormal” and “supernatural” (or “miracle”) as if they were causal explanations.
If it turned out that, say, people really could read other peoples’ minds and that they were able to do so because inside our neurons are tiny microtubules in which quantum effects happen that allow thoughts (patterns of neural firing) to be transferred from one skull to another at any distance (like “spooky action at a distance” effects that quantum physicists have measured in experiments), that would not be ESP or PSI, and we wouldn’t need to call it a “paranormal” effect because we would then know that the ability to read minds was due to the properties of neurons and atoms, and it would be subsumed under the sciences of neuroscience and/or quantum physics (quantum neuroscience?). (This is, by the way, an actual theory.)
As for the possibility that a God could be using other forces, “forces outside of nature to interact with the world” as Jerry says, if a God did that (through intercessionary prayer, miracles, or whatever) in a way we could measure the effects of such interactions, wouldn’t that mean that God must be using forces measurable by our scientific instruments? Here I am reminded of the analogy drawn by the great British astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington in his classic 1958 book The Philosophy of Physical Science:
Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematize what it reveals. He arrives at two generalizations:
(1) No sea-creature is less than two inches long.
(2) All sea-creatures have gills.
In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observations.
An onlooker may object that the first generalization is wrong. “There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.” The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. “Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.” (1958, p. 16)
Extending the analogy beyond the physical sciences to all fields, regardless of what forces a God may use outside of our universe, if he’s interacting with our universe in a way we can measure it, then he must be using forces measurable by scientific instruments or our senses, so by definition they must be natural. What our scientific nets catch are natural fish. If one were to argue that God’s forces are non-natural (or supernatural) and they can still effect the world but in a non-measurable way (because our scientific nets only catch natural fish), then what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?
I can hear the creationists using this analogy: “Our neural network is too course to catch the fine details of God. Therefore Hay-Zeus!”
(sigh)
This is one of those arguments that comes down only to semantics. The problem is that there is no agreed meaning of “supernatural” since there are no “supernatural” things to attach the meaning to.
It could, in principle, be the case that, in a universe like ours, an omnipotent god was occasionally moving objects around just by thinking about it.
Let’s suppose that scientists then observed such motions and codified them as new “laws” (= “descriptions”) of how things are.
Whether those motions then count as “natural” (because we know about them) or as “supernatural” (because they result from the thoughts of a god-like being) is merely a matter of preference over wording.
Agreed – although I would say that it seems to go beyond a disagreement on the meaning of the term supernatural. As far as I can tell, there simply does not seem to be a clear, useful meaning of the word anywhere. That is, if I knew everything about a newly discovered being, item or process except whether it is natural or supernatural, I have no idea at which of its traits I would need to look to decide that question. Does anybody?
It all boils down to begging the question, and its primary use does not appear to be a placeholder for unexplained stuff but as a marker for stuff that scientists should leave their hands off because the believer says so.
Ah, but theologians love it because it is semantical. When someone brings up supernatural acts of God like changing water to wine or resurrecting people, arguing about what counts as supernatural and arguing about how science will just change the label once some event is explained distracts the audience from the key point, which is: there is no observational evidence of any such miracles happening.
Asking “would it still count as supernatural if we repeatedly observed it” is a con-man’s shell game, intended to distract the mark so that they don’t remember that inconsistent with the claims of religion, no such events are observed to occur.
Put another way, we probably shouldn’t care what label we attach to faith healing or calling down the wrath of God. We shouldn’t care whether observing these things in a reproducible fashion would cause us to switch their labels. What we should care about is whether they occur…and they don’t. A supernatural healing claim by any other name stinks just as bad.
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Δ
I liked most of what Shermer said, but in the end it seemed as if he actually agreed with Jerry. There is always going to be something we do not understand, and the approach that has worked best in the past is to make a naturalistic proposal and test it. So if we detect a weird thing, such as acceleration of the expansion of the universe, is it preferable to suggest that God did it, or that there is some unknown source of energy? At least in the latter case we have some solid ideas about how to detect and study energy sources, but there are no reliable ideas about the properties of gods.
Think about the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Their powers were great and they probably were thought by some Native Americans to be gods. For all I know maybe some of the Europeans encouraged this way of thinking. But it soon became apparent to the Native Americans that the Europeans were men. If space aliens were to arrive next week, we might be impressed with their abilities to travel across the solar system or the galaxy, but we probably would not consider them goddy. Although some people might!
So I think that if we see phenomena we do not understand, we will treat them as problems of science and use the methods of science to investigate. Whatever the outcome of this, there will still be something left unexplained, but that does not mean we should conclude there is a god behind it.
If there are gods and they do things we cannot detect, indeed how is that different in reality from there being no gods? At the moment it does not matter to us whether there are aliens in outer space either.
It is of course preferable to treat the accelerated expansion of the universe (dark energy) as a natural but not understood thing. I kind of wonder if dark energy is really the Casimir effect operating over very large distances. I have not seen cosmologists say as much, but it would make more sense of dark energy.
Great article. I think I disagree. I just don’t understand how one bridges the gap between natural, albeit strange, phenomena (e.g. “I am a yam!” spontaneously appearing in the sky) and the supernatural. Sure, there could be a supernatural cause, but what is the evidence for this? How do we know aliens from Pluto aren’t responsible for this? There’s no evidence for this either, but a non-supernatural explanation seems more reasonable.
I don’t believe there is a useful definition for supernatural – it seems like any reasonable definition would draw in into the natural world. So I guess I agree with Shermer in that it’s a placeholder – for some – for we don’t know yet. For others, it’s sufficient evidence for *YOUR GOD’S NAME HERE*.
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I keep thinking of Clarke’s 3rd law:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It is a fancy way to express a gods-of-the-gaps argument*, so it illuminates some of Shermer’s argument.
*Depending on our level of competence, the assumed non-advanced technology will become greater and greater and the assumed “sufficiently advanced” will be ever more remote.
What about Victor Stenger’s example, from “God: The Failed Hypothesis”, of a supernatural event that could be detected by naturalistic means. Suppose that rigourous studies showed that Catholic prayer is always more effective at healing the sick than are prayers of any other religion or denomination. We would then have a measurable effect without a detectable cause, which is often what people mean when they invoke the supernatural, is it not? Such an effect would defy a naturalistic explanation and would tend to validate the Catholic version of a supernatural order, would it not? So the notion of the supernatural is, I think, not an incoherent one, though in reality we have no evidence of such effects.
My hypothesis if such a report were to appear would be that somebody is perpetrating a fraud…
Yes, that’s my beef too. Sure we can each define “supernatural” in our own idiosyncratic ways. But god-believers have some quite specific ideas about what they mean:a personal entity that can make improbable things happen in the world. If such a being existed, then we’d be churlish to say “Oh, that’s what we meant by “naturalism” all along.
“If such a being existed, then we’d be churlish to say “Oh, that’s what we meant by “naturalism” all along.”
Ridiculous. We would simply incorporate “such being” into our models of the natural world. No matter how different, exotic or incomprehensible this being seemed, if it could be detected, calling it “supernatural” would be semantic stubborness. Stranger things than gods, souls and universal fields of awareness have been detected – and incorporated into our models of the natural world.
Also, it’s not like, when general relativity was proved, every physicist then said “Oh, that’s what we meant by “theory of gravitation” all along.”. Not a single intellectually honest person would do such thing.
Not if we’re restricting ourselves to physics as we know it. Cognition in any form even remotely recognizable requires both communication and computation, and there are hard and absolute limits on both requiring minimum amounts of energy. See especially Claude Shannon — and observe it in practice by driving away from an AM radio station. As the signal-to-noise-ratio drops, the information gets overwhelmed by static. And if the signal is zero, there isn’t even any information to be overwhelmed in the first place.
That still leaves the possibility of Matrix-style conspiracy theories where the true nature of reality is utterly unlike what we think it is…but the gods themselves are no more in principle of detecting that they themselves are subject to such deception by super-gods than we are by gods.
Cheers,
b&
“That still leaves the possibility of Matrix-style conspiracy theories where the true nature of reality is utterly unlike what we think it is…”
Sounds like Gnosticism. There is nothing new under the Sun. 🙂
That’s no coincidence. Gnostic Christianity was a major inspiration for the movie. Neo is Jesus….
b&
Neo also is a buddha but in the end he is more Christ-like (which I think ruins it).
There is a book, The Matrix and Philosophy that is an interesting read.
There’s plenty of ecumenicalism in there, but Neo is pretty full-throttle Jesus from the get-go. Remember one of the opening scenes, where he sells the hacking chip to the punk dude with the rabbit-tattoo arm candy? “You’re my savior, man, My own personal Jesus Christ.” And everybody’s devoting their whole lives to finding him because he is The One, the salvation of Zion and all mankind.
b&
There’s a lot of Plato in there too – seeing for the first time.
He is a Buddha in that he becomes enlightened and then spreads his enlightenment as well.
He goes full throttle Jesus by the final episode, which was terrible. I liked it better in the first one when he was all these things. They got too literal and that was what ruined it the most for me – especially the Agent Smith character. I don’t think he should have been made completely evil. I think he had some decent motivations that were lost later.
What sequel?
b&
Since Gnostic Christianity is a kind of love child between Christianity and Buddhism, in this case Jesus is a Buddha.
I thought the way it ended ruined it too – “full throttle Jesus” was too much.
I think I would have liked it a bit more if they had titled it, “The Matrix: Full Throttle Jesus”. At least I would’ve known what I was in for!
Isn’t that the one where he steals a supercar and has to drive it to the other side of the country in order to stop some highly implausible tragedy from coming to pass?
b&
😀 xkcd has the answers again!
I never saw Matrix. After this exchange, I won’t ever see Matrix.
The first one is good. Just stop there as xkcd advises.
Oh, the movie is well worth seeing. Any Christian allegory in it is no more obnoxious than any Hellenistic philosophy in a movie featuring the Olympians, or Confucianism in a sword-and-sorcery movie set in ancient China, and so on. The special effects are mind-blowing (or, at least, they were at the time of its release; I imagine they might be a bit dated in cliché now that everybody’s had a chance to copy them). The pacing is good; there’s lots of suspense and excitement. There’s a good amount of mind-bending going on as it plays with notions of what really is and isn’t real. Some pretty good environmentalism, even. Some of the best Hong Kong school wire-suspended kung-fu sequences you’ll see. It’s a great example of an Hollywood blockbuster, as good as the genre gets.
I’ll just reiterate, as Randall Munroe observed: it’s a damned shame they never got around to making any sequels.
b&
The Matrix movies got too obsessed with their philosophical layers, to the detriment of making actual, entertaining films.
In the first one, the religious/philosophical subtext is subtly layered into the dialogue. In the second and third films, the movie essentially grinds to a halt several times, so that characters can idly jabber on DIRECTLY about it.
The family in the train station. The Merovingian. The keymaker. The Architect. Agent Smith (more than once). The Oracle. The Zion council guy who talks to Neo when they can’t sleep.
All of them take extended smoke breaks to pontificate about faith or philosophy, in the sequels.
Oh, and remember when Neo stopped the sentinels with his hand in real life? What the hell was that?
There are two ways to interpret that.
The first is the one they likely intended: the Christian allegory that demonstrates that Jesus’s power is universal and extends all the way to the real world — that his miracles aren’t only for the supernatural realms.
The second is the more interesting one. What makes you think the “real world” actually was real, and not just another subroutine in the Matrix? The physics of the machinery, including Zion’s steampunk and the flying sentinel squid-things, is radically beyond anything we can reasonably imagine today or for the next hundred, maybe even thousand years.
On the other hand, it would be the ultimate control mechanism to permit humans to “wake up” into yet another dream that’s entirely controlled by the Matrix.
I seem to recall both the Oracle and the Architect saying stuff that could reasonably be interpreted as supportive of such an explanation.
But, even if not…it illustrates a point that I keep trying to make: there isn’t any way, even in theory, to entirely eliminate the possibility of such conspiracy theories. And that inability extends all the way to any proposed gods, themselves. The Oracle and the Architect both know that they themselves are computer programs. How do they know whether or not their programs are running on “bare metal” or are actually in a virtual machine of sorts? And who’s to say that that virtual machine itself isn’t a small part of an even bigger virtual machine?
Cheers,
b&
Yes, the disorienting dream within a dream is something I always like to explore. It would have been far more interesting if that became the central theme as it was in the first movie & Neo asked Morpheus, when he was showing him the “desert of the real”, how do you know the life onboard the Nebuchadnezzar is real.
Would the characters peel onion layer after onion layer? Would they slowly lose their sanity as they did so?
Absolutely. And I’m still wondering how they held onto their sanity after waking up in an alien nightmare landscape with tubes down their throats and what-not.
For me, that’s about the point where I’d conclude that either I or the rest of the universe had gone insane. I’m not entirely sure how I’d react to such a conclusion. A great deal of it would depend, I think, on what sort of crazy world I found myself in.
b&
They did say that they usually don’t free someone as old as Neo so I suspect they’d be young adults or children who already suspected some weird shit was up so they may have adapted more easily.
You can’t really blame the one dude for wanting to go back even if he was a big Judas.
Exactly. That world is so obviously fucked up it’s hard to see the point of much of anything other than partying. Quite literally, everything is a lie. There’s no possibility of a foundation for anything. You can’t even trust physics, after all. That chair you’re sitting on? Nothing’s keeping it from turning into a teapot and flying rings around Uranus.
The same, of course, applies in a world with a deity….
b&
Hmmm… maybe I should check it out. Sounds like the first movie might be good. It certainly is one of the most referenced films out there.
Ultimately, of course, this is what the “supernatural” label really comes down to.
Jerry, let’s say you’re presented with whatever evidence it is that you would find sufficient to convince you of a god’s existence. Stellar “I AM YAM,” whatever.
Now what? Are you just going to give up and worship said god and stop trying to make sense of the universe? Or are you going to try to figure out what makes this god tick and how to replicate the phenomena it’s responsible for?
If the former, then, for you, yes, the god would truly be supernatural — to your everlasting shame. If the latter, then, even if you never succeeded in figuring out how the god does what it does, at least the god would be purely natural.
Take your pick: “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! or, “Gee, that’s strange….”
Cheers,
b&
I’ve discussed this before, Ben. You try to figure out what caused it. If you can’t, but the phenomenon comports with the existence of a God (I’ve posted on what phenomena would do this), then one can PROVISIONALLY accept the existence of the divine–subject, of course, to further testing.
But what does it mean to “accept the existence of the divine”?
What is it that makes this entity divine, as opposed to merely very powerful?
James “The Amazing” Randi would have no trouble, aside from his conscience, setting himself up as a divine being for some back-bush tribe by doing exactly as you propose but for their level of technological and scientific understanding. Would the tribespeople be justified in provisionally accepting him as their new god?
And, if not, why would you be justified in accepting a star-rearranger as a god?
b&
Does this mean Ben is trying to set himself up as a divine being for Goren tribe? 🙂
Any divine grace and power I might have comes wholly from Baihu.
b&
So… You don’t need $65 million for your own private jet? Damn. I was just about to write a check, too…
Ben, I think you’d make a crappy charlatan.
I don’t need $65M for my private jet…Baihu needs $65M for his private jet….
b&
Wouldn’t it be better to say: “we don’t what this caused this observed phenomenon; however, interestingly, it’s similar to this phenomenon described in the bible.”
I don’t see how this makes me provisionally accept the divine. It just seems like an interesting coincidence.
Ben, you are just defining away the issue (again). The important thing is whether a being exists who matches all the qualities that god-believers claim for their god. If such a being exists, we were wrong. It doesn’t really matter whether we call this being “natural” or “supernatural”. Of course we’d try to figure out its properties and preferences; science applies to it as to everything. But it’s a qualitatively different kind of world if private prayers can have effects on reality without identifiable physical causation between them. Might as well admit that in this kind of world, naturalism, as we know it today, would be wrong.
Lou, I have no clue why it is that you seem to think that, by defining, “natural,” in the same terms as Sagan used for, “Cosmos,” I am thereby refusing to even consider in principle the possibility of investigating claims of the supernatural.
Can we please move past that point? Will you do me the courtesy of admitting that I have never claimed nor implied that there’s no need even in principle to investigate something somebody calls, “supernatural”?
If you can get past that, then I would further note that we have investigated those claims, and we can have absolutely overwhelming confidence that they’re pure bullshit. And it is because they’re pure bullshit that we know they’re not part of the natural world, and therefore supernatural.
Now, if we were to start discovering evidence of these phenomena, that evidence would have to be reconciled with the millennia of observations and investigations we’ve had to date that, at this point in time, give us overwhelming confidence that we’ll never actually observe them. That is a most extraordinary claim, and the evidence that would support it would, in practice, never be able to top an alternate explanation that is most mundane and well supported by evidence: simple hallucination.
Again, what’s more likely: that your powerful experience of the divine is the first in all of history to really be really real, or that your powerful experience of the divine is no different from the millions of other powerful experiences of the divine in all of recorded history?
b&
“The important thing is whether a being exists who matches all the qualities that god-believers claim for their god.”
Since “god-believers” believe in an exceedingly large and different array of gods, or other types of supernatural phenomena roughly likened to gods,I think it impossible that such a group will ever agree on “a being who matches all the qualities that god-believers claim for their god.” An agreed upon definition of “supernatural” is a similar exercise in futility, although, with science, we may further limit what currently is defined as “supernatural”. We “know” that there are universes of things we don’t yet “know”, but have “faith” that, with rationality and scientific methods, much of what we don’t yet “know” can become “known”.
Human beings quibble over definitions of so-called “natural” phenomena due, in part, to differences in the perceptions of our sensory apparatuses,the ways our brains are wired, and the cultures in which we learned to ascribe meanings. Ditto with the “supernatural”.
I don’t think there’s a vast difference between the two points of view, and I think it’s also related to the question of whether there could in principle be any evidence that could convince an atheist of the existence of a god: some atheists have, surprisingly to me anyway, said there couldn’t be any such evidence, which if memory serves Jerry has taken issue with in the past.
If a god did exist he could do all sorts of seemingly random things that would seem to defy natural explanation, for example he could change the speed of light multiple times at random.
As a general principle I like to keep in mind a quote from Tom Baker’s Doctor: “To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained”. But a god could make that very difficult for us if he chose.
There’s a very simple question that both puts the matter in its proper context and demonstrates why the concept of a god is incoherent.
By what mechanism is this god manipulating (using your example) the speed of light?
The first and obvious answer is that we know that that’s simply not possible and never been observed. We might as well use squaring the circle for our example. There really isn’t any need to take this sort of thing any more seriously than Peter Pan and Captain Hook.
But, if we continue on for the sake of argument, the next most obvious answer is that there’s something about physics that we don’t understand…but an observation of this sort of thing happening would, quite likely, present us with the opportunity to come to understand physics better. Most likely, we ourselves would eventually figure out how it is that the speed of light can be manipulated, and maybe even come up with a way to manipulate it. But would that make us gods? If so, did not the first person to figure out fire become a god? Clearly advanced technology can make an entity god-like, but it can’t actually be the foundation for godhood.
The last remaining possibility is any of an infinite variety of conspiracy theories, all indistinguishable, and many actually popular with religious believers. The easy one to explain is the Matrix, but the theological conception of the Mind of God as the Ground of Being is the exact same thing with God standing in for the computer of the Matrix. Or, it could be a Star Trek holodeck, or aliens with their mind control rays altering our thoughts, or even funny mushrooms growing in the garden that made their way into the stew you ate for dinner. But the thing about this possibility is that even the gods themselves aren’t immune. The Matrix could itself be a simulated subroutine of an even bigger hyper-super-dupercomputer, and God could be but a bit character in Alice’s Red King’s Dream, and so on. And it also means that a teenager playing Sim City is a god to the characters in that game.
So, no matter how generous you are to the religious position, you still don’t end up at a place where anything other than worshippers delineate god from non-god.
That conclusion makes particular sense when you realize that, in reality, the gods are simply plot devices in a popular type of literary fiction and their function is to rhetorically amplify the authority of the author, and they do so by demonstrating truly impossible feats. “The LORD thy God says you should give ten — no, fifteen! — fifteen percent of your money to us priests, and you wouldn’t want to piss off the LORD thy God because He’s the One Who turned everybody into pillars of salt in that last story I told you.” Those feats must be truly impossible, rather than merely impressive, or else they could be replicated outside of the story and then the power would pass away from the author. “Obey the LORD thy God because he shelled ten walnuts in ten seconds” just doesn’t carry the same weight.
Cheers,
b&
Actually the speed of light changes all the time, as light passes from one medium to another….it is the speed of light in a vacuum that is invariant (as far as I know)…
+1
=)
I think what you’re saying can be more succintly expressed in pseudo-code:
//God function
function infinite_God_Matrix() {
int universe_dimension[];
for (unsigned_infinite_int i = 0; i >=0; i++)
{
universe_dimension[i] = new int[infinity];
}
//Incoherence left as Sophisticated Theology exercise
return universe_dimension;
}
//My God is bigger than your God function
function take_that() {
matrix universe_dimension[];
for (unsigned_infinite_int i = 0; i >=0; i++)
{
universe_dimension[i] = infinite_God_Matrix();
}
return universe_dimension;
}
//Super-Duper God function ad-infinitum
…
Even simpler, if the function takes a parameter.
function infinitely_recursive_divinity(god) { return infinitely_recursive_divinity(god + 1); }
Cheers,
b&
This is why I am a staunch advocate of code reviews.
+1…
Indeed, God + 1…
It seems to me that JC and MS are so close in agreement that the difference is very very small. The difference is a bit more than just semantics, however. MS says that there are no supernatural causes, really, since any such thing would have to work by natural but formerly unknown causes. JC says there can be supernatural causes, but we should be able to detect them by their resulting natural effects.
My only point to add is that if one allows that a supernatural cause is possible, it should be emphasized ‘early and often’ that such a thing by now seems so unlikely that we can safely operate as if there were no supernatural causes until events suggest otherwise.
In Tanya Luhrmann we may have another delusional anthropologist, ala Margret Mead, lurking in the bushes.
I got the feeling that this part is from Stuart Hameroff and his ORCH-Or model that was criticized here on this website by Jerry himself and that we have a soul etc. Just another Quantum mind thing:
“If it turned out that, say, people really could read other peoples’ minds and that they were able to do so because inside our neurons are tiny microtubules in which quantum effects happen that allow thoughts (patterns of neural firing) to be transferred from one skull to another at any distance (like “spooky action at a distance” effects that quantum physicists have measured in experiments), that would not be ESP or PSI, and we wouldn’t need to call it a “paranormal” effect because we would then know that the ability to read minds was due to the properties of neurons and atoms, and it would be subsumed under the sciences of neuroscience and/or quantum physics (quantum neuroscience?). (This is, by the way, an actual theory.)”
This sounds a little bit like Chopra and Quantum pseudoscience to me.
For what it’s worth, Maarten Boudry and I wrote a whole paper on this topic, available here:
Does Science Presuppose Naturalism (or Anything at All?)
http://www.academia.edu/3799490/Does_Science_Presuppose_Naturalism_or_Anything_at_All_
I wanna know the answer, before I download that paper. It doesn’t have to be short.
the short answer is “no.” science does NOT presuppose naturalism.
It seems to me that Shermer’s last paragraph begs the question somewhat, by excluding the possibility that a supernatural being could affect the universe in such a way that we could detect the effect (object A is no longer over there, it’s now over here) but not the forces causing that effect. The difference between a god using undetectable forces (or even no forces at all as we understand them) and a nonexistent god is not trivial if in fact object A has been moved.
Yes, I think you’ve got the agreement in a nutshell. Can God violate the laws of physics, in a way we can’t understand by pure naturalism, to produce a result that we can detect by naturalistic methods?
But your question answers itself.
Science is the analysis of what we observe, nothing more and nothing less. If we observe it, we attempt to understand it. If we don’t observe it, we (hopefully) don’t waste our time trying to understand it.
There’s all sorts of stuff we observe that we can’t understand — the accelerating universe, gravity both large and small, and so on. But we don’t consider those things supernatural.
What differentiates your hypothetical observations that we wouldn’t understand from the actual observations we do have that we don’t understand?
b&
This is the point I was going to make.
Suppose God has the power to stop time, rearrange atoms to his liking, and then start the clock running again. Suppose that from his vantage point outside of time, where he sees all of history laid out in four dimensions, he can take a cosmic chainsaw to that history, carve chunks out of it, flip them around, rearrange them, and paste them back together however he pleases.
In such cases our instruments would detect no measurable forces, only discontinuous changes of state that defy explanation in terms of forces, causation, and physical law.
Basically Shermer is equivocating on the meaning of “natural”:
1. Whatever happens is by definition natural.
2. Whatever is natural must be explicable in terms of natural law.
Conflating these two meanings allows Shermer to smuggle in naturalism as an axiom to his argument, rather than demonstrating it as a conclusion. But in trying to establish naturalism as true by definition, he renders it unfalsifiable and therefore scientifically meaningless.
Suppose YHWH goes ahead and slices and dices existence as we know it as you describe.
How does YHWH know that Zeus isn’t in turn slicking and dicing YHWH’s experience of existence?
And how does Zeus know if he is or isn’t being Dreamed by Alice’s Red King?
And so on.
In this conspiracy theory you’ve invented, why should we call YHWH a god when it’s really the Matrix, which is simulating Alice’s Red King, that’s ultimately calling all the shots?
In other words, is your YHWH a god because of some absolute intrinsic property? But he can’t even in theory have any such absolute intrinsic property. He therefore must be a god relative to those below him but a mere moral relative to his own gods…and that same reasoning makes us gods relative to those below us. So what good does this “god” term do?
b&
I don’t see that it matters how many higher planes of existence there are, or whether you call them “gods”. If beings in plane N+1 can intervene in the affairs of plane N independently of the physics of plane N, then naturalism as we currently understand it — the idea that the observable world is governed by discoverable laws and forces — is just wrong, regardless of any word games you want to play with the meaning of “natural”. That’s a logical possibility that Shermer ought to acknowledge, even if the evidence rules it out.
I would agree with your conclusion: that what is being proposed is a vast conspiracy theory that everything we think we know is worng.
However, many people, including Jerry, seem to place great significance on the importance of attaching the “god” label to entities substantially more powerful than us, so long as the power demonstrated is of some nature that I’ve yet to understand. Interstellar space aliens wouldn’t be gods, apparently, even if they could do all the tricks that Jesus did in the Bible. But some other entity that could do them in some other unspecified manner would be a god…and that distinction is important…and yet I still have no clue what that distinction actually is.
That seems to be what the whole debate is about. It’s Clarke’s Third Law, really…is it still supernatural even after we’ve figured out the trick? Is it still natural even if it requires more cognitive abilities than humans are capable of?
b&
“If beings in plane N+1 can intervene in the affairs of plane N independently of the physics of plane N, then naturalism as we currently understand it — the idea that the observable world is governed by discoverable laws and forces — is just wrong, regardless of any word games you want to play with the meaning of “natural”.” That’s a logical possibility that Shermer ought to acknowledge, even if the evidence rules it out.”
He did. He also acknowledged that such logical possibility would be indistinguishable from fiction: “what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?”
Bringing up every logical possibility every time one’s discussing the nature of reality is both pedantic and pointless. That’s why, it seems from his response, he didn’t even mention it in his letter.
First you say he acknowledged it, then in the next breath you say he didn’t even mention it. You can’t have it both ways.
In fact neither is the case. Shermer explicitly denied the logical possibility of supernatural interventions that defy understanding:
“if he’s interacting with our universe in a way we can measure it, then he must be using forces measurable by scientific instruments or our senses, so by definition they must be natural.”
I think this inference is wrong, for reasons I’ve already explained. Indeed, at this point nobody is saying anything that hasn’t already been said multiple times in this thread. So I’ll bow out per Rool 8 and leave the last word to you if you want it.
He acknowledged it in his reply, after Jerry called him out on it, even though he didn’t mention it in his original letter. Neither should he have to, since acknowledging the supernatural is indistinguishable from acknowledging the fictional. It’s futile.
Or he didn’t. In any case, it’s still futile and not worth talking about when discussing unexplained phenomena or the nature of reality. So kudos for him not wasting our time mentioning every poorly defined possible-in-principle hypothesis.
BTW, rereading my comment I notice I had actually made it pretty clear: “That’s why, it seems from his -response-, he didn’t even mention it in his -letter-.” Oo
Do you mean begs the question or raises the question? They are not the same thing (and using the former in place of the latter is one of my pet peeves).
ipso fatso, “God” too is a linguistic placeholder. That almost makes him/her/it useful. Again.
Speaking of semantics, shouldn’t quantum neuroscience be a ‘hypothesis’, not a theory?
My argument has always been that if it can interact with this universe in a measurable way, the it is natural, not supernatural. If it can’t interact, then as far as we are concerned, it doesn’t exist.
A good definition of supernatural is lacking.
I’m reminded oc the excellent little book, Flatland, which demonstrates how it is possible for a higher dimensional being to intervene in a lower dimensional realm. Su h intervention could be observed, but not subjected to predictive law.
Flatland is, indeed, an excellent little book. But where do you get the idea that the residents of Flatland are incapable even in principle of understanding the third dimension? Indeed, the whole point of the story is a demonstration of one way they experience it…and, once you’ve got that little bit cracked open, the rest generally follows in a pretty straightforward manner.
b&
I didn’t intend to say that Flatland residents could not understand higher dimensions. My point is that actions taken by a higher dimensional being would appear to have no cause and follow no laws.
We have such phenomena in our observable universe. Quantum phenomena, which have no “local” cause. It has not escaped my notice that like Flatlanders, we have postulated higher dimensions.
Now, if quantum phenomena failed to follow the expectations of stochastic distribution, we might infer a higher intelligence, or at least a higher dimensional cause.
You don’t think Flatlanders could develop technology that would let them observe 3-D space and project it in a form suitable for viewing in two dimensions?
Sure, they couldn’t do so with their unaided senses…but what does that matter?
b&
In what direction would they observe?
If they observed regular phenomena, they could devise models to account for the regularity. But that violates a rule of my thought experiment, which is the phenomena lack regularity.
You’re over-constraining your thought experiment. In particular, the whole point of the story was that the residents of Flatland are not restricted to Flatland; they can and do exist outside of it. And they can and do interact with three-dimensional objects that intersect with Flatland.
The analogy with, for example, interstellar neutrinos, leaps to mind….
Cheers,
b&
It’s been a few years, or decades, since I read Flatland. I do not recall that Flatlanders had any means by which they could get the attention of solid worlders.
There are aspects of the story that don’t seem compatible physical reality. For example, a creature one atom thick would not be two dimensional. Nor One quark thick. Nor one Planck length thick.
I constrained my thought experiment because it is about the inability to observe the interferer. One sees the interference and notes that it is capricious. Not regular of subject to modelling.
From this, the Flatlander could infer the existence of something paranormal, but not be able to characterize it.
“From this, the Flatlander could infer the existence of something paranormal, but not be able to characterize it.”
Nor distinguish it from hallucination, collective histeria, fertile imagination or simulated reality.
I think my point is that we have the intellectual tools with which to discover and observe paranormal phenomena. Or miracles. It is at least consistent with reason that we could observe phenomena that are — in principle — unexplainable.
I think Shermer would argue that as we refine those tools, we see fewer and fewer such phenomena.
I think my only challenge would be with your assumption that the phenomena must, by their very nature, defy explanation.
While we can be certain that there will be things that can’t be understood — as Gödel and Turing explained — we also can be certain that we frequently won’t be able to distinguish between the currently-uknown and the forever-unknowable. There will be things we won’t be able to figure out just because they’re beyond our ken, and other things we won’t be able to figure out because there’s nothing there to figure out. But, if we could tell the difference between the two, we’d know enough to be able to figure them out…a paradox.
In the case of Flatlanders, it seems they’ve got far more than enough to be able to reliably observe into the third dimension.
In the case of that set of phenomena we as a culture traditionally apply the “supernatural” to, we can be overwhelmingly confident that they’re just made-up stories, with the only way they could be real is if we’re the butt of some sort of vast conspiracy joke.
b&
I think Flatland could be read as guide to how we might study paranormal phenomena.
Although such phenomena are, almost by definition, unpredictable, their rate of occurrence seems to have diminished in proportion to the number of video cameras available for recording them.
I believe that earlier, Jerry, you said that in order to demonstrate that we are open-minded we should concede the possibility of a God existing. Bur surely for starters, It depends upon the definition of God, which becomes fuzzier all the time as believers keep twisting and turning and shifting the goal posts, until we are left with a vague and meaningless “Ground of Our Being”.
But most Christians adhere to the biblical notion of God, Omni-potent,-scient,-benevolent,-present. Such attributes are logically incompatible and therefore such as God is not possible. Could he be possible? Well it might be possible that he is possible, but how do we know that that is possible?–we don’t. Therefore we should say that God, as defined in Scripture is illogical and irrational and does not conform to the proper definition of something that exists; therefore he does not exist; and we are being open-minded by using logic and reason to deny his existence. An illogical and irrational Being cannot logically exist nor be the creator of a logical, digital Universe which works of its own accord because it is logical, and a hypothetical God is not;–if you follow my drift.
Ick! Theology!
Claims about the divine always strike me as fishy…
Ick-theology is the study of Jeebus fish…
The complete biblical reference is I Yam What I Am.
…and 80+ years later it is still funny.
“there could in theory still be a God”
The concept of a god is founded on musty, moth-eaten “holy” books. That is everything religion has for “evidence” of their many ridiculous claims.
I have carefully studied the “holy” books and can only conclude that the writings are confabulations. As the very idea of a sky-daddy is preposterous, we can safely dismiss the existence of gods as beneath even need of denial. “Ground of being” and other such is touchy-feely drivel.
“There could in theory” is a benefit of doubt gods, angels and other fairy tales do not deserve.
I agree with Shermer; there is no such thing as the supernatural. The notion of the supernatural is nonsensical and is invoked to avoid presenting evidence for cherished beliefs.
Saying that there are supernatural entities suggests that these entities have some part in our world and another part in another realm for which our rules of reality don’t apply and that natural phenomena are wholly withinin this world. This is an unwarranted assumption. It could be that every natural phenomena has some component in the supernatural realm. How would we rule this out? Simply because we think we understand something? In a way we already know this is true. Theoretical physicists tell us that the reality we see is only the barest tip of an iceberg that can only be understood with esoteric mathematics.
You say that if the supernatural exists we could understand it in a limited sense, like seeing a pattern to Gods miracles, but we could never have an ultimate explanation for it. But this is true for everyphenomena. All natural explanations are proximal explanations. They explain natural phenomena in terms of other related natural phenomena. But all phenomena trace back to the big bang ( or the quantum fields that engendered it) and the big bang is by any definition a miracle.
So we should either stop calling anything supernatural or call everything supernatural
+1
=)
This discussion rather reminds me of string theory, not that I understand much of what I’ve read. Should the Theory of Everything be effected by eleven-dimensional math, that would be an explanation. The utility of the TOE (beyond satisfying math), if any, would be sorted out over time. But we would still be confined to experiencing the world as it sits in these three dimensions plus time. We do not have an organ for sensing a fifth dimension.
Likewise the common thread in PCC’s statement and MS’s response is that there could be an explanation or motivation for action from outside of the natural four dimensions and forces, but our perception would still limited to 4-D faculties.
The slight difference between the two is in the premise: I think MS is less willing to acknowledge the possibility of a supernatural force, but then doesn’t posit anything that isn’t essentially consistent with PCC’s statement.
I don’t think the question is “what is the difference” between an un-measurable divine force and a non-existent one. I would ask what good is it, measurable or not? The creator could spell things with stars, or come to earth as George Burns and say cute old man things to John Denver: the limitation is in our perceptions and the fact that they can’t be trusted, which is Sean Carroll’s take on the stars-in-the-sky exercise.
If we take the meaning of “supernatural” to be something above or outside nature then here is the rub: according to the laws of physics (as I understand them so I could be wrong) it is not possible for something outside of nature (our universe) to reach across and touch our universe. They are forever causally disconnected from one another. In this way, there is no such thing as the supernatural.
If, however, we define “supernatural” as “unexplainable” then there are many things that we could call supernatural and “supernatural” becomes a placeholder for understanding things.
In other words, I think this argument hinges on what we mean by the word, “supernatural” and we should no longer use that word when we are talking about hitherto unexplained phenomena.
As I understand it (and IANAP), the laws of physics are simply generalizations from our experience of natural phenomena. I don’t see how they can tell us anything, even in principle, about whether it’s possible for something outside the system to interact with it. At best they can tell us that such interaction has never been reliably observed and thus must be exceptionally rare or nonexistent.
Sean Carroll has had lots of great stuff on this topic. Basically, physics is complete at human scales and at scales quite beyond human experience. A claim that there is something “outside” of physics that can, say, lift a pencil, is a claim that there exists a force that can interact with quarks and / or electrons. And that claim is exactly equivalent to one that a corresponding particle can be created with interactions of a specific energy range.
We’ve created literally uncountably huge numbers of particles in the relevant energy ranges, and found nothing outside the Standard Model. If such forces were real, we’d have made their corresponding particles by now.
You can invoke conspiracy theories at this point…say, that the aliens are using their mind rays to make us forget all the other particles we actually observed. Or that we’re in a computer simulation and the programmers are making us see the experimental results they want us to see. But that just gets really crazy really quick.
b&
The second paragraph is nonsense. The Standard Model is already known to be incomplete: dark energy, dark matter, nor even gravity, are explained by the SM. Even knowing more or less what is lacking, and conducting experiments specifically to uncover those things, we’ve yet failed to find them. This does not lead us to conclude the forces are not real, or have no corresponding particles.
Ben’s key phrase, i believe, is “in the relevant energy ranges”. That excludes gravity, Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
Yes, exactly.
Dark matter and dark energy only ever interact with humans in the most roundabout and indirect means that, basically, only affect the academic careers of high-energy physicists.
If you want to directly interact with an human being, it’s got to be through the Standard Model. Realistically, that basically means basically exclusively electromagnetism with a tip o’ th’ hat to gravity. You could technically start including things like the nuclear forces that hold our atoms together…but even that’s at a level removed from actual human experience.
For that matter, you can go a lot further than, “it’s got to be through the Standard Model.” You could simply leave it at chemistry and Newtonian physics. Yes, you might need a footnote here and there for GPS and lasers and the like…but, even in those cases, the actual human interaction is with pure chemistry and Newton. You don’t experience the oddities that GPS deals with; you just experience the colorful display on your smartphone. And, yes, you need Quantum Mechanics to explain the generation of the laser light…but the light, once generated, is purely classical and perfectly explicable by Newton.
Another way of putting it: the Standard Model reduces to chemistry and Newtonian physics at human scales. Anything new we know for certain will reduce to the Standard Model at the scales at which it’s currently applicable — and, therefore, will, in turn, reduce to chemistry and Newtonian physics at human scales. And anything beyond whatever’s beyond the Standard Model will reduce to that which is just beyond the Standard Model, and so on.
The only exceptions are the usual brain-in-a-vat types of conspiracy theories, which we needn’t even pretend to worry about unless we uncover positive evidence only explicable through recourse to such a conspiracy.
b&
You’ve gotten sidetracked by the specific examples. My point was that we already know the current best theory is incomplete with respect to several things whose measurable effect is not in question. We simply can’t make the claim that there cannot exist any other, as yet unknown, things that also lie outside that theory; certainly not on the basis that we’ve failed to notice any, since we can’t even uncover all of the things for which we’re actively searching.
…erm…let me point you to the authority in question, this Web site’s Official Physicist™:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood/
The short version is that things that lie outside the theory only apply to scales where the theory breaks down. Einstein, for example, didn’t invalidate Newton; he only explained things at high energies that Newton hadn’t already explained. Plug numbers into Einstein’s equations for phenomena that Newton does explain and they both come up with the exact same answers.
It’ll be the same thing for anything we don’t currently understand. Once we do understand it, you’ll be able to use the new understanding to explain the currently unexplainable, but, if you use the new understanding for things we currently understand, the new understanding and the old will both give you the exact same answers.
So, yes. Our current best theories are incomplete. But, over the domain of the phenomena you’ll ever personally experience, they’re not just complete, they’re serious overkill and will not ever even hypothetically be revised.
Cheers,
b&
Presumably Carroll isn’t wrong, but it’s irrelevant in this context. He doesn’t contradict my point, nor does he support the much stronger assertions you’re trying to make.
To paraphrase noncarborundum’s comment: It is philosophically sound to exclude something from consideration on the basis of a lack of evidence. It is philosophically unsound to exclude something from the realm of possibility on the basis of a lack of imagination.
No, that’s the entire point of this context.
He’s the one making the assertions; I’m the one repeating them.
Many of us here don’t give a damn what philosophers do and don’t consider sound, but that’s beside the point.
This isn’t about lack of imagination.
This is about physics that’s been confirmed multiple ways to more decimal places than humans can really intuitively grasp.
We know what humans and our environments are made of: electrons and quarks, to as much of an approximation in this discussion as makes no difference. If you’re going to interact with electrons and quarks, you’re doing so with a force that has a certain energy scale. In the real world, that means electromagnetism and gravity (as far as humans are concerned), but the supernatural claims explicitly demand something other than those two at work.
The relevant equations can be flipped (that’s the whole point of the “equal” part of “equation”), meaning that, if said force exists, you can create a corresponding particle if you can get an equal amount of mass into a small enough space. That’s what colliders do; they’ve done that; and they’ve found no unexpected particles.
If the supernatural were real, we’d have created those particles. We haven’t.
If you’re still going to insist that the supernatural could be real, that’s now equal to a claim that physics is very, very, very worng. Granted, that could be the case…but you’re now wholly in the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories of the type that maybe we really are in the Matrix after all. Frankly, those sorts of conspiracy theories really only belong in insane asylums and abstract discussions about the possible natures of reality — and it can get damned difficult telling the difference between the two at times.
Cheers,
b&
Science is built on a philosophical foundation. You may not give a damn about it, but many of us here like to remind ourselves of the fact, especially so, when considering hypotheticals meant to probe the limits of that philosophy.
You seem to think that if something outside the boundaries of the known universe could have any observable effect, then we must necessarily be able to produce such an effect from within the boundaries, using only those constituents that are already known to exist. The only possible basis for making such a claim is inherently philosophical.
Any experiment that could falsify this falls beyond the limits of what we could test, even in principle: we would need to be outside the universe to perform the experiment. Even if such a feat were possible, the result need not render currently known physics “wrong”; “incomplete” is another possible conclusion. I don’t see why this is a sticking point, as you’ve said essentially the same yourself, in this very thread.
There is a wide realm in between the known physics of the everyday as Carroll discussed, and a hypothetical physics of the everything. Substituting statements from one context into the other, while discarding qualifying remarks in favor of brain-vat conspiracy strawmen, does indeed result in you making a different assertion than he is.
In short: I agree with Coyne’s assessment, and disagree with yours and Shermer’s. Carroll may also belong in the second group, but based upon the article you linked, I doubt that.
I do believe we may be typing past each other.
I’ll be one of the first to acknowledge, if not even point out, that there are truly infinite possibilities for things that could be “outside the boundaries” of the universe as we perceive it — and, in the same breath, I’ll point out that all of them are paranoid conspiracy theories. Not a one of them can be proven worng, true…but you can also nest them infinitely, apply them recursively, or do any number of other things. The “outside the universe” could be the Matrix, brains in vats, the minds of any number of deities, the Truman show, the Star Trek Holodeck, or even just garden-variety CIA radio stations controlling your thoughts through your tooth fillings.
The most important thing all of them have in common aside from the fact that none of them can, even in principle, be eliminated as a possibility…is that you’ve truly got to be insane to take even a single one of them seriously as a candidate model for what the true nature of reality is.
Once you leave aside the realm of delusion and embrace reality as we understand it, you really are left with the fact that it would constitute a gross violation of everything we think we know about physics for anything to interact with humans through anything other than electromagnetism (and, minimally, gravity (with additional insignificant footnotes for other parts of the Standard Model)).
So, if you’re going to tell me that we have to remain open to the possibility that there could be something that can influence humans that’s not already accounted for by the Standard Model, my short reply is, “True, but only if either you’re insane or everybody else is.”
And I’m superbly confident that Sean would be in perfect agreement with what I’ve just written above.
If you still doubt me on that last sentence, we can always see if he’d be willing to chime in here….
Cheers,
b&
IANAP? ITJAGI?
I am not a physicist.
ITJAGI = Is This Just Another Gratuitous Initialism?
Comes in handy when a republican wants to deny AGW. (also IANAP (Politician)).
I think I’ve always looked at it that way. How could someone claim a prayer being answered for example was supernatural occurrence if it happened within the natural world. Even if the prayer answerer, and the methodology were forever unobservable, and unexplainable it would still be a part of nature. Supernatural is a word I never use yo describe an event unless I precede it with so called, or encase it in quotes.
There are several theories, I think hypotheses is a better word but “theory” is typically used, that do include causal affects between universes. Of course you then have the quandry of agreeing on a definition of the term “universe.”
But, for example, in various Brane theories it is postulated that our Big Bang, myriad Big Bangs actually, was / are caused by branes colliding with each other.
Similarly, there are legitimate theories that postulate things like that gravity is a phenomenon that can cause affects across branes, or that the phenomenon we perceive as gravity in our brane is caused by a phenomenon in a neighboring brane.
No such theories have yet achieved any significant verification, no “multiverse” theories have, but as far as our present state of knowledge warrants any judgement, they seem plausible to various degrees.
Speaking as a former woo, the idea of something being “supernatural” rests on some bogus distinctions that no physicist or reality-based inquirer would ever accept even hypothetically.
Above all they distinguish between “inanimate matter” and the “life force.” The life force — life itself — is “supernatural”. Being able to perceive it independently of matter is an experience of the supernatural.
…
“Matter” is equated with “atoms”, which are assumed to be conceived of by scientists as inert little billiard balls crashing about randomly. (Sheldrake for eg., is not even aware of high school chemistry or chemical bonding — so something as simple as plant growth is assumed to be utterly baffling even for botanists!)
Life forces direct these atoms, and form them into structures. This is essentially vitalism, and they believe it has been confirmed by quantum physics.
Hence “physicists are the new mystics,” and “physicists have proven that matter doesn’t exist.”
And hence, morphogenetic fields are equated with the various “fields” that physicists talk about.
They have removed all of the math from quantum physics. Some, like Chopra, don’t quite realize they’re doing this, but others like Sheldrake or Lipton say it openly — the “quantum realm” is the spirit realm. Physicists study the spirit realm; biologists deny the life force and only study inanimate matter.
For these people, quantum physics is the study of the supernatural.
It is best summed up by James Ray (star of The Secret)–
“Physicists have proven that there are eleven dimensions. Now, 3D is only one of them.
“…what’s the difference between an invisible God and a nonexistent God?”
The difference is the escape hatch theists cling to. Easy belief vs. hard critical thinking? Myth vs. fact? Myth wins 9 times out of 5.
A lot depends on what I call the “How Many 9s Problem.” There’s the famous 1-to-7 scale, from absolutely sure god(s) exist = 1, absolutely sure zero gods (or other supernatural phenomena) exist =7. Dawkins, if I recall correctly, claimed 6.9. Most scientists, I would speculate, put themselves at 6.9. No evidence, no observation, no utility … and yet, what if the sky rearranger appeared? Would I AM YAM bring us to 1? Or maybe 3.5?
I can’t tell you for certain (solid 7 on the continuum) that the Eiffel Tower didn’t turn to cheese two minutes ago, but my 6.9999999… would string out 9s a long way.
So. How many 9s? How far do you have to go decimally as a practical matter? At some point, rational people* have to round up to 7, at least for verbal economy. I’m sure I exist. I’d like a cup of coffee. I’m certain the Eiffel Tower is still metallic. Vishnu was a myth.
*I exclude the presuppositionalists who play gotcha-you-can’t-go-to-7, brain-in-a-vat word games. They only do it to annoy.
Arrrgh. 7 = NOT exist. Need an edit button!
They also overlook the true utility of the brain in a vat: applying it recursively.
Yes, sure. There’ll always be some practical limit to the number of nines because you could be a brain in a vat.
But, those mad scientists operating the brain in the vat? They themselves can’t have any more certainty than you. After all, they (along with your vat and your brain) could well be subroutines in the Matrix.
That is, even — nay, especially, for it’s their stock in trade — especially the gods can’t ever have absolute confidence in their understanding of the ultimate true nature of reality. And what kind of god are you, really, if you have no clue whether or not you’re somebody else’s unknowing pawn?
b&
First of all, I don’t think a god is possible for many reasons, but I have been mistaken before and could also be mistaken about this. I don’t think this means a god is possible; it only means a god might possibly be possible. (Yes, I suppose that’s only a semantic difference.)
With that out of the way, suppose a god did indeed exist. Maybe it created the universe and natural laws using powers not dependent upon said laws. Maybe it also intervenes in the universe from time to time, using its same non-natural (or supernatural) powers.
The fact that we might detect what it had done would in no way imply that we might ever (even in principle) discover how it had been able to accomplish its deeds or to do them ourselves.
It seems reasonable to me to use the word “supernatural” to describe the hypothetical being and its powers, and to describe its accomplishments as “miracles.”
The first thing that struck me in reading Michael Shermer’s response is that he doesn’t provide a clear definition of what HE means by the “supernatural.” The second thing I noticed was that you can figure out his definition by looking at his arguments. He’s defining the “supernatural” around his objections. So of course he’s victorious — but it’s kind of a trivial win. You can prove anything that way. It’s called ‘begging the question.’
If we define “supernatural” as “what has yet to be explained by science” then the supernatural is really just unexplained nature! If we define “supernatural” as “outside of nature” then the supernatural is really just unexplained nature! If we define “supernatural” as “what can’t be understood by observing the physical world” then the possibility of knowing about the supernatural is ruled out by epistemology! If we define “nature” as “all there has been, is, and will ever be” then the supernatural is ruled out by definition! And then let’s assume materialism is true and imagine ways that supernatural claims are really reducible to matter and energy! Rah rah. Big deal.
Now why don’t we define “supernatural” in a way which gives us atheists and skeptics an honest chance of being wrong — a way which looks at the critical distinction which its proponents constantly stress, overtly or under analysis?
Mind is not reducible to matter. Mental phenomenon — like thoughts, consciousness, intelligence, intent, values, emotions, creativity, etc. etc. — are fundamentally distinct from the physical world of nature and constitute being, or forces, or causes, or essences which act ‘down’ on nonmental things like atoms, rocks, and hands through their own power. My definition:
Supernatural: Non-material, irreducible mental Being, beings, or forces which exist apart from and/or ‘above’ the material realm, do not obey common physical laws, and which affect the natural world through the direct power of intentions or values.
Let’s go with this and see where it takes us.
Here is what fits into this definition:: disembodied souls, ghosts, angels, ESP, psychokenesis, magical correspondences, “luck,” vitalism, karma, prana, God, cosmic consciousness, reincarnation, precognition, remote viewing, mind as “energy force,” a universal tendency towards the harmonic balance of Good and Evil, progressive evolution towards Higher States, mind/body substance dualism, holistic nonmaterialistic monism, dual-aspect monism, nondualism.
“Supernatural” indicates a top-down view of reality where pure mind or mental properties (such as values) somehow precede or ground nature, and are creative forces not reducible to matter. “Natural” indicates a bottom-up view of reality where complex systems, including minds, have arisen from lifeless material processes.
There is no reason to assume this couldn’t be discovered, understood and described through science given strong enough evidence. I think Shermer suffers from a failure of imagination here. Instead of looking for ways to “prove” the supernatural consider finding ways to disprove or falsify naturalism. What would make it very hard to confidently say that “mind is what the brain does.”
Mystics who can walk, talk, and explain their theory of Mind after their brains are removed and destroyed. As a start. The supernatural hypothesis doesn’t need to be a one-off miracle. In fact, it shouldn’t be. It would need to be a cumulative case which makes the insistence that “mental things can only come from nonmental things” look sillier and sillier.
I agree with Jerry. I don’t think Shermer addressed his actual objection.
If we define the supernatural as no more and no less than disembodied minds and their effects, we can trivially dismiss it with the exact same confidence that we today trivially dismiss the luminiferous aether and calorific.
But the fact is that the supernatural is much more than that. It’s a conspiracy theory that says that reality is fundamentally and radically different from how we understand it to be. It says that we really are living in the Matrix, except the mechanism that runs the Matrix isn’t some silicon-based computer but some immaterial mind. And, as such, it’s no different from the brains-in-a-vat conspiracy theory, or the Star Trek holodeck conspiracy theory, or any other conspiracy theory. And people who take conspiracy theories seriously are in need of the services of mental health professionals.
The “nature is all there is” definition gives the supernatural much more of the benefit of the doubt, when it comes right down to it. It doesn’t care so much what explanations are put forth for any given phenomenon; it first insists we demonstrate that the phenomenon is real, and then worries about trying to explain it. You think you’ve got ESP? Great; let’s test it. What’s that? Negative vibrations are keeping you from telling us what’s in the box unless we let you have a good peek? Golly gee. What a surprise. And a shame. Mr. Peter Higgs predicted we’d find a particular particle if we built the right machine, and he was right…and we gave him a Nobel Prize for it. We’d happily do the same for you if only you’ll tell us what’s in the box…? No?
Cheers,
b&
It’s not supposed to be quite that limited, but okay …
That’s not a trivial dismissal; it was and is a hard won scientific conclusion. And as Yakaru pointed out in #26, belief in vitalism is not only alive and well in the minds of the misguided and misinformed, it’s basically a supernatural theory. And it’s wrong.
Not necessarily. This strategy I think is like when we argue that there’s no distinction between “alternative medicine” and “medicine.” There’s only medicine which has been tested and demonstrated … and that which hasn’t. We ought to use the same rules and standards of evaluation regardless of what it’s called. I agree. No fair inventing a category which doesn’t have to play fair. No fair defining or re-defining yourself around the objections.
But I think that the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ is more than an immunizing strategy — or a ploy for avoiding accountability — or a process for making stuff up. If we analyze the concepts themselves they differ in a common, critical way.
And when we do this naturalism becomes falsifiable… which means supernaturalism is in big trouble, because it’s now falsifiable itself. Otherwise, science can’t say anything about the supernatural one way or the other. Neither one of us thinks that’s true.
“Supernatural” indicates a top-down view of reality where pure mind or mental properties (such as values) somehow precede or ground nature, and are creative forces not reducible to matter.
Before we can honestly talk about this definition of “supernatural” you’ll have to properly define “pure mind”, “mental properties” and “creative forces”, at least to basic linguistic standards. Also, just what kind of values are you referring to? Moral? Biological? Mathematical?
As it stands, your definition of supernatural is as good as “an omnidirectional view of reality where pure conciousness or properties of conciousness (such as self-awareness) somehow pervade or transcend nature, and are creative fields not reducible to matter”. Sounds like anyone you know?
I don’t think that we really need to have clear definitions on what is meant by mind or mental properties like morals and goals. These terms are all referring to our common experiences taken at face value. You think, you feel, you evaluate. The question then has to do with what mental phenomenon like consciousness or love are. Natural or supernatural? We say the former; the supernaturalists insist these things are intrinsic to reality: they can and do exist in the absence of brains. Both views make testable predictions.
As you so wisely recognize, the more specific we get in the definition the more we start to reduce the phenomenon and develop an explanation — which can’t be done in a supernatural framework. They consider that a feature: the scientific approach considers it a bug.
Sounds like Chopra and I think it’s a pretty good example from the definition I’m offering — which pleases me since I’m trying to describe what they believe, not what we believe.
“These terms are all referring to our common experiences taken at face value.”
Are they? How can we know, if we don’t even know what they’re proper definition is?
“The question then has to do with what mental phenomenon like consciousness or love are.”
Precisely.
“Natural or supernatural?”
Natural has proper a definition. Supernatural doesn’t. It’s like your contrast of “black swans” and “souls”. Calling “souls” “superblackswans” doesn’t help.
“We say the former; the supernaturalists insist these things are intrinsic to reality: they can and do exist in the absence of brains.”
The problem is that they have yet to even define what “these things” are.
“Both views make testable predictions.”
How can a hypothesis that isn’t even defined make any predictions? I think what you mean is: In principle, “supernaturalism” could make testable predictions. But first, it would need a clear definition of its parameters. What I’ve been arguing this whole time is that, frankly, all this supernatural talk isn’t even a proper HYPOTHESIS. It doesn’t even have proper concepts to work with! Just like Chopra. So, all I am saying is that until someone comes up with a proper definition for supernatural, it’s pointless even mentioning it when talking about the nature of reality.
“As you so wisely recognize, the more specific we get in the definition the more we start to reduce the phenomenon and develop an explanation — which can’t be done in a supernatural framework.”
Which is why a “supernatural framework” can never be scientifically verified, by definition.
“They consider that a feature: the scientific approach considers it a bug.”
Yes, since they don’t mind – even thrive – in having no idea what they’re talking about but pretending they do. But intellectually honest people do.
The “experience of mind taken at face value” is direct knowledge. We don’t need to start out with a complicated “proper definition” of mind in order to deal with it or its implications. Iirc in The Astonishing Hypothesis Francis Crick wrote that it’s not necessary to have a crystal clear definition in order for science to investigate something: he compared “consciousness” to “life.” If he and Watson had gotten bogged down in philosophy they’d never have gotten down to work.
The definition of “supernatural” I provided is I think defined well enough to be understood by people on both sides. Read my long list at #29 of examples which fit into the definition (“disembodied souls, ghosts, angels, ESP, psychokenesis, magical correspondences …”)
Now — can you give me an example of something people call or would call “supernatural” which doesn’t somehow involve something “irreducibly mental?”
I’ve gone over this. If naturalism is true, then everything mental depends on something non-mental. The simplest way of falsifying this would be to demonstrate examples of mental causation which cannot in any way be connected to a physical substrate. I’ll trot out the babbling brainless mystics again.
Supernaturalism predicts that we will observe good, strong evidence for mind/body dualism. The lack of such evidence is not conclusive disproof — but science doesn’t deal in that.
“The “experience of mind taken at face value” is direct knowledge.”
It is YOUR direct knowledge of YOUR experience of mind. All one can ever know about others’ experience of mind is anecdote. Besides that, since when are subjective feelings considered knowledge? The experience of mind is just this: an experience. Rationalizing it is like rationalizing “the feeling of rapture/awe/wonder” people use to justify the existence of whatever their personal fixation is.
“We don’t need to start out with a complicated “proper definition” of mind in order to deal with it or its implications.”
Of course we don’t need to start out with a complicated “proper deginition” of mind. A simple one would do. We just can’t go around pretending that a blob of random concepts and bad metaphors is a proper definition.
“Iirc in The Astonishing Hypothesis Francis Crick wrote that it’s not necessary to have a crystal clear definition in order for science to investigate something: he compared “consciousness” to “life.” If he and Watson had gotten bogged down in philosophy they’d never have gotten down to work.”
Yes, but in the end he still has no idea of what “conciousness” is, and even better, he doesn’t waste our times talking as if he did. What he and Watson seem to have done, from what I gather from your post, is to shut up and get to work. I am all for that.
“The definition of “supernatural” I provided is I think defined well enough to be understood by people on both sides. Read my long list at #29 of examples which fit into the definition (“disembodied souls, ghosts, angels, ESP, psychokenesis, magical correspondences …”)”
None of the stuff you mentioned can be reliably distinguished from hallucination, collective hysteria, fertile imagination or a simulated universe. So, it’s as good a definition as calling it any of those.
“Now — can you give me an example of something people call or would call “supernatural” which doesn’t somehow involve something “irreducibly mental?”
I can’t give you any definition of something people call or would call “supernatural” besides the one you don’t like, I already told you that. In fact, I don’t KNOW of any other honest definition. Now, if it was even possible to have a proper definition of something people call or would call supernatural that involves something “irreducibly mental”, defining “irreducibly mental” OR EVEN “mental” to the same standard as we define strings and branes might be a good place to start. Until then people can talk about mindstuff and pretend they are on the same page all they want, but treating it like it’s EVEN A HYPOTHESIS about the nature of reality would still be as dishonest as ever.
“I’ve gone over this. If naturalism is true, then everything mental depends on something non-mental.”
Yes, you have.
“The simplest way of falsifying this would be to demonstrate examples of mental causation which cannot in any way be connected to a physical substrate.”
If it causally affects a physycal substrate, so that it’s detectable, it is connected to the physical substrate by definition. You want it to be causal, but you don’t want it to be connected. Please, make sense of this to me.
“Supernaturalism predicts that we will observe good, strong evidence for mind/body dualism.”
But even this is just an arbitrary diferentiation. We might as well be talking about spirit/mind/body trialism, spirit/perispirit/mind/body tetralism, cosmos/spirit/perispirit/mind/brain/body hexalism…
If you’re going to argue that the definition of “mind” is too vague to link to supernaturalism then it’s also too vague to link to naturalism and deal with scientifically. You’ve gotten in to a different issue.
There is more evidence for these natural explanations than there is for the hypothesis that what’s on my list can be explained as supernatural. If we win on the science, then it wasn’t a semantic debate.
There is no physical chain of causation, which rules out naturalism.
Think of it this way: a child might believe that they wiggle their finger just by wanting to wiggle their finger. That’s the connection. They know nothing of brains and nerves – or chemistry and physics. It’s just “thought power” at work.
This is more or less what supernaturalism proposes. They’re either ignorant of the physical explanation or they insist that the physical explanation is not enough — can never be enough — because mental things can’t be “made of matter.” They’re being sloppy and creating a sloppy model of what things are and how things work. They’re mistaken, not incoherent or vocabulary-challenged.
The incoherence comes from the conceptual framework they’re using to try to explain it all — that framework is itself incoherent, so, of course, the explanations are at least equally incoherent.
William Lane Craig is a great example. He’s absolutely besotted with the ancient misconceptions of math and related subjects, especially the desperate ancient aversion to infinity. All his arguments for the necessity of a creator god rest on the requirement to terminate the infinite regress of causation. But we’ve known for centuries that there is no such requirement and that there’s no way to even coherently express such a need…which makes his arguments that rest on that need equally incoherent.
Similarly, we can very coherently explain cognition as an entirely physical activity that’s the primary function of brains. (And we’ve had very powerful evidence that this should be so ever since the discovery of beer.) In contrast, any supernatural (using your “mind-first” attempt at a definition) explanation instantly falls flat on its face because it starts with premises that just don’t make sense.
Imagine trying to explain orbital mechanics using pre-Newtonian frameworks. You just can’t do it. Any attempt is doomed to incoherence. That’s why Newton was such a revolutionary and why we still respect him so much to this day: he was the first to propose an actually-coherent framework that really does explain what’s going on.
…but that’s exactly what supernaturalists are trying to do: explain the world using ancient, long-since-discarded, and flat-out incoherent misconceptions of reality.
Cheers,
b&
To be fair, the way you defend this challenge isn’t exactly transparent. The last time you and I had this discussion, I tossed out the obvious things like potions and magic wands…and you dismissed them by saying that they focussed the mind or were somehow mental distillations or some such.
With such reasoning, everything is similarly mental, by the simple fact that everything we’re aware of must, of necessity, somehow interact with humans who are mental. And, okay, maybe that’s the point that supernaturalists (especially Chopra) would have us believe. But it seems utterly bizarre to me to claim that a magic potion is supernatural because of its mental properties, and it would seem equally bizarre to me to exclude magic potions from any definition of the supernatural.
Cheers,
b&
What is the difference between a magic wand and a wand? What is the distinction between a magic potion and a potion?
The “magic” item is supposed to be responsive to the mind’s intentions in a way that mere physical items are not. There’s a mental connection between the wish and the execution which involves an object as a sensitive participant. A magic potion is not limited by chemistry: it will directly seek out qualities like “goodness” or “truthfulness” or “beauty” as if it knew and cared what these things are.
Iirc Richard Carrier gets in to more details.
Yeah…sorry. Not buying it.
He uses a love potion as his example.
What about a magic potion that turned lead into gold? This involves some sort of purely mental imbuing of supernatural substance?
…or a potion to cure illness, or a spell that makes the gingerbread house re-bake itself, or a ring that makes somebody impervious to blades and arrows and what-not, or just an old-fashioned rain dance, or a mirror that lets you see what’s happening several kingdoms over, and on and on and on and on.
It’s trivial to pick some examples of things that are closely coupled with states of mind. But so much of the supernatural is just technology that, at least at the time, was considered impossible.
And that’s the dividing line. The supernatural has always been about the impossible become real…but, if and when it does come real, we no longer think of it as supernatural.
…unless you consider television, a magic mirror that lets you see what’s happening several countries over, to be supernatural…? But I guarantee you your ancestors from at least a couple centuries ago certainly would have thought it so.
Cheers,
b&
“If you’re going to argue that the definition of “mind” is too vague to link to supernaturalism then it’s also too vague to link to naturalism and deal with scientifically.”
Of course it is. That is why neuroscientists, neurolinguists, cognitive scientists and the such have to reduce “mind” to the dynamics of simpler concepts that are defined by even simpler concents, until we (hopefully) get to a conceptual framework that can be tested and verified as analogous to actual evidence of actual phenomena. The same goes with physics, biology, chemistry, etc… Metaphors of metaphors of metaphors, all based on our most basic sensorial inputs. That’s why every attemp at setting up the grounds for a supposedly “new paradigm” are laughably bound by the same top-bottom/bottom-up, reductionist/holistic spatial metaphors.
“There is more evidence for these natural explanations than there is for the hypothesis that what’s on my list can be explained as supernatural. If we win on the science, then it wasn’t a semantic debate.”
Of course, you are correct. Disgusting failure of expression on my part. It is not as good a definition as any of those, since those ARE in fact proper definitions. And no, this isn’t just a semantic debate – this is an unwarranted mix up of a proper scientific/philosophical debate AND a linguistic debate, treated as if operating on the same standards.
“There is no physical chain of causation, which rules out naturalism.”
Indeed.
“Think of it this way: a child might believe that they wiggle their finger just by wanting to wiggle their finger. That’s the connection. They know nothing of brains and nerves – or chemistry and physics. It’s just “thought power” at work.”
Yes, but what is “thought power”? How does it work? How does it relate to “finger”? “Thought power” is, like all the other supernatural/paranormal jargon, a nebulous and obfuscatory concept. Just a placeholder for what they don’t know – say brains, nerves, chemistry or physics.
“They’re either ignorant of the physical explanation or they insist that the physical explanation is not enough — can never be enough”
It’s even worse. They are being sloppy and (perhaps unknowingly dishonest) by pretending to understand (and that somebody else understands) what they are talking about: “— because mental things can’t be “made of matter.”
“They’re being sloppy and creating a sloppy model of what things are and how things work.”
But it’s not even a model.
“They’re mistaken, not incoherent or vocabulary-challenged.”
Incoherent, inconsistent, incohesive, linguistically confused, intellectually dishonest. And most of them, I’d wager, don’t even notice it. Hell, MOST PEOPLE can’t notice it, dazed by the torrent of nonsense.
Sorry, forgot to address this:
“Sounds like Chopra and I think it’s a pretty good example from the definition I’m offering — which pleases me since I’m trying to describe what they believe, not what we believe.”
Yeah, but since what they believe can mean anything, trying to describe it is futile.
“After Tanya Luhrmann published an egregious op-ed in the New York Times claiming that she melted a bicycle light with her mind (mentioning Michael Shermer’s experience with a dead radio that mysteriously played music on his wedding day)”
It looks like Michael Shermer’s sharing of his supernatural story is gonna hunt him for many years to come 🙂
Were you going for “haunt?” 😀
Yes, thanks! 😉
“Nevertheless, I contend that supernatural phenomena could arise by, say, God changing the speed of light”
No God needed for that 😉
Scientists slow the speed of light
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-30944584
I agree with Jerry. God could fiddle with the universe without touching the underlying forces of nature (the Standard Model). After quantum mechanics (QM) and Standard Model do their thing with the quantum amplitudes, an observation is made converting the amplitudes to probabilities. Then comes the Born rule that converts the probabilities to actualities. Standard QM invokes the Born rule that says the last step of getting actualities is done totally randomly. But the error bars on tests of the Born rule are pretty large as compared to tests of the Feynman diagram Standard Model. Keep in mind that Francis Collins (head of NIH) and Ken Miller (Brown Univ. biologist) are theists who have written books saying that God can now and then produce a major violation of Born rule like for the Jesus empty tomb event. Both Collins and Miller are strong advocates of Darwinian evolution and strong critics of intelligent design. So they are defenders of almost standard science. My point here is that there can be supernatural forces that are beyond us. Allowing the Born rule to deviate from randomness can be done in a manner beyond any possible human science. So far, thank goodness, no violations of Born rule have been reproducible since paranormal experiments haven’t had adequate controls. But those violations are possible. So I disagree with Shermer. A friendly, unknowable God as companion is still possible.
Stan
If you look at the Born rule in isolation, there would be gaps caused by remaining uncertainty.
But quantum physics as a non-hidden variable theory do not allow such a gap. So this would be arguing for “theistic physics” akin to how Collins and Miller is arguing for “theistic evolution”.
This gets back to the prior-posterior confusion. It was possible earlier, it isn’t now. And some (even if perhaps not Shermer), makes a lot of hay from skipping over the difference.
I’ve said before that Shermer rubs me the wrong way, and I don’t even know where to begin with this. It seems sloppy in many ways.
But first let me note that others have said, the differences are somewhat terminoplogical. That is so unless you refuse to research religious claims or note when science advances invalidates them in the way of accommodationists.
The description of religious claims are not placeholders, but I’ll return to that later.
It is popular but erroneous to claim that DE and DM are ‘placeholders’, fudge factors of mathematical equations that are to be decided later. Perhaps they started out that way when all Zwicky had was the DM deficit in the viral theorem of galaxy clusters, or when the accelerated expansion of the distant universe was observed and “Lambda” was placed into the LDCM model.
But today they are constrained, albeit not very detailed, by the LCDM model and is well tested by them, not something that a fudge factor can do. We know that DM is cold, particulate and in addition to earlier energy (CDM), and we observe it in lensing. We know that DE is static and a vacuum property, and we observe it in baryonic oscillations.
Mostly, the claim that DE and DM is placeholders is sloppy and allow for inserting unwarranted doubt, much as the claim that the description of religious claims are placeholders.
Not that it has anything to do with the religious claim description, but this is not measured and in fact impossible. Quantum physics allow for non-local correlations, not non-local causality. The code key for the measurement, the state of the read mind, would still need to be transmitted in another channel slower than the universal speed limit.
I have looked at this before here, and I claim that LHC has made copying the synapse state of the mind impossible. To distinguish signal from noise an interaction larger than the LHC limits, which includes _all_ interactions by way of the quantum field physics vacuum, must happen since the number of synapses is so enormous.
Finally, what is the actual theory here? I think it is Penrose’s microtubule theory, which is problematic since it doesn’t figure in decoherence from water molecules, and not the ‘paranormal’ read out application of Shermer.
Returning to the question of description of religious claims, this is only the case in hindsight. E.g. we couldn’t know before science that we were able to describe nature and its workings in a measurable way. Nor could we know until later that it is in many ways exhaustive (thermodynamics, quantum physics, cosmology, evolution).
This is an unwarranted, one could say sloppy depending on intention, way of leaving gaps-for-gods. And it is why I rather say that religious claims has always been, and will always remain, magical until proven erroneous. Instead of accepting theological labels intended to ascertain gaps-for-gods such as ‘supernatural’.
I should also note that this allows me to define “magical”, while Shermer is silent on what he means with ‘supernatural’, making it a rather empty label.
We now know, but couldn’t before science was discovered and advanced, that any supposedly “magic” action would show up in closed systems as an excess.
And it is why I rather say that religious claims has always been, and will always remain, magical until proven erroneous.
I would say that the fact that they are “magical” is alone sufficient proof that they are erroneous, on a deep epistemological level. The claimaints erred in what is neccesary to make a proper, meaningful, ontological claim. The claim itself is in error precisely because it is “magical”.
subterranean.
The devil you say!
“Nevertheless, I contend that supernatural phenomena could arise by, say, God changing the speed of light, or moving stars about with his mind to spell out “I am a yam!” in the sky, and, at least in principle, those things could defy our understanding of the universe.
Shermer disagrees on that one point”
And I think I see why. Since our understanding of the world is not yet complete, we can’t conclude based on observations of some strange new phenomena that our current theories can’t predict, that these phenomena are supernatural.
And btw, what if we some things that “defy our understanding of the universe” were to forever elude our comprehension, would our limited capability to understand the world indicate that these phenomena are “supernatural,” or simply beyond our comprehension?
“we can’t conclude based on observations of some strange new phenomena that our current theories can’t predict, that these phenomena are supernatural”.
Why not? We can tell if it breaks thermodynamics, the quantum field vacuum, cosmology or evolution, say. That has little to do with completeness but with system knowledge; that the systems now cover all of physics, the universe or living organisms are coincidental.
Your argument is a gods-of-the-gaps argument, and as such it is also incompetent. (Incompetent as in the way that it shrinks every time it is subjected to test.)
“Your argument is a gods-of-the-gaps argument,”
On the contrary, I don’t stick supernatural god in places where our current scientific theories fail to provide an explanation.
“we can’t conclude based on observations of some strange new phenomena that our current theories can’t predict, that these phenomena are supernatural”.
Why not?
because the fact that our current theories don’t predict it are not sufficient evidence that the pheonomena are supernatural.
for example, at one point, our current theories did not predict atoms to emit light only at specific energy levels. this was not sufficent information to deduce that it was a supernatural phenomena. indeed, we know now that it is due to quantum physics, such as described by the schrodinger equation / dirac equation, etc. this single counterexample suffices to prove the supposition above neccessarily incorrect.
It seems to me the effects observed of a supernatural god would be fundamentally different than simply an aspect of natural law we didn’t yet understand. Gods have personality and intervene out of some purpose such as being upset with man’s behavior. Thus, the ensuing flood would not be something you could incorporate into natural law because it is whimsical and temporary. Not subject to evaluation like the lawful behavior of matter and energy. I assume this is what is meant by miracles.
So, the supernatural in this case isn’t a matter of filling a gap in our understanding of a regular and constant system of laws.
Gods have the attributes ascribed to them by the people who created them. Those attributes depend on the times, needs, abilities and understandings of their creators. For example, at one time gods lived on this planet in mountains, rivers, oceans, etc. Later they moved to the sky or heavens. Perhaps, by now, some have moved elsewhere in this universe or another universe. At one time humans met up with gods on the earth, climbed ladders or towers to heaven, were taken up by chariots, or ascended in body or spirit after death to be with them, now some believe that spacecraft will be used by us to go to the gods, or vice versa.
Beliefs about gods we’ve created change as we change and our understandings and needs change. Sometimes, when those gods are no longer perceived as needed they, hopefully, fade away like old soldiers.
So where does Creflo A. Dollar, Jr. fit into this scheme? Oh, I see. Dollar creates his own god who is defined in terms of money. Gods change as our needs (and wants) change. OK, I get it. 😎
Nature can be quite whimsical on its own. In one (in)famous case in Italy, a group of scientists who failed to correctly predict the occurrence of an earthquake was sentenced to 6 years in prison. But that was just that, a failure to predict an earthquake, not a confirmation that some supernatural force triggered it.
AFAIK, the scientists didn’t argue in court that their geology was right, therefore the event must have been supernatural, although, who knows, this line of defense might have saved them from jail time 😉
Wonderful Italy!
I disagree with the claim Jerry attributes to Sean Carroll. There is wiggle-room in our quantum laws. It is sometimes argued that occasional very rare minor miracles of certain kinds would not necessarily violate natural laws, since many of those laws are fundamentally probabilistic.
I think you have to pick your way very carefully through the meanings of ‘probabilistic’. I wonder if it is possible that while the outcome of an observation may be probabilistic the causes of the outcome are fully deterministic (but hidden from observation, or, affected by observation)?
As a god free person I am not concerned about the existence of gods, however I am certain enough for practical purposes that the Christian god, the Muslim god, the Jewish god (and so on) don’t exist. From which it follows, for practical purposes, that the Christian supernatural, the Muslim supernatural, the Jewish supernatural (and so on) also don’t exist.
So by reversing the argument (suspect logically, I realise) any ‘supernatural’ that possibly exists would be related to a god that possibly isn’t known. Not a great source of comfort for believers.
Right. A great deal of the conspicuously hypothetical going on here.
The more I think about it…the more I think we have Plato to blame for this mess.
The whole idea of the supernatural is that there are multiple layers / levels of reality, with some of them being “more real” than ours. And that’s what modern supernaturalists of all stripes are asserting: the real reality is not as it seems, but is pure mental energy / divine ground round of being / whatever.
That whole idea is not only very much outdated but incoherent from the get-go — so much so that this entire debate demonstrates that you can’t even define the concept in modern language given what we know to be true of reality.
So, here’s another definition of the term that might help clarify things:
“Supernatural: an ancient and thoroughly discredited concept of cosmology that, like Aristotelian Metaphysics and Platonic Idealism, nevertheless inexplicably and incoherently remains popular to this day despite centuries of scientific understanding to the contrary.”
b&
I’m happy to blame just about anything on Plato!
I blame Canada on Plato!
b&
I vouch for Democritus.
Don’t dis the presocratics or Ben will kick your ass. 🙂
I’m not dising presocrastics. Democritus was a presocratic and the “father of modern science”. Plato, on the other hand, lead to Catholicism.
…and then there was Epicurus, the oldest-known New Atheist; Eratosthenes, who first mapped the Solar System to scale….
b&
Don’t forget Hinduism’s Brahman. I would argue that it’s at least as bad an influence as Plato, in our current times. So Fritjof Capra and his plagiarists – such as Mr. Deepakity – should share at least a portion of the blame.
every claim that has ever been considered “super-natural” that is at all testable (e.g. mysticism, psychic powers, etc.) HAS been scientifically tested and shown to be false.
so there is that problem… the set of testable super-natural claims that remain to be evaluated as true or not true, is, currently empty. and so is the set of ostensibly “super-natural” claims that have been confirmed to be true. none have. there is the issue of those two sets being empty.
Let’s provisionally accept the claim that a divine being who can manipulate the physical constants of the Universe or break the laws of Physics to spell out “I am a yam!” in the sky is a supernatural being.
In the former case, it would be new evidence that the physical constants are in fact their own entities and not merely emergent properties of the actual stuff that makes up the Universe. Ok, so we now have an empirical finding that shows the constants can be changed, which drives the behavior of the matter and energy we can observe. We would then proceed to investigate how it is that the divine being adjusts the constants. In the latter case, we’d have a new boundary condition where the laws of Physics break down (just like the time immediately following the Big Bang) and would have a better understanding of the scope where our current observation applies.
Everything we know about how the Universe works arose from observations and testing them against various models and seeing what fits. Why would a being spelling out “I am a yam!” fall into a different category than something like dark energy or dark matter? Science does not hold the laws of Physics as we understand them now as sacred or dogmatic. In principle, if new evidence arose, it would be incorporated into our understanding of the Universe, just like every other new discovery we make. What for example, would be the distinguishing condition in called the “I am a yam!” message being outside the scope of our current models and the moment after the Big Bang being outside the scope of our current models? Where do we draw the line between what is unknown and what is unknown and supernatural? It’s an extra unnecessary category.
There’s another approach here that I think is at least equally as strong in labeling supernatural as incoherent as the fact that science changes and our physical laws arise out of observation, and that is to go to the dictionary definition.
There’s only two definitions there and the one we’re concerned with specifically incorporates some force “beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.” We’ve already discussed at length here that the laws of nature already have known scopes whether it is classical versus quantum mechanics or the point where all our understanding breaks down at the Big Bang.
That leaves “beyond scientific understanding” as the core claim for what makes something supernatural. I agree with Jerry that many claims people call supernatural would not in fact be beyond the reach of science, so those types of claims are simply wrong. That leaves us with all the other stuff we haven’t explained potentially belonging in the supernatural category if we were to take the liberal interpretation of the dictionary definition. This is utterly absurd, and I don’t think anyone would argue that unexplained things are supernatural now but become natural when they are not “beyond scientific understanding” anymore. So where does this leave the definition of supernatural? I argue it leaves it as an incoherent mess, much like free will.
In the free will debates on this site, much of the conversation revolves around why we should redefine a word that most people think of in ways explicitly defined by religion. In the same vein, why redefine supernatural when any attempt to do so goes against what the majority of the population thinks it means? Let’s throw it on the scrap heap of history along with free will (for the definition of supernatural is even less ambiguous that that of free will). To drive the point home one more time, we have explainable phenomena and unexplainable phenomena and using those terms avoids the confusion of cluttering up our language with explicitly religious and nonsensical terms.
What a pleasure reading such thoughtful, intelligent, and (generally)respectful discussion.
My problem in the entire discussion is understanding what supernatural even means.
If somehow tomorrow we universally understood that Gods existed, and prayers were answered, and people could read minds, and predict the future, wouldn’t all these things be considered part of the natural world?
In any debate about belief the first step should be ‘please define your god’. Trouble is that the debate either stops immediately or revolves around this definition endlessly, so getting on to ‘please define the supernatural’ rarely happens.
I was thinking about the same thing. If for example one were to prove the existence of soul and life after death as part of the reality, what would be supernatural about these elements of reality?
Another problem I have with the term is how naturalists often use it. They’ll note how things like thunder, or volcanoes were once considered “supernatural” events, and use them as examples of things we once thought were “supernatural”, but have since found natural explanations for.
The problem with is that labeling those things supernatural gives the term more credibility than it deserves. Thunder, and volcanoes actually happen. Prayers being answered for example, and every other thing I can think of that is labeled as supernatural don’t even happen as far as we can tell. So there isn’t even anything there to explain.
I’d have to precipitate Him to see if He’s a supernatant.
😀
There are currently plenty of things in science that we recognize as “natural” that we really have virtually no explanation for. For example “spooky action at a distance” is really how we should describe all of the fundamental forces since we really have no satisfying explanation of how they do what they do. And yet this does not stop us from calling them “natural.”
Sub
WP is not subbing me to threads again.
“The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages
Part of The Wiles Lectures
AUTHOR: Robert BartlettDATE PUBLISHED: April 2008AVAILABILITY: In stockFORMAT: PaperbackISBN: 9780521702553
How did people of the medieval period explain physical phenomena, such as eclipses or the distribution of land and water on the globe? What creatures did they think they might encounter: angels, devils, witches, dogheaded people? This fascinating book explores the ways in which medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural and showing how the idea of the supernatural came to be invented in the Middle Ages. Robert Bartlett examines how theologians and others sought to draw lines between the natural, the miraculous, the marvelous and the monstrous, and the many conceptual problems they encountered as they did so. The final chapter explores the extraordinary thought-world of Roger Bacon as a case study exemplifying these issues. By recovering the mentalities of medieval writers and thinkers the book raises the critical question of how we deal with beliefs we no longer share.
Fascinating study of the invention of the supernatural in the Middle Ages
By one of Europe’s leading medieval historians
Essential reading for scholars and students of medieval history and medieval studies”
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/european-history-1000-1450/natural-and-supernatural-middle-ages
I think you said it yourself–if God is bound by natural laws how can God be super natural?
The fundamental conceit of theism is that the God-mind can create, change the identity of, and control the physical world. It need not rely on measurable forces to accomplish these ends. If a liquid is water at one observable instant and at the next possible observable instant it is wine because this mind wished it to be so, then the concept of force as we understand it does not seem to be involved. The planets could be at various points in their orbits at one instant and at the next they could be in conjunction. These are instants of time unconnected by cause and effect, and would strongly indicate the existence of a God like type of mind.
Consequently I would opt for a third option not mentioned by Shermer. If a God exists it could interact with physical reality in an observable but non-natural way(the primacy of mind over matter is just about the most unnatural thing there is). Until such interactions are observed it is all just an imaginative fantasy.
This thread may be dead already, but it strikes me as I read the comments that no one has mentioned – nor has Jerry – actual creation as the litmus test for what is “god”. Everyone is talking about supernatural phenomenon, and can god affect the material world, etc., etc- and others rightly point out how is that different from a super powerful alien race? But what about the key being that this being has supposedly created humans? Any being in the running for acknowledgment as “god” must prove that it created humans. Anything short of proof of that only proves that it is a super powerful being with powers we do not understand.