Studying the supernatural

Well we have had physicists offering to eat their pants on live TV if the 'faster than light' travel thing is confirmed.Christ alone knows what some of us will do if CERN actually discovers heaven!!!!!!Play ping pong with my own eyeballs?

You will all collectively say - we should have listened to GDR all along.

Thanks for the link!Does that mean we can conclude that the supernatural cannot be evidenced, I wonder?I would like to see a meta analysis but I would be surprised if there were enough usable studies.

I think it means we can conclude that when studied scientifically prayer doesn't appear to work.No doubt believers will claim that the very act of studying it in this way negates the effects or somesuch. Anecdotal "evidence" will continue to be rife. But the best scientific study done to date doesn't corrobrate those subjective claims. I think the quality of most of them, rather than the quantity, is the main problem. They need to be conducted just like the best medical trials.

I don't think that is what Chuck meant. I think he meant that if we all agree we can study the effects of prayer, then we can also all agree we can study the bible and see if what it says is true or not.

I see what you mean.I interpreted him to say we can study prayer via the bible.

Your right, and neither does our current models of cosmology.
I wont be surprised if CERN discovers a substance called AETHER in the near future.

Actually our model of cosmology works very well indeed. It just isn't entirely compatible with our other equally successful models (i.e. quantum theory). So we know something somewhere has to be a bit wrong in our scientific understanding of reality as a whole. Well this is probably more likely than discovering heaven.

I'm recusing myself from participation as Percy and will begin moderating this thread tomorrow with a goal toward keeping discussion focused on studying the supernatural while confining discussion of the nature of knowledge to the Scientific Knowledge thread.

Roughly 95 percent of the stuff that makes up our universe is unexplained and inexplicable as of yet.It seems we are living in a age of discovery. Just a week ago the speed limit of the universe it seems has been violated.I bet Mr. Clarke is right:"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."Edited by 1.61803, : No reason given.

Honestly, I don't know.If we assume that the supernatural does exist, then it seems that science simply cannot investigate it (else why hasn't it). Of course, on the other hand the supernatural may simply not exist.But I don't see how we can infer from what science has/can investigated about that which it has/can not. It doesn't follow.I don't really like the term "supernatural" though, because it doesn't impart a lot of meaning to me. As you question, does it imply an intrinsic property or is it simply assigned as a placeholder for one that is yet to be revealed? I don't think we can scientifically answer that question.I prefer the term "paranormal".So lets say we have some supernatural/paranormal activity, how about the Burning Bush? -- its on fire but its not being consumed. And us scientistist are studying it... but everything we can determine suggests that the bush should be being consumed by the fire and we have no explanation for how it could not be, and yet.. it isn't being consumed. So then what? You just leave it as "we don't know what's happening here". What's the purpose of assigning some property of "supernatural" to it? Esspecially if it doesn't add any meaning to our explanation? At least the term paranormal implies "this isn't normal", i.e. we have no explanation. Wait, how do we know that's the only source?

Notice that I started the paragraph with a conditional: If the 'Intrinsically, no' people are right - there is no way they can know they are right.The 'Intrinsically, no' people tend to claim that the only source of information is through 'personal experience'. They do this as a response to the conundrum: if it were true that the scientific method cannot be applied, then how can anyone know anything about the supernatural?My point is that their own argument undermines them, as you hint at with your question. We don't know this is the only possible way of getting information about the supernatural - and their own argument precludes them from knowing this, but they still claim it. This is evidence that the rationalisation is purely an ad hoc one to save their preferred metaphysical theories.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : clarification and spelling

Here is an article from a 1998 issue of Newsweek. The bulk of the article pretty much mirrors my feelings on the subject.

quote:

---

According to a study released last year, 40 percent of American scientists believe in a personal God — not merely an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray.

​

To Joel Primack, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, "practicing science [even] has a spiritual goal" — namely, providing inspiration. It turns out, explains Primack, that the largest size imaginable, the entire universe, is 10 with 29 zeros after it (in centimeters). The smallest size describes the subatomic world, and is 10 with 24 zeros (and a decimal) in front of it. Humans are right in the middle. Does this return us to a privileged place? Primack doesn't know, but he describes this as a "soul-satisfying cosmology."
Although skeptical scientists grumble that science has no need of religion, forward-looking theologians think religion needs science. Religion "is incapable of making its moral claims persuasive or its spiritual comfort effective [unless] its cognitive claims" are credible, argues physicist-theologian Russell.
Although upwards of 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal God, fewer believe in a God who parts seas, or creates species one by one. To make religions forged millenniums ago relevant in an age of atoms and DNA, some theologians are "incorporating knowledge gained from natural science into the formation of doctrinal beliefs," says Ted Peters of Pacific Lutheran Seminary. Otherwise, says astronomer and Jesuit priest William Stoeger, religion is in danger of being seen, by people even minimally acquainted with science, "as an anachronism."
Science cannot prove the existence of God, let alone spy him at the end of a telescope. But to some believers, learning about the universe offers clues about what God might be like.
As W. Mark Richardson of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences says, "Science may not serve as an eyewitness of God the creator, but it can serve as a character witness." One place to get a glimpse of God's character, ironically, is in the workings of evolution.
Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist who became a priest in the Church of England in 1971, has no quarrel with evolution. To the contrary: he finds in it signs of God's nature. He infers, from evolution, that God has chosen to limit his omnipotence and omniscience. In other words, it is the appearance of chance mutations, and the Darwinian laws of natural selection acting on this "variation," that bring about the diversity of life on Earth.
This process suggests a divine humility, a God who acts selflessly for the good of creation, says theologian John Haught, who founded the Georgetown (University) Center for the Study of Science and Religion. He calls this a "humble retreat on God's part": much as a loving parent lets a child be, and become, freely and without interference, so does God let creation make itself.
It would be an exaggeration to say that such sophisticated theological thinking is remaking religion at the level of the local parish, mosque or synagogue. But some of these ideas do resonate with ordinary worshipers and clergy.
For Billy Crockett, president of Walking Angel Records in Dallas, the discoveries of quantum mechanics that he reads about in the paper reinforce his faith that "there is a lot of mystery in the nature of things." For other believers, an appreciation of science deepens faith. "Science produces in me a tremendous awe," says Sister Mary White of the Benedictine Meditation Center in St. Paul, Minn. "Science and spirituality have a common quest, which is a quest for truth."
And if science has not yet influenced religious thought and practice at the grass-roots level very much, just wait, says Ted Peters of CTNS. Much as feminism sneaked up on churches and is now shaping the liturgy, he predicts, "in 10 years science will be a major factor in how many ordinary religious people think."
Not everyone believes that's such a hot idea. "Science is a method, not a body of knowledge," says Michael Shermer, a director of the Skeptics Society, which debunks claims of the paranormal. "It can have nothing to say either way about whether there is a God. These are two such different things, it would be like using baseball stats to prove a point in football." Another red flag is that adherents of different faiths — like the Orthodox Jews, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics and Muslims who spoke at the June conference in Berkeley — tend to find, in science, confirmation of what their particular religion has already taught them.
Take the difficult Christian concept of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. It turns out that this duality has a parallel in quantum physics. In the early years of this century, physicists discovered that entities thought of as particles, like electrons, can also act as waves. And light, considered a wave, can in some experiments act like a barrage of particles. The orthodox interpretation of this strange situation is that light is, simultaneously, wave and particle. Electrons are, simultaneously, waves and particles. Which aspect of light one sees, which face an electron turns to a human observer, varies with the circumstances.
So, too, with Jesus, suggests physicist F. Russell Stannard of England's Open University. Jesus is not to be seen as really God in human guise, or as really human but acting divine, says Stannard: "He was fully both." Finding these parallels may make some people feel, says Polkinghorne, "that this is not just some deeply weird Christian idea."
Jews aren't likely to make the same leap. And someone who is not already a believer will not join the faithful because of quantum mechanics; conversely, someone in whom science raises no doubts about faith probably isn't even listening. But to people in the middle, for whom science raises questions about religion, these new concordances can deepen a faith already present.
As Feit says, "I don't think that by studying science you will be forced to conclude that there must be a God. But if you have already found God, then you can say, from understanding science, 'Ah, I see what God has done in the world'."
In one sense, science and religion will never be truly reconciled. Perhaps they shouldn't be. The default setting of science is eternal doubt; the core of religion is faith. Yet profoundly religious people and great scientists are both driven to understand the world. Once, science and religion were viewed as two fundamentally different, even antago-nistic, ways of pursuing that quest, and science stood accused of smothering faith and killing God. Now, it may strengthen belief. And although it cannot prove God's existence, science might whisper to believers where to seek the divine.
With Marian Westley

---

The question still remains though as to what is supernatural. Is it just some form of ghostly spiritual life floating around in our world that is nearly always unperceivable, or is it another normally unperceivable universe/dimension around us in which there is some form of intelligent life?If it is the latter, then it seems to me that science might very well be available to discover it, in the terms of the Scientific American article that Straggler linked to earlier. Here again is that link. It seems to me that the information is that article is the crux of the notion of science "Studying the Supernatural" Hidden Worlds of Dark Matter - An Entire Universe May Be Interwoven Silently Within Our Own

Hi RAZD,That was certainly lengthy. I’m going to try to keep my response shorter, so as to prevent going off on a tangent.You’ve recreated some terminology in your prior participation in this thread — I’ll say right now, I couldn’t care less whether you say un-natural or a-natural or supernatural. The reason is that my entire point has been that these subsets are unnecessary, and harmfully so.There are two sets: {exist} and {not exist}. These sets are fully known to nature, but not to us. We use our senses to explore nature. We ask her questions through experimental tests, and we do our best to accurately make sense of her answers. We then make our own sets of {exist} and {not exist}, made to mirror those of nature to the best of our ability.Whether we’re currently able to test a given hypothesis to determine whether its subject belongs in the {exist} or {not exist} set is irrelevant — that hypothesis is still either valid or invalid the moment we write it down. We might not know which is which, and we might not be able to for some timebut that doesn’t mean that investigation will forever be impossible.The term supernatural has traditionally been used to describe phenomenon that share certain themes in common. They tend to be unfalsifiable to one degree or another (sometimes this is actually due to the current unfeasibility of investigation; sometimes not). They tend to seemingly contradict current understandings of nature’s laws in a very significant way. Even the term itself, supernatural, means above or higher than nature; phenomenon carrying this label are typically understood to operate on a higher level than mundane nature. That they belong to a new, special set, one immune to mundane things like science or human understanding. Indeed, when a mundane explanation is brought forth that feasibly explains the aberrant observation, many people will actually still prefer the supernatural hypothesis, simply on the basis of personal preference. So immune to science are these so-called supernatural phenomenon that even a plausible naturalistic explanation after a full investigation is frequently ignored! The terms you’re trying to use simply add another layer of semantics to the problem; they don’t change the nature of the beast at all.RAZD, an actual observation of a phenomenon that contradicts well-established theory should never be dropped down the supernatural hole. These observations are the potential keys to discovering where our maps do not match the territory, whether because we’re wrong or because we just haven’t even seen that part of the territory before. Statistically speaking, the vast, overwhelming majority are more likely to be a poor observation followed by overeager conclusions or a thousand other more normal phenomenon that completely match with our current understanding of nature and her laws. But those rare few exceptions are the hints that will drive another round of exploration and explanation!Supernatural is an extraneous term. There should be no distinction whatsoever between phenomenon that lack explanations. There are only two sets: those things that {exist}, and those that do {not exist}. Our identification of what belongs in each of those sets is governed by evidence, our confidence controlled by the degree of testing we’ve been capable of so far. The term supernatural simply provides an unfounded excuse for people to either disregard a hypothesis totally, or to hold significant confidence in the accuracy of a hypothesis in the absence of evidence justifying such confidence.Why bother with such a label? Why not simply acknowledge the difficulty in repeating observations of such phenomenon under controlled circumstances, and go about trying to determine a way to do so, even if it’s beyond current capabilities? Neutrinos, as an example, are extremely difficult to detect because they pass through matter about as easily as through empty space. A hundred years ago, detection would not have even been possible. Did we identify neutrinos as magic? Did we call them supernatural? No — we thought about the problem and eventually designed and constructed detectors for the weakly-interacting, elusive particles.Why are phenomenon frequently identified as ghosts, as an example, treated differently? Why does this seems difficult or impossible to test at the moment translate to this is outside the realm of science entirely, and can never be tested?Perhaps most importantly, why is this distinction drawn only for specific phenomenon, and not for all such difficult to test phenomenon?

As of today I'll be actively moderating this thread. Please keep the focus on issues surrounding the study of the supernatural. Please take discussion of the nature of scientific knowledge to the Scientific Knowledge thread.