Studying the supernatural

This topic has been at the fringe, and sometimes the focus, of a number of debates here. Apologies to those who are weary of it, as acknowledgement of this fact I have attempted to tie things in with the EvC theme this forum is intended for. If preferred, I'll add this to an open thread.

Can science even investigate the supernatural?

There are of course two broad possible answers to the question posed by this debate. There are others, I'll leave those as an exercise for the student.

1. Intrinsically, no
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   Science studies the natural and so by definition can not investigate the supernatural. This seems like a reasonable position enough to take, Stephen J. Gould formulated famously as Non-Overlapping MAgisteria.

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   But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain.

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   This is certainly a valid way of defining things. Science studies a set domain and if something existed out of this domain then science cannot study it.
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   Of course, it may be true that such a domain exists, but that is only so because it has been defined that evidence and reason cannot be employed in ruling it out...and that's the only way we know how to reliably rule things out.
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   The problem with this - if it weren't apparent - is that, if it were true that the scientific method cannot be applied, then how can anyone know anything about the supernatural? One can invoke alternative ways of knowing than the scientific method such as through appeals to personal experience, of course, and this has been done considerably in other threads.
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   For instance, I know I own a cat. This isn't because science has studied the cat and confirmed its existence. And the argument goes that I know I own a cat because I experience the cat personally. Even if I lived alone and had no visitors I could still say I know I own a cat.
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   So surely then, if I can know I have a cat - with no evidence but my own personal experiences of the cat, we can know a god with no evidence but our own personal experiences of the god.
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   So goes the argument, to boil it down.
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2. Yes, of course
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   Here I find myself allying with creationists. What joyous times!
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   The thing is, science investigates what can detected. It doesn't care whether the thing being detected is metaphysically natural or metaphysically supernatural. Science is a methodology for investigations.
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   Our ancestors may survive in some supernatural realm detectable only to spirit mediums. If that is so, then by definition science can say nothing except that people lie, or can be delusional and that such theories are evidentially supported.
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   On the other hand, ghosts may exist. And these are detectable. Whether it be by sight, sound, or maybe vibrating at frequencies above visible light. Whatever, if they can be detected science can confirm their existence.
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   Most people would be happy to call a ghost supernatural, but if the Intrinsically, no people insist then it must be that ghosts are actually natural phenomena in this setup.
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   And this is where creationists and I agree. After all, most of them believe that science will ultimately vindicate everything they've said. To them, science is still the study of God's creation and through it, we can prove God's imminent existence. Where we disagree is the current status of that situation: They think we're getting there, some even think we're there now.
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   Since the large part of the creationist position is premised on the notion that a set of supernatural events occurred that can be evidenced in a scientific context, we should not adhere to the strict non-overlapping understanding of the supernatural in the context of EvC.

In conclusionIf debate is to be meaningful we have to grant that it is possible to infer some information about the supernatural based on its natural effects. There are some supernatural propositions which have very subtle or no natural effects. These maybe impossible, or impractically difficult for science to study, indeed they are as impossible as those that construct them intend for them to be.But not all constructs that are deemed 'supernatural' are necessarily closed to science to study. For all we know, the supernatural realm may follow certain regularities or laws that can be inferred from the natural. In which case, science will expand its borders without worrying about the philosophical objections people might throw up.And herein lies my final argument: If the 'Intrinsically, no' people are right - there is no way they can know they are right. Their only source of information about this realm is via a detection system that we know is prone to false positives (the human mind), with little to no capacity for corroboration. Furthermore, if they are right, they have no way of knowing if gods, ghosts, djinn or domovoi are in fact supernatural beings.Science studies experienced phenomena (whether direct or indirect experience). If the supernatural can be experienced, science can study it. Even if it means paradigm shifting upheavals. If the supernatural cannot be experienced, science can still study entities that are commonly called supernatural - but the Intrinsically, no people will just insist they are natural.

I was presenting my opponents position in the strongest terms I could. I think I covered this point when I put my own position forward viz., "The thing is, science investigates what can detected...Science is a methodology for investigations. "I was more thorough in my first draft, but my first draft was three times longer than the final product. I have to leave something to debate, right? Precisely the point I was hoping to be able to make. Furthermore, there is independent evidence that cat's exist and that people own them.

No we don't. See the OP for a counterexample to this universal. If you are in the 'intrinsically, no' crowd - the answer must necessarily be 'I don't know and I can never know'If you are in the 'yes, of course' crowd, then yes ghosts are supernatural but they are potentially studyable. I believed I called that shot in the OP, too

I don't think science declares things as 'natural'. I don't think science cares. Philosophers (specifically, metaphysicians) are the ones that say things like this. Science just investigates what it can and some people label these things as 'natural'. I believe this is a way to artificially protect the supernatural (or rather as an explanatory framework, explaining why science hasn't confirmed the dearly held and sincere beliefs of some people).Your general point, however, is not particularly disputed.

From a Christian perspective, God knew that your shoulder hurt, knew that you wanted it to not hurt. Any prayer you make to that end is superfluous. Therefore your shoulder would have been healed regardless of the prayer. And therefore the correlation of prayer and healing is in fact, a coincidence. It might have been healed by God, but the fact that you prayed prior to it does not provide evidence of this fact, since it would have happened anyway.For Biblical references please see Matthew 6.I think we'll need something a little more concrete if we are going to study the supernatural. Are you saying that all supernatural phenomena are necessarily beyond the purview of experiential study? Are you of the position that it is in principle impossible for God to appear in front of multiple observers in a manner that lends for corroboration? That he could not perform miraculous events that alter the normal 'natural' course of events in a way that can be detected above and beyond the personal experiences of individuals?Is the supernatural intrinsically indistinguishable from the delusional? Or is there a little more meat to it than that?

I'm afraid there's no way to make it simpler. God knew that your shoulder hurt before you prayed. God could have healed you without your prayer, and you have no way of knowing from this set-up what would have happened had you not bothered to pray. The fact that you prayed and then were healed tells us nothing about whether the prayer was of any importance.You are in pain. You take experimental pain killers. The pain goes away. Is this because the pain killers actually work, is it because your pain just went away naturally, or is it because God healed you? I was talking about the whole of Chapter 6 in its context. But a better and more direct wording would be:

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And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
This, then, is how you should pray: "'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name...

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Indeed, the inconsistency of the way prayer is proposed to work is surely something that would hamper study, not aid it. We, the participants in this thread. Straggler was proposing we study prayer in a large scale. You proposed that you prayed for shoulder pain to go away and it did.Imagine a drug trial that went like that. They ask 1 person to take their experimental pain killer and then ask 'Did the pain go away?' if the answer is yes, they conclude the pain killer is effective and ship it out. How can they rule out that the person took the pain killer and said a little healing prayer and they were subsequently healed by God not the pain killers?This is in contrast with the way it is actually done: hundreds of people take a pain killer and a control group takes a placebo and the results are compared to see if the experimental pain killer has any effect. This means that the cases where the pain would have gone away anyway will be 'averaged out', and people on both the placebo and the real deal will pray in approximately equal measure, balancing that effect (if any) out. If you want to propose an unpredictable deity, then I say you have an unfalsifiable and potentially unverifiable deity. This means it is not amenable to study, there is no way to know anything about said deity (including its proposed unpredictability) and any claims by anyone to know anything about it are indistinguishable from delusion.Don't worry, I don't consider being delusional a slight on a person's character: I'm delusional. The important point is that there are ways and means to minimise what we are deluded about. Checks and balances of the human mind, so to speak.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

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

Well, I don't have any strong objections to your stated viewpoints and I don't think they are significantly different from my own. As such I think what happens next is that we don't debate any further. There are possibly some minor differences, I suppose we could dig into finding those and argue minutiae - but I'm not sure I'm interested in that.