The Science of the Supernatural

If Darwinism fails then supernatural causes are back on the table and should be included in science.

I do not think there can be a science of the supernatural.

I do not think that if Darwinism fails that supernatural causes will become acceptable.

If the hope of ID is that supernatural causes will be allowed back into science if they can only just get rid of Darwinism, ID is doomed.

The tools and methods of ID cannot differentiate a supernatural cause from a natural cause anyways.

Thoughts?

1,433 thoughts on “The Science of the Supernatural

  1. walto: I said I don’t know what revealing knowledge means, and you “respond” by saying God can do it.

    You don’t need to know what something is to know it happens. I don’t know what Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis is but I know it’s a thing.

    walto: God is not truth then, because truth doesn’t “just know” a single thing.

    Actually, Truth is a person and as a person it does know stuff.

    Your problem here is that you don’t take into account that God is a Trinity.

    Did you ever read Edward’s short unpublished essay on the Trinity? He explains this very well except in the context of God being love rather than truth.

    I know you think this is all silly religious foolishness but that does not make it illogical.

    peace

  2. BruceS: 1. For any given logically possible world W and a given logically consistent statement S that can be modeled in W, then God knows whether or not S under a given model is true in W. (By modeled, I mean reference given for names and predicates).

    2. For any logically consistent statement S, God knows all logically possible worlds where S has some model and is true under that model for the world.

    I don’t know what you mean by “statement” in those. I take it, based on what you say about “modeling” that they’re just uninterpreted WFFs?

  3. Neil Rickert: It is actually very easy to have truth outside of a system of axioms.All you need to do is smuggle in additional unstated axioms, but be in denial that you are doing this.

    For fifthmonarchyman, those unstated axioms are often called “revelations”.Among philosophers, the unstated axioms appear to be part of metaphysics.

    And what do you rely on in your own case when, e.g., you make statements like this:

    It is actually very easy to have truth outside of a system of axioms.All you need to do is smuggle in additional unstated axioms, but be in denial that you are doing this.

  4. fifthmonarchyman: You don’t need to know what something is to know it happens.I don’t know what Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis is but I know it’s a thing.

    Actually, Truth is a person and as a person it does know stuff.

    Your problem here is that you don’t take into account that God is a Trinity.

    Did you ever read Edward’s short unpublished essay on the Trinity? He explains this very well except in the context of God being love rather than truth.

    I know you think this is all silly religious foolishness but that does not make it illogical.

    peace

    No. Actually, truth is not a person at all and cannot be. Failing to recognize that simple fact constitutes the basic confusion that has made your entire life absurd in an almost Camus-like way.

    ETA: I hope you will forgive the ad hominem here, but you really must drop that absurd claim in order for you to understand anything whatever about anything whatever. Right now, you seem to me to be floundering about in a kind of cuckoo dreamworld. If truth is actually better than illusion, then it’s not a good way to live.

  5. walto: No. Actually, truth is not a person at all and cannot be.

    quote:

    Understanding may be predicated of this love because it is the love of the understanding both objectively and subjectively. God loves the understanding and that understanding also flows out in love so that the Divine understanding is in the Deity subsisting in love. It is not a blind love. Even in creatures there is consciousness included in the very nature of the will or act of the soul, and tho perhaps not so that it can so properly be said that it is a seeing or undemanding will, yet it may truly and properly be said so in God by reason of God’s infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole Divine essence flows out and subsists in this act, and the Son is in the Holy Spirit tho it does not proceed from Him by reason ( of the fact) that the understanding must be considered as prior in the order of nature to the will or love or act, both in creatures and in the Creator. The understanding is so in the Spirit that the Spirit may be said to know, as the Spirit of God is truly and perfectly said to know and to search all things, even the deep things of God.

    end quote:

    Edwards

    lots more good stuff there if you are willing to look.

    peace

  6. BruceS:
    Cheryl Misak in Aeon writes on some of the topics that Neil and I discussed:truth, pragmatism, logical empiricism:

    ” For Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, much of philosophy was mere nonsense. Then came Frank Ramsey’s pragmatic alternative.”
    https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle

    Thanks for sharing that! There’s certainly an interesting story to be told about why the later Wittgenstein has so many moves that look like pragmatism, and Ramsey is a big part of that story. Elsewhere Misak tells the story about how Ramsey got interested in Peirce. As a historian of American philosophy Misak is superb, though she has an animus against subjectivism and relativism that leads her to misread James and underestimate Rorty.

    BruceS: I like the idea, but I am not clear how you accept both Peircean truth and correspondence theory for truth for scientific realism.

    I do have the intuition that some kind of small c correspondence is needed for scientific realism because realism requires ontology and reference. But I also think that truth as the end of “right” type of inquiry makes sense as a way to understand truth.

    I think one might be able to reconcile these two by taking correspondence as representation in the sense we have discussed for mental representation and somehow finding commonalities in

    1. single person cognitive inquiry by perception/action to form accurate mental representations, and
    2. intersubjective inquiry in a scientific domain to build true theories.

    That is pretty vague, but it is the best I’ve got.

    That’s pretty much what I got, too. But I think that one key difference between (1) and (2) is pretty much that inter-subjectivity allows for each embodied subject to revise his or her mental reps. A solitary inquirer can change his or her reps through trial and error, but the more different ‘perspectives’ are being brought to be bear within a specific situation, the more information is available to everyone about which aspects of their models are just artifacts of their own cognitive processing and which aspects are reliably tracking real patterns. So there’s a real story to tell, grounded in cognitive neuroscience, about why intersubjectivity is a reliable guide to objectivity.

    For ethics, I am not sure if naturalism requires correspondence theory or indeed any ontology at all.

    Maybe that depends on whether one thinks that facts about human flourishing are relevant to figuring out which ethical values are good for us and which ethical values are bad for us.

  7. fifthmonarchyman: quote:

    Understanding may be predicated of this love because it is the love of the understanding both objectively and subjectively. God loves the understanding and that understanding also flows out in love so that the Divine understanding is in the Deity subsisting in love. It is not a blind love. Even in creatures there is consciousness included in the very nature of the will or act of the soul, and tho perhaps not so that it can so properly be said that it is a seeing or undemanding will, yet it may truly and properly be said so in God by reason of God’s infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole Divine essence flows out and subsists in this act, and the Son is in the Holy Spirit tho it does not proceed from Him by reason ( of the fact) that the understanding must be considered as prior in the order of nature to the will or love or act, both in creatures and in the Creator. The understanding is so in the Spirit that the Spirit may be said to know, as the Spirit of God is truly and perfectly said to know and to search all things, even the deep things of God.

    end quote:

    Edwards

    peace

    Yeah, that seems about 80% nonsense to me, and, I believe, must do so to anybody rightly considered a rational human being.

  8. walto: No. Actually, truth is not a person at all and cannot be. Failing to recognize that simple fact constitutes the basic confusion that has made your entire life absurd in an almost Camus-like way.

    It’s rather endearing that you believe so strongly in the possibility of education that you’re still treating FMM as someone who can be reasoned with.

  9. walto: Yeah, that seems about 80% nonsense to me

    That is because you have not met the God who is Truth!!!!

    walto: must do so to anybody rightly considered a rational human being.

    The problem is that a good chunk of humanity disagree with you and think this stuff is perfectly logical and sublime in it’s reasoning.

    You are making yourself and your own limited experience the ultimate judge of what is rational and what is not.

    That is not a recipe for clear thinking

    peace

  10. fifthmonarchyman: I know you think this is all silly religious foolishness but that does not make it illogical.

    It doesn’t make it logical either. Since God is Logic as well, any silly religious foolishness would seem to need to be logically sound as well as true.

  11. walto: And what do you rely on in your own case when, e.g., you make statements like this

    I was expressing an opinion. People can decide for themselves whether they agree or disagree.

    I really don’t understand this idea that we are only supposed to utter truths and never have personal opinions. That’s not how the world works.

  12. Perhaps it might help for you to explain exactly why you think that Truth can’t be personal.

    In other words how can you tell that something is personal rather than impersonal?

    I believe in the past you have denied that you can ever know if anything is a person rather than a mindless philosophical zombie so you are not exactly an expert on that sort of thing.

    peace

  13. fifthmonarchyman: The problem is that a good chunk of humanity disagree with you and think this stuff is perfectly logical and sublime in it’s reasoning.

    You are making yourself and your own limited experience the ultimate judge of what is rational and what is not.

    A good chunk don’t believe in exactly the version of God that you do, therefore they believe in idols. Since it is also perfectly logical and sublime belief for idol worshippers , it might be an issue to claim their beliefs as evidence of the correctness of your position.

  14. newton: any silly religious foolishness would seem to need to be logically sound as well as true.

    God and not human reasoning is the standard for what is logical and true.

    Paraphrasing Edwards

    Logic is just the way God thinks “and by reason of God’s infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole Divine essence flows out and subsists in this act.”

    The Father is the subject of thought the Spirit is the object of thought and the Son is the Logos (Logic)

    peace

  15. newton: it might be an issue to claim their beliefs as evidence of the correctness of your position.

    I be sure not to do that then 😉

    peace

  16. Kantian Naturalist: It’s rather endearing that you believe so strongly in the possibility of education that you’re still treating FMM as someone who can be reasoned with.

    Haha. I know. I pity myself sometimes.

  17. Neil Rickert: I was expressing an opinion.People can decide for themselves whether they agree or disagree.

    I really don’t understand this idea that we are only supposed to utter truths and never have personal opinions.That’s not how the world works.

    Whether something is an opinion or not is entirely orthogonal to whether or not it is true. That something is an opinion is just a function of whether somebody believes it.

  18. fifthmonarchyman: Perhaps it might help for you to explain exactly why you think that Truth can’t be personal.

    I have no idea what truth being personal means, and I don’t think you do either.

  19. fifthmonarchyman: God and not human reasoning is the standard for what is logical and true.

    Paraphrasing Edwards

    Logic is just the way God thinks “and by reason of God’s infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole Divine essence flows out and subsists in this act.”

    Almost exactly the same confusion that Neil is participating in.

  20. fifthmonarchyman: In other words how can you tell that something is personal rather than impersonal?

    I believe in the past you have denied that you can ever know if anything is a person rather than a mindless philosophical zombie so you are not exactly an expert on that sort of thing.

    Haha, you’re right. I’m probably not the guy for the nuts puzzle of the day.

  21. walto: Whether something is an opinion or not is entirely orthogonal to whether or not it is true. That something is an opinion is just a function of whether somebody believes it.

    How would you decide if a statement were true?

  22. ALL

    This has been a long and enjoyable discussion but it looks to be winding down. Probably all that is left from your side is the name calling and mockery.

    How about we skip that part this one time 😉

    Thank you all for the diversion.

    peace

  23. fifthmonarchyman: God and not human reasoning is the standard for what is logical and true.

    Wonder why He created beings capable of reasoning if the reasoning does not result in valid conclusions.

    Paraphrasing Edwards

    Logic is just the way God thinks “and by reason of God’s infinitely more perfect manner of acting so that the whole Divine essence flows out and subsists in this act.”

    The Father is the subject of thought the Spirit is the object of thought and the Son is the Logos (Logic)

    Understand the principle. A little short on details.

  24. Kantian Naturalist: . As a historian of American philosophy Misak is superb, though she has an animus against subjectivism and relativism that leads her to misread James and underestimate Rorty.

    Fair enough, but she is from U of Toronto, so that has got to count for something in her favor, at least for me! Seriously, I think the sidebar said she was publishing a biography of Ramsay sometime this year. I knew about some of his work eg in truth and in Ramsay sentences, but I had not realized his place in the pragmatic tradition. So I will be checking that biography out.

    That’s pretty much what I got, too.But I think that one key difference between (1) and (2) is pretty much that inter-subjectivity allows for each embodied subject to revise his or her mental reps.

    That makes sense.

    Then language and science norms have to be intersubjective too. But that does not seem true at first for norms relating to (mis)representations. However, maybe you could extend the selection justification for representation norms to a sort of intersubjectivity by including past members of the species to be part of that population of subjects. Though that’s probably stretching things too far.

    You did mention objectivity, which is important, but I’ll not comment since I have pontificated enough about product (ie ontological) objectivity versus process objectivity (ie using the “right” type of inquiry).

    Maybe that depends on whether one thinks that facts about human flourishing are relevant to figuring out which ethical values are good for us and which ethical values are bad for us.

    I do think that. But I do not think that ethical standards correspond to those facts about flourishing, or indeed to anything in the natural world. I also do think truth about ethical norms is a variant of the ends of inquiry approach (combined with consistency).

    However, there may be room for limited pluralism among cultures with regard to ethical standards, and so there would be different communities of inquirers for each culture to make that pluralism possible. I recognize I am treading on the thin ice of cultural relativism, but I am hoping the human flourishing bit keeps me from falling through.

  25. Kantian Naturalist: It’s rather endearing that you believe so strongly in the possibility of education that you’re still treating FMM as someone who can be reasoned with.

    Or he could be pursuing the research into combining drive-by philosophy with drive-by less-the-complimentary commentary, research which he expressed interest in earlier in the thread.

  26. newton: Wonder why He created beings capable of reasoning if the reasoning does not result in valid conclusions.

    The only way for any reasoning to result in valid conclusions is for it to begin with the proper presuppositions.

    When you willfully reject the presuppositions that God has revealed and substitute your own all sorts of goofiness necessarily results.

    Presuppositions come before reason.

    Peace

  27. fifthmonarchyman: God and not human reasoning is the standard for what is logical and true.

    Fair enough.

    But why don’t you understand that as a metaphor, as a figure of speech?

    Even back when I was a devout Christian, I understood “God is truth” to be a metaphor. For if it is not a metaphor, then it is an absurdity.

  28. fifthmonarchyman: It’s important to remember that at least one of the persons in the Godhead has revealed himself in human form as a male and referred to another of the persons as Father.

    While we are on the subject I’d like to point out that because of the incarnation God exists both inside the system that is the universe and outside of it. So he can both know the truth of an axiom of the system and understand how that it works out in time.

    peace

    OK, I knew you’d have a reason, since of course I was aware such usage of He/His is common. But I wondered what those reasons would be.

    I’m OK with what you say about God existing outside of spacetime. They don’t call it the “God’s-eye” of the universe because of the scenery!

    Existing inside time seems more related to one’s theology then to a general concept of God, but I understand some versions of Christianity would do that. Spinozan classes of Gods too, I suppose.

  29. @ Bruce

    Googled “Ramsey sentence” which I see Rudolph Carnap developed. If Wikipedia is accurate, Carnap was on the right track.

  30. Neil Rickert: Even back when I was a devout Christian, I understood “God is truth” to be a metaphor.

    If you were ever a devout Christian you’d still be one. The reason you were never a Christian is because you did not really know the truth.

    At least that is what the Word of God says

    Quote:
    They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth.
    (1Jn 2:19-21)
    End quote;

    peace

  31. BruceS:

    To be sure, I have the utmost respect for Misak as a philosopher and as historian of philosophy. Her book The American Pragmatists has some problems here and there (I think) but it is really is excellent. She’s brilliant on Peirce, good on Dewey, and has an outstanding chapter on C. I. Lewis.

    Then language and science norms have to be intersubjective too.But that does not seem true at first for norms relating to (mis)representations. However, maybe you could extend the selection justification for representation norms to a sort of intersubjectivity by including past members of the species to be part of that population of subjects.Though that’s probably stretching things too far.

    That would be too far by my lights, too. I’d probably urge a distinction in the vicinity of “ecological norms” and “socially instituted norms”, then try to think about different kinds of representational adequacy or failure. Some would be simply cognitive/perceptual errors (e.g. not correctly perceiving the distance of a branch one is trying to jump to), and others would be “genuinely epistemic”.

    One thing I would say about trying to connect shared cognitive models with the Peircean limit of inquiry view: what gives the Peircean limit of inquiry its sense is its connection with the idea that even here-and-now we have better shared cognitive models than did previous generations of inquirers. We have better (to use Sellars’s term) “pictures”. What language and esp science allow us to to is revise our pictures much better than solitary inquirers could. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that language enables entirely new (and better?) ways of picturing.

    I do think that. But I do not think that ethical standards correspond to those facts about flourishing, or indeed to anything in the natural world.I also do think truth about ethical norms is a variant of the ends of inquiry approach (combined with consistency). However, there may be room for limited pluralism among cultures with regard to ethical standards, and so there would be different communities of inquirers for each culture to make that pluralism possible.I recognize I am treading on the thin ice of cultural relativism, but I am hoping the human flourishing bit keeps me from falling through.

    That’s pretty much my working view as well: there’s plenty of room for various cultures to enact norms that are conducive to human flourishing, and those will local and contingent in various ways. I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” approach to morality that transcends all historically contingent, culturally grounded evaluative schemas. So while there are all sorts of culturally relative ways of resolving particular moral disagreements, there probably aren’t culturally transcendent ways of resolving all possible moral disagreements.

  32. Alan Fox:
    ALL

    Opinions solicited on how you would decide whether a statement were true.

    Been there, done that, see PD’s OP latest for links and for commentary of a sort.

    Important IMHO to leave open not deciding, at least for now.

    I assume you are not referring to deciding statements from a formal system.

  33. Alan Fox: Opinions solicited on how you would decide whether a statement were true.

    I would ask if the statement is (1) inferentially consistent with the larger class of statements to which it belongs and (2) if that larger class of statements tends to perform better than alternatives when it comes to describing and explaining the world as we are able to experience it.

    (Note that (2) is just as crucial as (1). (1) by itself gives us a coherence theory of truth. Coherence is necessary as a condition for truth but not sufficient.)

  34. Alan Fox: Who is PD?

    That might have been a typo — he might have meant PS for Peaceful Science. (S is right next to D on the keyboard).

  35. Neil Rickert: why don’t you understand that as a metaphor, as a figure of speech?

    Metaphors and figures of speech are types God is the archetype. He is the exemplar everything else is a copy.

    When we metaphorically say that God is the door of the sheep (Jn 10:7) we don’t mean that God is like a physical door we mean that physical doors are in some sense like him.

    peace

  36. Kantian Naturalist,

    Thanks but (inevitably) that raises more questions.

    Kantian Naturalist:…explaining the world as we are able to experience it…

    That seems not to be far from my suggestion of truth as accuracy. A close description being an improvement on a vague description

  37. Alan Fox: Who is PD?

    PhooDoo. I thought he linked to this as it was related to the video at one point, but I only skimmed his post and I misremembered.

    Munging ID

    ETA: Bottom line, unless you are asking me something personal, I trust the testimony of experts so it comes down to seeing who are trustworthy experts and whether there is a consensus among them.

    And the interference stuff and the quining qualia stuff in the post is not part of the answer, of course.

    ETA 2: the sutff in that post on ” core similarities to processes that work to meet the domain goals in many other domains” is an allusion to the Mertonian norms which I think are part of any process objective means of inquiry.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms
    [start of quote]
    “The four Mertonian norms (often abbreviated as the CUDOS-norms) can be summarised as:

    – communism: all [inquirers] should have common ownership of […]goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm.[3]

    – universalism: […] validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants[4]

    – disinterestedness: […] institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for the personal gain of individuals within them

    – organized scepticism: […]scientific claims should be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted: both in methodology and institutional codes of conduct.[5]

    [end of quote]

    (article concentrates on scientific but I think the norms generalize hence the […]’s)

  38. BruceS: Or he could be pursuing the research into combining drive-by philosophy with drive-by less-the-complimentary commentary, research which he expressed interest in earlier in the thread.

    I often feel like I ought to be working on SOMETHING while farting around at TSZ.

  39. Alan Fox:
    @ Bruce

    Googled “Ramsey sentence” which I see Rudolph Carnap developed. If Wikipedia is accurate, Carnap was on the right track.

    Haha. Someone should tell somebody!!

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