Science is inherently atheistic

[polymath257]

I'm not clear why ghosts would be any more difficult to study than any other living thing. The biologist Medawar said that given the most stringent control of environment, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. And that's for standard biology. But we can do science nonetheless.

If we can detect ghosts, we can learn their properties and behaviors. That would then open up new physics (potentially) and even more science.

So science doesn't *require* a commitment to 'physical' things: just to testability of ideas and analysis of data.

But, of course, the actual observations DON'T lead us to believe in ghosts or any new physics associated with them, nor anything typically terms 'supernatural'.

You're pretty much on point. The simple answer is they are not bound by natural law.  Ghosts may not have been the best example, but I didn't want to pull anybody's strong personal beliefs into it so they didn't feel like I was picking on them.  If you could establish natural laws, then you could study them based on those laws, assuming you could set parameters that they couldn't violate.

But, as always, you can start out with observed behavior and *hypothesize* the laws they operate under, test those laws, etc.

There is simply no reason the scientific method could not be applied to ghosts, goblins, or gods, in theory.

In practice, of course, it fails to study them because of the utter non-existence of them all.