All science is materialistic

[Jehanne]

This is where we part company and I would simply cite "irreconcilable differences".  If a phenomenon happened (the amputee example) that simply shattered the Conservation Laws (Energy, Momentum, Angular Momentum), I would give up, once any reasonable possibility of fraud had been eliminated.  I doubt that most of our religious friends would be going on about "separate Magisteria" much, either.  Of course, you or anyone else could try to model magic, but, I think that there is going to be a practical problem when you or others try to replicate your results.

But, such is a bridge that no one has yet crossed, and, so, this conversation is purely hypothetical.

I think that the fact that we've been able to model quantum phenomena, which are often inherently probabilistic, suggests that science could, if necessary, deal with magical things that obey detectable patterns.

So, for example, if it was discovered that burning a specific herb while incanting specific words healed amputees, that would be basic data from which science could work to create a testable model. Looking at how the healing was affected by slight changes in pronunciation or rate of burning of the herb or by substituting related herbs would add further information.

Once again, this is clearly NOT what has turned out to be the case in the real world. But neither has the phlogiston theory of heat. Nobody would *return* to those hypotheses at this point, even though there is nothing about the scientific method that, prior to observation and testing, would eliminate those possibilities.

Let's say that only 1 out of 100 or so adult amputees were healed, but only on occasion, after fervent prayers, but yet on other occasions exactly 1000 were healed with no prayers immediately followed by the Earth stopping in its orbit about the Sun with no ill effects whatsoever except that the Earth's rotation immediately switched direction with the Sun rising in the West instead of the East followed by the Moon completely disappearing only to reappear exactly 73 days later, which was followed by a return to complete naturalistic normalcy, except for the fact that all of the observable galaxies in the Universe (save our own) have disappeared from view at all wavelengths of light only to all instaneously reappear exactly 13 years later to the exact second?

Maybe there would be those who would try to "model" this phenomenon, or, perhaps, such would be "proof positive" that electrons and protons have conscious wills. I do not know, except physicalism would have, in my judgment, been thoroughly falsified.