(May 27, 2020 at 12:50 am)LadyForCamus Wrote: @Belacqua
When you say “a case where no scientific explanation is possible,” you’re doing the very thing you’ve accused others in this thread of doing; assuming one of two mutually exclusive causes is impossible in order to pave a way for the other.
I think there's another way we could approach it.
Let's say there are two positions.
1) All questions are answerable by science.
and
2) Not all questions are answerable by science.
The first statement is falsifiable. To falsify it, you just have to find a question that science can't answer. (I'm not saying it has been or will be falsified, only that it could be.)
The second is not falsifiable, because at any given time we don't know all the possible questions there are. Even if science answered all the questions there are for a million years, an unanswerable question might pop up some day.
But I think we have to limit this. Because obviously there are lots of questions that science can't answer. These fall into roughly two types: statements of value and metaphysical.
Value statements are like "what is a good life?" or "should we give welfare to lazy people?" On this thread we've been discussing a metaphysical question: "are there questions which science can't answer?" And I think science can't answer that question.
So we'd need to specify what issues we're wanting science to address. It would be more specific if we ask "are there any facts about nature that science can't answer?" That also isn't falsifiable, but I think we could have pretty high confidence. I think that science can answer all questions about nature, or could if we weren't on track to wipe out civilization sometime soon.
Given my definition of "supernatural," questions about supernatural issues can't be answered by science, because they don't involve the nature of something. Science can tell us everything there is to know about the nature of frogs, but can't tell us whether sometime somewhere, in some unseen bog, a frog has done something which is wildly against its nature. Full many a frog is born to sing unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. So that's a metaphysical question. In a general sense, "are there ever times when an object can do something that is not a part of its nature?"
This leaves aside questions of what we'd do if we observed a singing frog. People here are determined that if they saw a frog singing opera, they'd study it with science and show that it is indeed a part of the frog's nature. But that doesn't falsify the possibility of supernatural events, because we can't rule out such events at other times and places.
So the possibility of the supernatural remains open. Empirical research can't show it to be impossible. I don't know of any logical argument that shows it to be impossible. I see no evidence for it, but I also can't demonstrate that it never happens. It has to remain an open question. If a person has a conviction that it can happen, or a conviction that it can't happen, this is a faith.
