I think we've about covered it. So I'll sum up. Whether anyone wants it or not.
In part I think we've conflated two different issues. We started off talking about the supernatural. Is there such a thing, and if so how do we define it? Since somebody earlier declared that there is only the natural world, and that world is knowable by science, I think we sort of slid sideways into a related but different question, which is: can science tell us everything there is to know?
To the second question, I think we could answer "no" without positing anything supernatural. There could easily be things that are natural which are beyond human comprehension. And since science is carried out by humans (despite its near divine status on this forum) if people can't comprehend it then science can't answer it.
My go-to example for this kind of thing is from a lecture by Noam Chomsky. He said that researchers have set up mazes for rats involving fairly complicated math problems. It turns out that to get through their maze, rats can grasp surprisingly high level math. However, it appears that they can't solve a maze based on prime numbers. That concept is just not something that rat minds can get. So I see no reason to assume that human minds are immune from such limitations. We get prime numbers, and some other things rats don't, but we don't know what we're not getting.
So it makes sense to me that there could easily be all kinds of things in the natural world that people just aren't going to figure out. That maybe aliens somewhere find easy. And that means that just because science can't manage it doesn't mean that it's supernatural.
Unless someone wanted to define "natural" as "that which humans can know through empirical means." I think that would be a little unusual for science-type people, but not without precedent. It's normal for mystics from several traditions to say that nature is a kind of veil or surface of reality -- the portion of reality that humans can get through their senses. But they say there is far more to the world than that. They might call the portion of reality beyond what we perceive "supernatural," and if that's the way they do it I'd go along with them. I'm pretty sure I agree with them that what humans can perceive is only a very limited part of reality, though I might think about it in a Kantian rather than a mystical sense.
I think I pissed some people off by defining "evidence" in a certain way. I said that evidence is any input which increases a person's confidence in a proposition. And whether that input counts as evidence or not depends on the way a person interprets it. It has to fit into a larger model, and the model will largely determine what the evidence points to.
So I think that for many reasonable people, there is plenty of evidence for the supernatural. Among this evidence is 1) the obvious fact that people know very little of the world. 2) The fact that science seems to have no clue as to how we should approach some really big questions about reality -- e.g. what is consciousness? and why is there something rather than nothing? (And I know some people are attached to their theories and don't agree that these are mysteries. But lots of scientists agree with me about consciousness. And in Krauss's book about why there is something rather than nothing he actually admits in the last chapter that he doesn't know.) So if a person has a model which is skeptical of complete naturalism, and open to the idea that the supernatural is real, then these mysteries would be evidence (not proof) of the supernatural.
Obviously to people whose models hold solely to naturalism, who have faith that all unanswered questions will have natural solutions, the lack of answers in those problems *doesn't* constitute evidence for the supernatural. They interpret the lack differently.
Then there are the many many people in history who say they have had supernatural experiences. Some are fakers, some are obviously mistaken. But if we declare tout court that they are all wrong, we are doing so because a priori we have declared that only naturalism is possible. We don't know what those people experienced, we haven't had the same experience. Again, for anyone whose model allows the supernatural or skepticism about pure naturalism, their testimony is evidence. Not proof, but evidence. I know that a lot of people -- especially on this forum -- have no qualms about calling anyone who disagrees with them a liar or an idiot. But I think that is having too much faith in our own judgment about things we can't know for sure.
So I think there is lots of evidence for the supernatural, if a person hasn't ruled it out already. If you have ruled it out already, there is no evidence.
Anyway, people are extremely limited, it's the height of arrogance to imagine that we can understand more than a tiny fraction of the world, and over-confident conclusions about things we don't really know are just self-promoting fantasies.
OK, I'll drop it now.
In part I think we've conflated two different issues. We started off talking about the supernatural. Is there such a thing, and if so how do we define it? Since somebody earlier declared that there is only the natural world, and that world is knowable by science, I think we sort of slid sideways into a related but different question, which is: can science tell us everything there is to know?
To the second question, I think we could answer "no" without positing anything supernatural. There could easily be things that are natural which are beyond human comprehension. And since science is carried out by humans (despite its near divine status on this forum) if people can't comprehend it then science can't answer it.
My go-to example for this kind of thing is from a lecture by Noam Chomsky. He said that researchers have set up mazes for rats involving fairly complicated math problems. It turns out that to get through their maze, rats can grasp surprisingly high level math. However, it appears that they can't solve a maze based on prime numbers. That concept is just not something that rat minds can get. So I see no reason to assume that human minds are immune from such limitations. We get prime numbers, and some other things rats don't, but we don't know what we're not getting.
So it makes sense to me that there could easily be all kinds of things in the natural world that people just aren't going to figure out. That maybe aliens somewhere find easy. And that means that just because science can't manage it doesn't mean that it's supernatural.
Unless someone wanted to define "natural" as "that which humans can know through empirical means." I think that would be a little unusual for science-type people, but not without precedent. It's normal for mystics from several traditions to say that nature is a kind of veil or surface of reality -- the portion of reality that humans can get through their senses. But they say there is far more to the world than that. They might call the portion of reality beyond what we perceive "supernatural," and if that's the way they do it I'd go along with them. I'm pretty sure I agree with them that what humans can perceive is only a very limited part of reality, though I might think about it in a Kantian rather than a mystical sense.
I think I pissed some people off by defining "evidence" in a certain way. I said that evidence is any input which increases a person's confidence in a proposition. And whether that input counts as evidence or not depends on the way a person interprets it. It has to fit into a larger model, and the model will largely determine what the evidence points to.
So I think that for many reasonable people, there is plenty of evidence for the supernatural. Among this evidence is 1) the obvious fact that people know very little of the world. 2) The fact that science seems to have no clue as to how we should approach some really big questions about reality -- e.g. what is consciousness? and why is there something rather than nothing? (And I know some people are attached to their theories and don't agree that these are mysteries. But lots of scientists agree with me about consciousness. And in Krauss's book about why there is something rather than nothing he actually admits in the last chapter that he doesn't know.) So if a person has a model which is skeptical of complete naturalism, and open to the idea that the supernatural is real, then these mysteries would be evidence (not proof) of the supernatural.
Obviously to people whose models hold solely to naturalism, who have faith that all unanswered questions will have natural solutions, the lack of answers in those problems *doesn't* constitute evidence for the supernatural. They interpret the lack differently.
Then there are the many many people in history who say they have had supernatural experiences. Some are fakers, some are obviously mistaken. But if we declare tout court that they are all wrong, we are doing so because a priori we have declared that only naturalism is possible. We don't know what those people experienced, we haven't had the same experience. Again, for anyone whose model allows the supernatural or skepticism about pure naturalism, their testimony is evidence. Not proof, but evidence. I know that a lot of people -- especially on this forum -- have no qualms about calling anyone who disagrees with them a liar or an idiot. But I think that is having too much faith in our own judgment about things we can't know for sure.
So I think there is lots of evidence for the supernatural, if a person hasn't ruled it out already. If you have ruled it out already, there is no evidence.
Anyway, people are extremely limited, it's the height of arrogance to imagine that we can understand more than a tiny fraction of the world, and over-confident conclusions about things we don't really know are just self-promoting fantasies.
OK, I'll drop it now.
