Quote:
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
You say this as if it's a problem. And that's the problem you're having. That you keep raising this is further indication that you don't understand things nearly as well as you think you do. And until you drop that delusion, you're not going to understand anything new in this direction.
I would just shrug and say that I have nothing to prove. While I may be a mathematician, I've been a chair of a Department of Physical and Life Sciences. I've worked with scientists and have helped to establish undergraduate research labs and am currently working on the establishment of a science center in Mexico. At no point is anyone required to make some sort of assertion about natural/supernatural in order for research to be done.
Tame_deuces is spot on. It doesn't matter what your labels are (natural/supernatural).
Let's approach this from a different angle. I have two questions:
1) If we accept that there can be both the Natural, and the Supernatural, that there is both a physical, material universe, and also something that isn't physical or material but that in some way can interact with the physical such as an intercessory god (or anything that shows that the supernatural can influence the natural in a detectable way), then that has obvious implications.
The first problem it poses for Naturalism is that any explanation developed from the assumption that there are only natural causes is ignoring that there may be an alternate supernatural explanation for the phenomenon being studied, (or an explanation that includes some combination of elements of both the natural and supernatural). So a hypothesis that has been supported sufficiently by evidence such that is called a Theory, like Gravity, but that has been developed from a purely naturalistic PoV, must be treated as unreliable since it entirely rules out another source of explanations for what it is and how it works.
So my question is (somewhat multi-faceted), how do you understand Gravity, do think that there may a supernatural explanation for it, and if so, why do the majority of scientists not think that also, and how do you apply the scientific criteria to Gravity?
2) Why do we need criteria like being Corrective, Falsifiable, Repeatable, Predictive, Useful, Internally and Externally Consistent, Parsimonious, and Testable, when those things cannot be applied to the supernatural? In my viewpoint, those criteria exist specifically to prevent an explanation from containing anything that can't be 'physical' i.e. natural, but how they fit into your viewpoint, what purpose do they serve?
My current view is that it is your understanding that is internally logically inconsistent both with itself and what you believe about things like Gravity (although I await your detailed explanation of your view on Gravity), not externally consistent with what we see in the world or the scientific method that supplies those explanations, and fails to answer obvious questions like the ones above.