Some Things I don't Get About Science.

[JustSomeGuy]

I understand that in science you try to find answers that make sense to questions about the world around us. So far science has answered almost every question except those classified as "Supernatural." how will we ever advance further in science if we aren't willing and open to test new ideas? It never used to be like that before, once we found explainations that made sense it's as if scientists suddenly just stopped trying to test out of the ordinary ideas. Maybe if we tested it more we could try to make sense of these sort of things instead of always wanting to find out for the rest of our lives. But of course it will be hard to do that no doubt because it's hard to obtain evidence but just think what if we could make sense of the supernatural maybe even advance technology so that it's easier to get evidence.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

The trouble is that supernatural things are very difficult to test. Historically, when people with claims of supernatural powers are put to the test, they end up being found to be frauds: see Project Alpha, Uri Geller, and the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. James Randi's made a living off of showing many psychic and supernatural powers to be stage magic tricks.

 

The other problem is that believers in supernatural powers often explain away failed attempts to prove they're real. If equipment set up to detect a ghost detects nothing, they respond that the ghost only appears to those prepared to believe, or that it appears in dimensions undetectable by ordinary equipment. If a spoon-bender fails to bend a spoon, he explains it as nervousness or the negative energy from the skeptical TV show host.

 

In short, supernatural powers are often fraudulent, supernatural effects often don't appear when rigorously tested by scientists, and supernatural practitioners explain away any of their failures.

 

Also, scientists have had more success finding ordinary explanations for supernatural events than finding supernatural ones. Neuroscientists have triggered religious experiences -- where the subject believes they feel God's presence -- through magnetic stimulation of the brain, and psychologists can give people the eerie feeling that someone else is in the room through low-frequency sound and cleverness.

[CharonY]

By definition anything that is supernatural is outside the realm of science. If it was testable, it would suddenly not be supernatural anymore.

[Leader Bee]

I understand that in science you try to find answers that make sense to questions about the world around us. So far science has answered almost every question except those classified as "Supernatural."

 

 

How do we make interstellar travel possible?

 

Can we create a time travel device?

 

Can we bring the dinosaurs back to life?

 

Along with many many other questions, scientists have all sorts of things they have yet to discover and perfect. "Perfect" being the important word here as scientific discoveries are rarely eureka moments where you have nothing then suddenly you have all the answers, research is incrimental.

 

 

Basically, answering questions about how the universe works just isn't easy and if you don't hear of any groundbreaking developments for some time it isn't because there are none left to answer, it's more likely that they're too busy running experiments & researching the subject so they can produce one.

[Ophiolite]

So far science has answered almost every question except those classified as "Supernatural."

I think this is fundamentally wrong.

 

Science has more questions to answer today that it ever had in the past. As we increase our knowledge in depth and breadth we come up against more unknown issues and more questions. One hundred years ago we thought the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Twenty years ago we knew nothing about dark energy. (In twenty years time we may have decided there is nothing to know about it!)

 

We don't know how the universe arose. We don't know why the fundamental constants are what they are. We don't know how life arose. We don't understand what was responsible for the Cambrian explosion. We don't know all the rules governing the formation of planetary systems. The list of what we don't know would fill several volumes the size of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

[cypress]

I agree Ophiolite. It may well be that the list of questions we don't know the answers to may be growing faster than the list we do know.

[AzurePhoenix]

I understand that in science you try to find answers that make sense to questions about the world around us. So far science has answered almost every question except those classified as "Supernatural." how will we ever advance further in science if we aren't willing and open to test new ideas?

I would say science HAS largely answered questions about the supernatural, so far as you can prove a negative (I'm of the "yes you can" school of thought.) As far as I'm concerned supernatural just means something suspected by some that doesn't fall under the known spheres of science, but if it DOES exist in any capacity and we ARE capable of finding out about it / detecting it / testing it, then obviously it's some aspect of the natural world (no matter how exotic) and you might as well drop the Super bit. And I third Ophi's stance.

[CharonY]

Indeed. One of the major jobs of science is to show what else we do not know. Sometimes we even come up with answers .

[cypress]

To build further on your point Auzur, quantum uncertainty and entanglement seems to guarantee that it is not possible to distinguish the difference between an incredibly improbable isolated event and a supernatural event (one without a natural explanation).

[padren]

It's also worth noting that science doesn't "avoid" any given topic, it deals specifically with what it is designed to, in the ways it's designed to. Science is inherently designed as something that can be engaged in with multiple people over multiple generations - a way to share knowledge and information, and to do that there needs to be a degree of reliability in what is shared.

 

Consider it somewhat like an internet protocol - for a signal to transfer from point A to B via a digital connection, there has to be a way to ensure signal integrity and that it is not corrupted. While it is possible to send data without this overhead, it is impracticable if you require any degree of reliability.

 

Likewise, since has a high overhead due to ensuring that data is not corrupt or unreliable, it doesn't lend itself as the best medium for certain topics. You can study aspects of philosophy in a scientific way, but the bulk of the topic just isn't highly compatible. Science doesn't make any claims about whether such philosophical discussions are beneficial or useful, it simply isn't applied to them. Same goes for art or music - you can measure aspects of it scientifically (history, re-emergent patterns, etc) but it just doesn't apply to most of the topic.

 

In the same way I could be absolutely certain that I see a UFO try to tractor beam up a cow, but I have no way to communicate that event in a reliable way. If any other human were to experience the exact same phenomenon and describe it to me, I would have no way to evaluate it as more likely accurate than swamp gas or delusion. At that point the only tools we could use for ensuring reliability are based on (1) consistency with one's own model of the world and (2) the authority of the person making the claim.

 

While those hold a lot of weight in politics and other social forms of communication, they do not hold weight in science. They could never be used as metrics for evaluating reliability of data and result in the world we experience today that has benefited so much from science. If anything we see them as fallacies that always apply pressure to twist perceptions but we endeavor through discipline to overcome.

 

When people are critical or fearful of scientific research the first thing they want to know is if the scientists are financially biased (ie, not a genuine authority) or if they are just catering to a populous idea - the exact same things science tries very hard to avoid and consciously excludes as measures of reliability. You just can't evaluate a bunch of anecdotal evidence from isolated, unreproducible events in a scientific way.

As such it just doesn't work for "supernatural investigations" outside of the testing of the few things it's good for - which usually appears as a "close minded aversion" to those that don't realize it's entirely a feature of the very mechanism of science.

 

It's not in favor, or against, or even indifferent - it just not a tool that can be used for everything.

[iNow]

quantum uncertainty and entanglement seems to guarantee that it is not possible to distinguish the difference between an incredibly improbable isolated event and a supernatural event

 

Well, from the perspective of most rational people, supernatural events are only described as such by idiots and woo worshipers, so the incredibly improbable becomes de facto the only reasonable choice.

[Mr Skeptic]

Science is all about being able to predict (being able to predict is considered answering the question). Some questions cannot be answered by a formula for predicting a result; these questions have no relation to science whatsoever.

[Marat]

I think the problem lurking in the background of the original comment was that scientists often seem remarkably dismissive of any data that do not fit the existing paradigms of explanation, and in this they demonstrate a dogmatic attitude and lack of curiosity which is profoundly unscientific. This results from the two opposing roles of the scientist: One is to police the boundaries of the existing realm of established science and dismiss as 'rubbish' anything inconsistent with its basic commitments. The other, however, is to expand and, if necessary and after considerable resistance, to abandon the existing paradigms of explanation in response to data which do not fit the established belief system. Imre Lakatos describes this process in detail.

 

Consider for example Isaac Newton's characterization of the gravitational attraction among planets as an 'action-at-a-distance' which was not mediated by Cartesian particles, waves in a subtle aether, or any other intervening mechanical agent. This was dismissed by contemporaries as 'supernatural,' since it was characteristic of magic that witches could make objects move without touching them, that clairvoyants could see what was happening hundreds of miles away, or that there would be some response of the dagger which had murdered a victim when the court brought the victim's killer into the room, etc. But because the data proved stubbornly resistant to re-description in terms of intervening mechanical agents, eventually science had to move the existing boundary between 'science' and the 'supernatural' to take gravitational action-at-a-distance into the realm of science and out of the realm of magic. This same thing can always happen again in science, and scientists today would do well to remember this, rather than concentrate on their 'policeman' role in maintaining the existing explanatory theories.