First, so I’m not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:
- Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
- Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don’t have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn’t mean you know anything about psychology.
- Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
- This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
- This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
- These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it’s just straight-up made up by some religious leader.
There’s thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people’s world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.
(Again, just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)
I think they tried to make an effort. At least in the New Testament they do things like testemony from several people. And miracles as evidence for divine intervention. So… I think there’s some early attempt to get logic into the mix… Of course it’s a bit unfortunate for reproducability how people stopped walking on water, God stopped doing supernatural things a long time ago and wine and fish multiplying or things burning without burning isn’t open to research and study any more… 😆 Maybe he has other hobbies these days or died in the meantime…
Walking on water doesn’t happen that often anymore, but miracle healings are just as alive and well as they were 2000 years ago. Probably because humans have immune systems that allow people to often recover even without medical intervention.
Hehe. Though beating the odds isn’t a miracle. We know how maths and the immune system works. It’d need to work by supernatural means to be a miracle. I’ve just not seen any blind person suddenly be able to see or a permanently deaf person being cured. Disabled people don’t grow a new leg and start to walk again like they did 2000 years ago. (Well, actually, God was always pretty ableist with the amputees, I don’t think he ever fixed missing limbs…)
But in modern times, disabled people kinda stay that way, and I’m not aware of any counterexamples. 😉 We have a better understanding of the polio virus, though. Which would have been some of the “cripples” in Jesus time. But now that word is considered a derogatory term and we also know what’s temporary and what is permanent with paralysis from these kinds of diseases. And recovering from the flu or other illnesses isn’t really impressive in my eyes. That either takes time or medicine. The charlatan miracle healers on TV have been debunked a long time ago… So if there’s medical miracles out there as of today, I’m not seeing it.
I know a (then) girl who was told by her doctors that she would never walk again due to the nerves in her spine being damaged from an illness (can’t remember what exactly that was, it’s a while ago).
Her church congregation did some fasting, prayer and blessings, and soon after that she was able to walk again and she didn’t have any problems with walking since.
Her doctors called it a miracle, because they didn’t have a medical explanation of how this happened.
Stuff like that isn’t even all that rare, especially because our understanding of medicine is still rudimentary at best.
What is supernatural?
To say it in the words of Arthur C. Clarke
To paraphrase it: Anything we don’t have a scientific explanation for is indistinguishable from the supernatural.
If magic would exist in our world, we would study it and it would just become a branch of physics. The supernatural is just the collection of things we don’t have an explanation for right now.
Thanks for sharing. I didn’t have any story like that happen around me.
Yeah. The Arthur C Clarke one is a gem. I’d argue this means we live in a world including magic. We have a lot of crazy advanced tech at our disposal. My grandpa always used to tell me he can’t wrap his head around how there’s encyclopedias worth of information stored on the fingernail sized microSD card in my smartphone. Next to all the pictures and music on there. And Clarke also lived from a time where people would just die of an infection, because antibiotics weren’t invented yet, to a time with the internet, wifi and smartphones, spaceships… computers that can make billions of calculations in one second…
I don’t think defining magic that way is very useful, though. That just turns it into a word to describe things we don’t know. It’d lose the meaning of breaking the laws of nature. Because they exist no matter whether we understand them. Gravity existed before Newton was born. Earth turned around the sun when we thought we were the center of the universe. The understanding is just something that happens within our heads.
Tbh, there’s hardly another way of defining the supernatural.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that God really exist. He’s a personified being that’s omnicient and omnipotent (let’s ignore paradoxi created by these facts, as they aren’t really relevant to the argument).
Since he’s omnicient he knows how his omnipotence works. Since he’s omnipotent he can replicate what he’s doing and he can show a scientist how he does it. Since he’s omnipotent, he can even make it possible that said scientist can replicate it the same way.
Is this still supernatural, or is it just advanced science?
And to go further, is he breaking the laws of nature, or did we just misunderstand the laws of nature? Like you said, gravity existed before Newton, and that theoretical God’s omnipotent abilities break our understanding of the laws of nature would to me just mean that our understanding was wrong.
To put it differently, someone using the relativity theory is breaking Newton’s laws. That doesn’t mean they are breaking the laws of nature, but only Newton’s understanding of them.
Good point with breaking Newton’s laws. I think that showcases nicely how our understanding isn’t identical to physical reality. We’re just forming models to describe it.
Debating about a world including an omnipotent God is really complicated. He can do everything. Surely God can give arbitrary power to an individual like a scientist? Turn supernatural into natural and the other way round… Create paradoxes… He wouldn’t be omnipotent if he couldn’t do it. We’re leaving the realm of logic with that. Everything and its opposite is possible with that at the same time. At least that’s my understanding. So there isn’t really anything to discuss here, we can’t apply logic or conclude anything. It just doesn’t abide by these things any more.
That’s why I purposely left out paradoxes created by omnipotence/omnicience, because you are right, they are incompatible with logic.
The main thing I wanted to argue is that as soon as something supernatural becomes explainable, it’s not supernatural anymore.
The same argument could be made with anything else supernatural, doesn’t really have to be an omnipotent God. As soon as something supernatural exists, it is part of the laws of nature. It might not fit our model of the laws of nature, but that’s a problem with our models/our understanding, and not a problem of breaking the actual laws of nature.
And at that point it’s something that we can either explain (and thus it’s not supernatural) or something we will be able to explain with enough understanding (and thus also not supernatural).
Unless, that is you follow the definition of magic we talked about above: Magic is what we cannot (yet) explain, and we call it magic because we don’t want to admit that we can’t explain it.
(And with magic I mean any handwavy non-explanation like magic, supernatural, God, aliens, …)