Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Most people, in discussions about the relationship between science and religion, plunge right in by saying that science deals only with natural laws or that science arbitrarily excludes the supernatural. Hardly anybody bothers to define what "supernatural" means. It turns out to be a lot more complex than it first appears.
Start with a simplistic definition: "supernatural" means anything having to do with God, angels, spirits or similar beings. On the other hand, there's plenty of science fiction out there that deals with beings in higher dimensions, beings made of energy, and so on. If we ever encounter such creatures, are they supernatural? Does lacking a material body make them supernatural?
We'd probably say no; if we can understand their internal workings in terms of natural laws, then they're natural, not supernatural. If they're made of neutrinos, we understand neutrinos, sort of, so no, they're not supernatural. So a better definition of supernatural might be "does something operate according to laws of nature?" Now we run smack into a problem; we don't yet know all of the laws of nature. Barely two centuries ago, stones from the sky were routinely dismissed as medieval folklore. When one fell in America and was reported in the scientific literature, Thomas Jefferson remarked that he considered it more likely that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones could fall from heaven. Not too long afterward, a large meteorite shattered in flight and showered a village in France with stones, and meteorites went from folklore to real phenomena.
We might also ask "does some alleged phenomenon run counter to known natural laws?" This definition has the benefit of making the benchmark something already known. On the other hand, lots of things once judged impossible, like heavier than air flight, are not only perfectly possible but explicable in terms of the very laws they were once thought to violate. So something that flagrantly violates known physics, say creating matter from nothing, might either be fraudulent or miraculous depending on your interpretation, but we still have the problem that there might be some hitherto unknown law, or even some combination of known laws, that permits the phenomenon.
So how do we tell potentially real but unexplained phenomena from illusions and fakes? First, are the phenomena potentially explainable in known natural terms? Lots of faith cures involve remission of cancer, but some cancers naturally have a remission stage. It's conceivable that there is a yet unknown natural process that halts cancer. Levitation, on the other hand, is not explainable in terms of known physics. We might accept a sudden disappearance of cancer as real even if we question its cause, but not levitation.
So now we are in a position to outline some common, but unworkable definitions of "supernatural:"
Finally, what's the status of the observational evidence? There are lots of alleged miraculous cures of disease, but none with any credibility of a severed limb regenerating, even though some vertebrates are capable of it. There are alleged cases of people being restored to life after death, but never involving a decapitation victim. It's conceivable that brains generate electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by other brains and form a basis for ESP, but nobody has convincingly demonstrated it. From a biological standpoint virgin birth is hardly miraculous at all; there are no medically documented human cases, but even some vertebrates are capable of it. There's even a term for it:parthenogenesis, which means "virgin birth" in Greek. The reason scientists are skeptical about claims of it among humans is that there is a much more probable alternative explanation that is extremely hard to exclude (also there are some genetic mechanisms that specifically block it in mammals and birds).
Not only may there still be undiscovered laws of nature, what if there are laws that we will never discover because they manifest themselves extremely rarely, or their manifestations are too subtle to detect, or they require energies we cannot generate, or because they are too complex for us to understand even with supercomputers, or they are simply outside the logical capabilities of our minds?
Anyone with a dog knows that if the mutt winds his leash around a tree, he will starve before he figures out to simply reverse direction. So we go out, unwind the dog, only to have him turn right around and do it again. From the dog's perspective, here he is in a fix, and along comes a superior being, employing skills utterly beyond the dog's comprehension, and fixes the problem. Is this supernatural? From the dog's perspective it is; we would say no. The dog is simply incapable of reasoning like a human, but to us the solution is purely natural.
Now, suppose, as some people have speculated, there are higher physical dimensions of which we are physically unaware. Someone trapped beyond rescue in our world, say on a crashing airliner, a deep mine collapse or a sinking submarine, comes to the attention of some higher-dimensional being. From the perspectives of a higher spatial dimension, any closed space in our world is wide open. The higher-dimensional being reaches in, grabs the victim, and places him someplace safe. All of this is perfectly legitimate scientific speculation, by the way. Would the rescue be supernatural? Well, you could hardly blame people for saying so. Furthermore, it would be outside our known laws of science. But from the standpoint of the higher-dimensional being, it would be as trivial as our unwinding a dog's leash. So if we had the benefit of a complete knowledge of all natural laws, we'd probably say it was not supernatural. But if we couldn't access or verify the existence of higher dimensions, the question gets pretty thorny.
C.S. Lewis quote "There may be Natures piled upon Natures, each supernatural to the one beneath it"
"To explain even an atom Schrodinger wants seven dimensions: and give us new senses and we should find a new Nature. There may be Natures piled upon Natures, each supernatural to the one beneath it, before we come to the abyss of pure spirit; and to be in that abyss, at the right hand of the Father, may not mean being absent from any of these Natures - may mean a yet more dynamic presence on all levels."
At a meeting of the Socratic Club in Oxford in 1945, while discussing Jesus after the resurrection, Lewis says, "He apparently passed into some spatial relationship with a new universe. The senses of His new body were responsive to multidimensional space and to a time that was not unilinear...From the local appearances, from the accounts of Christ's eating, it would seem that the new nature was at some points interlocked with the old. That to our view it was supernatural and yet it was natural. This to the modern mind, conceiving of nothing real between the unconditional and the world of our senses, was shocking, but reality...was like a skyscraper with several floors. God could create more systems than one, and there might be natures piled upon natures."
Lewis' analogy with a skyscraper invites additional speculation. To get from floor to floor you can take an elevator and travel via a path otherwise not possible, or you can take the stairs. If there are multiple levels of nature, wholly separate from each other, then the only way to get from one to the next is to be lifted from above. A being at the lower level would be unaware of anything higher and would see anything from a higher level as supernatural. A being at the upper level would know his own laws of nature as well as those of the levels below, but would see a discontinuity between the two levels. It would be hard for such a being to avoid suspecting that there might be discontinuities above as well as below. The reason we don't see unwinding a dog's leash as supernatural on our part is we don't see a discontinuity. The dog just doesn't know any better, but some breeds are smarter than others, dolphins and lower primates are more intelligent yet, chimps are still more intelligent, and at some point on that continuum a creature will try going the opposite direction.
But what if, instead of elevators, there are also stairs? Then it gets very interesting. Then there are passages from one level of nature to the next. Once somebody discovers one, he can show others where it is. Language, invention of writing, discovery of Renaissance science, Maxwell's Equations, relativity and quantum mechanics, might be several stairwells we have already traveled. Brought to the present day, a medieval peasant might be utterly incapable of understanding how a computer works, even if he spent his entire life trying. The flights of stairs might be utterly beyond his abilities because of his prior conditioning, even though a biologically identical descendant has no problems. And Australopithecus might be forever incapable of climbing beyond a certain level. On the other hand, having discovered that there are stairwells, we naturally start wondering if that ceiling above us might be just another floor, if we can find the next flight of stairs. Ordinary scientists explore each floor; Nobel Prize winners search for stairs.
We can now state what might be called a Weak definition of "supernatural:" phenomena that involve levels of reality permanently inaccessible to us. In the skyscraper analogy, we get to a floor where there are no more stairs leading up. Not only can we not get to higher floors except by elevator, but we can't even tell for sure that there are higher floors or elevators.
On the other hand, how can we know if a level of reality is permanently inaccessible? Maybe the stairs are just very well hidden. And even if it is, the fact that it operates according to laws makes it "natural" in a sense, even if it's a level we can never investigate. After all, the inside of the event horizon of a black hole is still "natural," even though it's something we think we can never access. So there's a nagging incompleteness to the Weak definition.
The fact that the nagging incompleteness involves being bound by laws leads us to the Strong Definition of "supernatural:" phenomena that are not bound by any laws at all; that are wholly autonomous. So now we see the difference between incorporeal science fiction beings like those in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 or Childhood's End, or any number of Star Trek episodes, as opposed to gods, angels, and spirits. The science fiction beings are natural, functioning by natural laws, the gods, angels and spirits are wholly autonomous. C. S. Lewis had this sort of definition in mind when he said "There may be Natures piled upon Natures, each supernatural to the one beneath it, before we come to the abyss of pure spirit."
This is obviously the definition people have in mind when they define "supernatural" as having to do with incorporeal beings, but it's a superficial, poorly articulated definition.
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