Why science can’t study the supernatural – A physicist’s view

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 7, 2012

Mind, Physics}

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boo — Oh please, let us guess just this once: You were going to say ... Boo! Right?

Why can’t the paranormal and spiritual realms be subject to scientific analysis? The materialist says “Because they don’t exist.” and therefore all signals are spurious and a waste of resources.

The intelligent design theorist says “coherence is not just a sign of extra dimensions, but a sign of front-loaded purpose”. Therefore the paranormal might not be “spooky action-at-a-distance” but a design feature of simultaneous causation. If A is correlated to B, it may be that A doesn’t cause B, or B cause A, but previous design C causes both A and B such that they are correlated.

Lipstick and breast cancer are correlated, but neither causes the other.

But if we look at the meta-studies, if we ask, what is the benefit of studying the paranormal versus ignoring it? We find the curious phenomenon that the Enlightenment advanced precisely where it ignored the paranormal. Thus it would seem that studying the paranormal wasn’t merely a distraction, but a degradation of science.

Stanley Jaki argues in “The Savior of Science” and several of his other books, that bad metaphysics, such as looking for paranormal effects, waylaid the nascent scientific progress of the Greeks, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Caliphate and even the Jewish Kabbala. Only the severe discipline of the Enlightenment materialism could negotiate the shoals of bad metaphysics.

I’ve come to a similar answer, though phrased a little differently. Inasmuch as the paranormal and spiritism are “personal”, possessing the characteristics of contingent personality, then it is dangerous to study them as a machine. This is like BF Skinner studying humans as if they were a computer program.

Economists can tell you the danger of doing this. Not only does this give the wrong answer, but it even gives the wrong questions. What makes people people, and what makes the divine divine is precisely the personal, and therefore science does a disservice to theology when it reduces the personal to machinery. But worse, it invites the ghost into the machine.

More precisely, the Bible condemns even the exploration of the occult, because of its parasitic relationship to persons.

We all understand computer viruses. And thanks to global warmists, we are beginning to understand the power of positive feedback and what money does to our science models. But we have yet to understand what psychology does to common sense, or what evolutionary biology does to our sanity.

Inasmuch as the paranormal is personal, it is forbidden for the same reason that the occult is forbidden–it infects our mind.

Thoughts? – UD News

Comments

Bruce, Humans don't violate the second law. If they did, it wouldn't be a law. As for Granville Sewell, I explained the problems with his argument to Collin here.champignon_{February 7, 2012
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The supernatural is simply too complicated for mankind. We would normally say its invisible but real but really in a greater sense of existence God and the spiritual world is simply too atomic or complicated for mankind. The natural world is touchable. In fact its been the discovery of the atom and mechanisms of forces that have come too define human intelligence discovery. Not my idea as I insist biology is more complicated but still its logical to see the spiritual world as just really more atomic.Robert Byers_{February 7, 2012
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It is not that the paranormal and spiritism are “personal”, but rather that a very strong characteristic of mind is that it is creative. Creativity, by its very nature is unpredictable, not subject to any kind of law that determines outcome. One of the consequences of ID which has not been stressed enough, IMHO, is the central "dogma", if you will, that it is only intelligence that is capable of producing complex, functionally specified information (CFSI). Another way of putting this is that it is only intelligence that is creative. A third way (a la Granville Sewell) is that the only known phenomenon that is capable of violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics is intelligence. And we don't need to be Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Leonardo da Vinci to do this. I am doing this right now as I write this. We do it any time we figure out how to repair something, or speak a meaningful sentence longer than 20 characters or so. What does that say about us human beings? In my view, one of the aspects of our being made in the "image and likeness" of God is that we, like Him, are creative. Others are that our essence is Love and that we are capable of knowing.Bruce David_{February 7, 2012
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Science can certainly study certain kinds of claims about paranormal phenomena. It could certainly confirm whether a particular person can reliably do paranormalish things, like predict the future, move objects without touching them, read minds. Harry Potter kinds of things. The failure to confirm is never taken as evidence that the phenomena do not exist, but it would be useful to confirm the existence of a phenomenon before worrying about its causes or its moral status.Petrushka_{February 7, 2012
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Science can't study the supernatural because, the way supernatural is typically defined, it can't exist. For most people, the reasoning goes something like this: -------- Premise I: The supernatural is anything that isn't natural. Premise II: Anything that exists is natural. Conclusion: The supernatural doesn't (can't) exist. -------- This is why I typically reject any usage of the term supernatural unless it's explicitly defined in a way which doesn't devolve into the circular-reasoning nonsense demonstrated above. From my experience, the term "supernatural" is primarily used as a loaded word/ad hominem used to discredit ideas. Claim an idea is supernatural, then associate it with other so-called supernatural ideas (leprechauns, unicorns, fairies, etc.), and make it an either/or proposition: You either accept them all, or you reject them all. "You believe in God? That means you believe in the supernatural! Believing in the supernatural means you believe in the tooth fairy and leprechauns and break-dancing unicorns! You're so stupid!" My belief is that we should abandon any natural/supernatural demarcation and simply debate individual ideas on their own merits, absent any biasing classification. God either exists or does not exist. That someone chooses to label God as supernatural has zero impact on which is true. Likewise, God is either a testable premise or a untestable premise, and, again, any natural/supernatural labeling is irrelevant to the question.Jammer_{February 7, 2012
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Nick, No, I wasn't clear, and yes, this was written as a response to some other conversation. So I will try to clarify. a) science tends to study material causes (formal, material, efficient), and doesn't do well on the final causes. ID argues that final causes do influence our science, but doesn't advocate any particular approach. History, and the experience of the Enlightenment, seem to suggest that focussing on final causes is a detriment to science. That is, explaining phenomena theologically interferes with explaining phenomena materially. Stanley Jaki argues this in his books. The reason Science was still-born in Babylon, Rome, Greece, Persia, etc, was that they permitted final causes to "shut down" science. Conversely, the reason that science bloomed in the West, was Western metaphysics, with a Trinitarian view of God. Now you might think that this is reintroducing the final causes again, and you'd be right. But the Trinity doesn't permit the roadblocks of theological dualities to interfere with science. The unheralded secret to the success of the West is Trinitarian science. Think of it this way--neither theoretical science, nor experimental science is allowed to dominate, but they must exist in communication with something external called alternately "Laws of Nature", and "Nature" by the two groups. This trinity reflects the contribution of Christianity to Science. b) So why can we not study God the same way we study Nature? Why can we not subject the Bible to the same empirical tests, the same philosophical tests that we use on our science? The Church Fathers pointed out that to do so, was both to assume our own divinity--that the finite could comprehend the infinite--and to create God in our own image. This is the positive feedback that goes unstable in a big hurry. This is the source of idolatry. This is the source of the bad metaphysics Jaki warns us against. For if we use the tools of science to investigate the tools of science, we end up with circular arguments, "circles of death", self-fulfilling prophecies. This is the final end of Socialist economics, Communist freedom, Monarchist power and Nietzschean philosophy. This is why the Church Fathers insisted we cannot know the Trinity, we can only know what it is not. c) But where is the boundary between (a) and (b)? What are the things we can study, and the things we can't? I use the word "personal" to distinguish between these things. Persons are beings who have consciousness, who have self-awareness, who know that they know, who believe that they believe. These are all recursive, self-referencing things, and therefore have all the power, all the explosive potential that made (b) so dangerous. But we deal with people everyday! Yes, and we do not treat them as chairs or tables. We treat them as people. So my version of Gould's NOMA is "treat science as science and people as people". The version my wife taught me is "Use things and love people, but don't love things and use people". Finally, the danger of the occult and the paranormal, is that we are treating things that are self-conscious, things that are aware of themselves, as if they were things rather than persons. Demons and angels and people and God are not things, they are persons. We endanger ourselves and our children if we treat them as things. Because that is when the recursion gets us. That is when we are in danger of getting infected and modifying our behavior to reinforce the result. So it is not that the paranormal is "forbidden knowledge" so much as it is recursive knowledge, parasitic knowledge, infectious knowledge. We can know a lot about the paranormal and the occult, just like we can know a lot about the uncle who wears an ankle bracelet. But it must be personal knowledge, knowledge that is aware of recursion. Neil, I write about this occasionally on my blog. Here's an old blog on the subject: http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2008/07/31/the_holy_part_2.thtml where my term for the recursion of persons is "the holy". Axel, I do hold to a form of NOMA, but it divides along slightly different lines than is usually expressed. I attempted to clarify it above, but in a nutshell the separation is between the impersonal and linear, and the personal and recursive.Robert Sheldon_{February 7, 2012
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Rob Sheldon wrote it, as a note to News, and News posted it. This is the source material.News_{February 7, 2012
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Wait, what are you smoking, Nick? Take a look at athletes- you can measure how tall they are, how much they weigh, their body fat %, their 40 yard dash time, how far they can throw, etc., meaning there is quite a bit for science to do. However as evidenced by the likes of Ryan Leaf and Jamarcus Russell- both had all the science numbers to support drafting them as early as they were drafted (#2 Leaf & #1 Russell), but neither one had the unmeasureable intangibles. And those unmeasureable intangibles cost two teams millions of dollars. IOW science is good for things that can be measured, but there are some other things that exist that can't be measured (observed, yes) and to try to force those other things into the science box does a disservice to both.Joe_{February 7, 2012
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The strength of science resides in its exclusion of fields of knowledge that are not relevant, together with the incremental pace and meticulous pedantry, whereby research reaches its conclusions, whether confirmatory or falsificatory, in relation to the hypothesis under consideration.Axel_{February 7, 2012
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Empirical science is about the measurable isn't it? Moreover, human personality partakes of a literally immeasurably more profound order of truth than the physical world, even at the quantum level, although the latter marginally addresses it. It may well be that spiritualism is forbidden according to the canons of Judaeo-Christianity, because it is potentially dangerous, in that parasitic sense alluded to.Axel_{February 7, 2012
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Presumably this is based on something posted by Rob Sheldon. Can you provide a link to that source material?Neil Rickert_{February 7, 2012
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Wait, whaa?? The post seems to say that studying material things as personal is bad, and that studying personal things as material is bad, but then also says that studying personal things as personal is also bad when it comes to the occult and the paranormal, because the Bible says so I guess, and to top it off says that the paranormal is like a virus, which is itself an example of treating the personal as material. So the point, whatever it was supposed to be, is less than clear.NickMatzke_UD_{February 7, 2012
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