Against the supernatural as a profound idea--Part 8

Why did I mention all that? The idea we were discussing is that supernatural things lack a scientific explanation. It will be obvious from what I said that everything lacks an ultimate scientific explanation, so if we were to use this idea than we would have to view everything as supernatural, making the word useless. Some people might say that at least science gives some kind of explanation, even if it is not an ultimate one -- for example, explaining both falling objects and planetary orbits in terms of gravity -- and that this cannot be done with "supernatural" things. The problem with this is that, because the scientific explanation is never an ultimate explanation, there must always be some point at which there is no explanation for some scientific theory. For example, we use gravity to explain things, but we do not know why the theory of gravity applies, or we explain gravity in terms of some theory X and we do not know why X applies. The "bottom level" of our current scientific knowledge, that underpins all of our other explanations, must always be unexplained. This means that if we define supernatural things as "not scientifically explainable" then we would have to regard the most fundamental scientific theories that we have as supernatural, as they are just there with no explanation and our only reason for thinking them true is not any deeper knowledge, but merely observation of reality. This would suggest that this kind of definition of the "supernatural" is trivial as it implies that the basis of everything we know must be supernatural.

Someone might argue that there is a difference between fundamental scientific theories and truly supernatural things, in that there is always the possibility of finding a deeper explanation for a scientific theory later, while you could never do this with a truly "supernatural" phenomenon. However, if you accepted a definition like this you would never be able to tell when looking at different phenomena which category they fall into. For example, is there an "explanation" of gravity of or do we just have to accept it as "supernatural"? If we see ghosts is there an explanation or do we have to accept them as "supernatural"? This also starts to become a trivial definition of the supernatural because it suggests that all kinds of things that are generally thought to be "scientific" are supernatural. If we adopt this kind of idea then when we try to explain anything, sooner or later we would have to reach something that is "supernatural" because we cannot proceed further, unless there is an infinite chain of explanations for everything.

The idea is also dubious because whether or not some phenomenon is explained can depend on how you structure the description of it. For example, we could have two phenomena, A and B:

A is explained by C.
B has no explanation.

Someone accepting the dubious ideas we have been considering here might claim that A is "natural" and B is "supernatural." However, we might invent some other type of phenomena, D, which is superficially similar to B and which is explained by some theory E, so that D and E are together just a different way of expressing B. We could then say:

D is explained by E.

We would then have something like B which could be considered "natural." Insisting that natural things are "explainable" and supernatural things cannot be explained is trivial because nothing can be ultimately explained, while an intermediate explanation can be given for anything.

Natural things are scientifically understandable and supernatural things are not scientifically understandable

Some people think that some things are "supernatural" because they are beyond the "understanding" of science. The incorrect idea here is that science somehow tries to limit the sorts of understanding that could be valid. In fact, science attempts to understand in the most general way possible. Science is a methodology for using our limited observation of reality to work out what reality is like. If scientists tend not to accept that something exists then it means either that the evidence really does not justify thinking that it exists or that the scientists are wrong.

It might seem that science has a limited kind of understanding because of the language that science uses. Scientific understanding is generally described in terms of rules and equations. This gives some people the idea that science demands that everything can be expressed in mathematical terms and that some things might exist that are not understandable in terms of mathematics, and therefore not scientifically understandable.

There is nothing built into scientific methodology that demands that mathematical equations are used. Equations tend to be used because they tend to be useful for describing reality. Some people have speculated that, at a more basic level, equations may not even be best for describing reality and simple rules may be more appropriate, the equations only becoming relevant for higher level processes that are statistically derived from those rules.

When people regard scientific understanding as "limited" though what they probably object to is the idea that everything can be "reduced" to formal language. There is clearly a difference in style between the sorts of things that scientists say and the sorts of things that people making "supernatural" claims say. Here is an example of each to show the difference:

F=-GMm/r² (Newton's inverse square law of gravity) [6]

and

"The spirits of dead people wander the earth as supernatural ghosts" (a typical supernatural claim).

The sort of person who regards the second claim as meaningful is likely to have issues with the sort of person who thinks reality is best described in ways similar to that of the first claim: scientists tend to like things formally expressed. Does it make sense to say that some things are beyond formal description? This might seem tempting, but formal description is merely an attempt to reduce vagueness -- to remove as much doubt as possible about what the description means. Conventional, everyday language has a lot of vagueness and is natural to want to reduce it as much as possible for the purpose of describing nature. Saying that a particular thing is beyond scientific understanding or description is effectively saying that it is beyond formal description and therefore that it cannot be described without some vagueness. I think it makes no sense to demand that things must be described vaguely, if they are described at all. We might describe things vaguely because we do not know enough about them to describe them better, but to suggest that there are some things in reality which can only be described vaguely, because we are "limiting our view of reality" if we try to describe them without vagueness seems to me what someone would suggest if proposing incoherent concepts.

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