Against the supernatural as a profound idea--Part 9

Nevertheless, should we entertain the idea that maybe formal description cannot encompass everything and that things might exist which can only be described in everyday, vague human language? Suppose someone made such a claim, in everyday human language and insisted that the claim must be expressed vaguely. We could ask a series of yes/no questions about the claim and gradually learn more about it. Doing this would be equivalent to expressing the claim formally in the first place, so when someone claims that some "supernatural" thing cannot be described formally they are effectively saying that it is not even possible to answer yes/no questions about it. This is not the same as saying that someone making a "supernatural" claim should always know the answer to yes/no questions. We might have incomplete knowledge of the thing and, likewise, the person claiming that it exists might lack the knowledge needed to answer all yes/no questions, but it should be possible in principle to answer yes/no questions: an answer should be possible assuming someone has complete knowledge. If that is not the case, what are we supposed to even think it means when a properly constructed yes/no question about some "supernatural" thing does not even have an answer in principle? All things should be describable by using the answers to a series of yes/no questions and that means that all things, at least in principle, should be formally describable.

Someone who claims that things exist that are not "scientifically understandable" should say exactly what they think the unreasonable limitation in the scientific method is and why it will always exclude some things that can be known to exist by other means. When asked to do this people are likely to jump to one of the other definitions I have mentioned here. For example, they may say the scientific method only considers the "physical," while the supernatural is "non-physical" or they may say that the scientific method only considers things that can be analyzed, or that the scientific method only considers things inside reality, and so on.

The supernatural is a higher part of reality or is higher than reality.

This is attempting to take a commonly used, and understood, word like "higher" and use it in a way in which it loses all meaning.

When we properly use the word "higher" there is some well well-defined index. Different things are at different points on this index. Going in one direction along the index corresponds to getting "higher" and whether or not one thing is higher than another depends on the relative positions of the two things on this index. All that might seem a lot to say about such a simple concept as "higher," but there is an important point here: the word is meaningless without the well-defined index -- without some way of saying how high one thing is relative to another. Where things are in space is often used as the index. The height of a thing above sea level might, for example, be the index, so one thing would be "higher" than another if it was at a greater distance above sea level. The index does not have to be based on space though. It can be more abstract. We could say, for example, that one person has a higher IQ than another, or that one person is higher than another based on their levels of seniority in some organization.

When the word "higher" is used to define the "supernatural," however, the word "higher" itself is not explained. No index is given. People seem to think they can just declare the supernatural to be "higher" and leave it at that. Imagine if people tried do this in any context other than the "supernatural." Suppose someone said to you, "Fred is higher than Bill." You ask "In what sense is Fred higher than Bill? Is he taller?" and the person replies, "No, I don't mean taller. He is just higher." You ask, "Do you mean he is an ethically better person, or that he has been promoted to a higher level in some company, or has more power in society?" The reply is "No! You don't get it. He is just higher." You would assume you were talking to someone who was rambling incoherently. I have explained why now: no index would be given.

That is what people are usually doing when they are claiming the supernatural to be "higher."

People who do this usually fail to see that they are being incoherent by not stating what index they are talking about. This may be because in everyday life the index is obvious to both people in a conversation, and so does not need explicitly stating, leading some people to fail to see that it is needed.

Some people would argue with this by saying that there is a well-defined index when we are talking of the supernatural as "higher" things. Well, what is it supposed be then?

If "higher" things are supposed to be things to which our everyday world is subject then we know about lots of things like that already which I do not see people labelling as supernatural.

As an example, particle physics is now known to underpin our everyday world. When things happen in the everyday world it is really because of things happening with particle physics that we do not directly see. Our everyday experiences are subject to particle physics. When you see a car crash, a thunderstorm, or a man selling apples at a market stall, particle physics is producing all of these everyday experiences for you. Why then, does nobody label particle physics as "supernatural" on account of our everyday experience being subject to particle physics? The answer should be obvious: if this kind of "ontological superiority to everyday life" were adequate for making something supernatural then much of science would be supernatural. Some readers may object to this by saying that this is not what "higher" means, but I am not claming it is: I am merely showing one example which is of little use. If you do not want this meaning for "higher" then just declaring the supernatural as "higher" but in a different way is meaningless: what index do you want?

The supernatural is outside space and/or time

Some advocates of the supernatural claim that things are supernatural because they are outside space, outside time, or outside both. The assumption here is that science assumes that anything that exists must exist within space and time. Not all scientists think this is the case however. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist, has suggested a possible cosmology in which our observable universe, with its space-time, is merely one object in a set of all mathematically describable objects. Space and time are not important in Tegmark's cosmology. Instead, the concepts of space and time are provincial concepts, relevant only to anyone who happens to inhabit one of the small proportion of objects structured in ways describable in these terms. Objects space and/or time can still be formally described -- just not in spatial and temporal language. Tegmark's is not the only attempt to consider things beyond space and time scientifically.

An advocate of the supernatural could reply that most scientists think that space and time are fundamental parts of reality and that nothing exists beyond them. Rather than get involved in arguing about that I would merely point out that if that were true, and if something happened to exist beyond space and/or time, it would merely mean that most scientists were wrong. Why, however should this make things beyond space or time really all that special, particularly when someone like Tegmark is capable of scientifically considering them?

Should anything be found to exist beyond space and/or time we would have to change our views about reality, but this would just be a paradigm shift -- one of many that has happened. It would be a limitation in our worldview that was the issue here -- not any profound nature of the thing that is supposed to be "supernatural" and, once science had made such an adjustment, there is no reason why some sort of cosmological model like that proposed by Tegmark could not emerge, reality could still be scientifically considered and formally described, and science could just carry on.

For these reasons, I suggest that this type of "supernatural" lacks the profound nature that some people think it has. It is a trivial definition of the "supernatural."

By the way, some readers may think that I have invented a game that is easy to win here: all I have to do is consider whatever "supernatural" is supposed to mean, state that if it turned out to exist science would just incorporate it anyway, and then declare the definition of the supernatural to be trivial. There is some limited truth in this. When faced with some of these definitions my obvious answer is to say that science could go there too, but I do not think that is just playing a game. The point is that science could "go there" by functioning in much the same way that it does now and if someone thinks that it could not then they are essentially making a claim for things beyond scientific inquiry -- a different idea of the supernatural which I have already dealt with. If anyone really thinks that being "outside time" would qualify something as supernatural I suggest reading one of Tegmark's [8,9] papers and then asking yourself if somewhere in this set of mathematical objects would be a satisfying place for something like spirits or God to exist.

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