This isn't a religion vs. science thread. This thread has nothing to do with religion whatsoever.
This thread is about naturalism, the metaphysical view that natural things are all that exist.
If science has used methodological naturalism, and has been very successful because of this working assumption, wouldn't this be empirical evidence for naturalism?
Naturalism has straightforwards falsification criterion: if you can show one thing that isn't natural, then naturalism is false. Naturalism has never been falsified.
>Search Results A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.
How is naturalism not a scientific theory that has been validated more than any other?
Prove me wrong instead of posting /pol/-tier dismissals.
Or else get out.
Cameron Williams
the ability of falsification is actually a classical criteria for distinguishing science from pseudoscience
Carson Martin
Well what the fuck is natural? If you prove the existence of something doesn't that make it natural? Like, even if we discovered that yes, some people can make tables levitate and bend spoons with their mind, that would just be a new natural thing we'd now know about.
Science has already integrated shit that would have looked supernatural before it studied them. Like "maaan, there are rocks that can make sheperd sticks fly, maaaan". And then wow, turns out magnetism is a thing.
Supernaturalism isn't wrong or unsubstantiated, it just doesn't make logical sense. It's just people butthurt scientists don't accept their special branch of supernatural beliefs.
Logan Baker
>if you can show one thing that isn't natural, then naturalism is false how do you show one thing that isn't natural? you can always make your model more complicated to allow for this new thing
Grayson Thompson
>If science has used methodological naturalism
It hasn't. Science is natural philosophy i.e. the study of things that aren't being fucked with by jackasses, outside effects, or Jesus.
John Young
If telekinesis was discovered, and upon careful research into the phenomenon no physical mechanism for how it works is discovered, then yes it would be support for supernaturalism.
If it was found that the human mind was hooking into some physical phenomenon etc then it wouldn't be evidence against naturalism.
Noah Allen
>If telekinesis was discovered, and upon careful research into the phenomenon no physical mechanism for how it works is discovered, then yes it would be support for supernaturalism. no, it would support a burst of research into how telekinesis works, and at worst, the addition of its irreducible element as a fundamental force
Bentley Wood
>If telekinesis was discovered, and upon careful research into the phenomenon no physical mechanism for how it works is discovered I doubt that. You don't need to link something to another area of physics. Like, if we didn't manage to link Navier-Stokes to microscopic physics, we'd still not call them supernatural.
Similarly, we'd still make a theory of telekinesis and study quantifiable things like how heavy of a mass you can move and so on.
Blake Gutierrez
>it just doesn't make logical sense
Just because you're still butt hurt over being dragged to church as a kid doesn't mean you can just call it illogical.
A supernatural presence fucking with the universe is no different than a programmer (a super-code presence) fucking with an executing program with a debugger.
Jack Nguyen
>Shitty computational metaphors.
You're assuming a dualistic metaphysics in your thought-experiment... and then proceed to use it to support the idea that said dualism is logical.
Lincoln Peterson
But in that analogy, physics is only interested in the code. Supernatural in that sense is more a matter of "not the thing you're studying" rather "some unwarranted asumption we make".
It seems your objection then would be more about reductionism than naturalism. Yes, reductionism is totally an assumption, that just happens to be very well substantiated. I think it'd fit OP's point more.
Julian Sanchez
>But in that analogy, physics is only interested in the code
Not quite, physics is concerned with emulating that code. There's a subtile but important difference which kills the "falsifiable" meme. If physics was concerned with reverse engineering the source code then any deviation would be a death sentence. If physics is concerned with emulating the universe then minor glitches can be tolerated as long as the overall behavior is as expected. If you have ever taken any physics courses you would've quickly realized that it's must be the latter as soon as something gets expanded in a infinite series and immediately truncated (falsifying it then and there).
>Supernatural in that sense is more a matter of "not the thing you're studying"
Exactly.
Jayden Morris
>If you have ever taken any physics courses >you would agree with my positivist views wew get fucked lads, there isn't one correct philosophy of science
>somebody did a third order approximation therefore physics ain't real kys my man
David Phillips
Why so triggered?
>Positivism
Where did I say I was a positivist?
Kayden Anderson
When you said >we're just trying to do numerical emulation maaaaaan, it's not about truth, maaaaaan
Dominic Jones
...
James Reed
>History: The first proto-scientist was the Greek intellectual Aristotle, who wrote many manuals of his observations of the natural world and who also was the first person to propose a systematic epistemology, i.e., a philosophy of what science is and how people should go about it. Aristotle's definition of science became famous in its Latin translation as: rerum cognoscere causas, or, "knowledge of the ultimate causes of things." For this, you can often see in manuals Aristotle described as the Father of Science.
>The problem with that is that it's absolutely not true. Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization. For Aristotle, science started with empirical investigation and then used theoretical speculation to decide what things are caused by.
>What we now know as the "scientific revolution" was a repudiation of Aristotle: science, not as knowledge of the ultimate causes of things but as the production of reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation.
>This method of doing science was then formalized by one of the greatest thinkers in history, Francis Bacon. What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation. Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering — of trial by error. Scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge, since it is knowledge about only specific empirical propositions — which is always, at least in theory, subject to further disproof by further experiment. Many people are surprised to hear this, but the founder of modern science says it. Bacon, who had a career in politics and was an experienced manager, actually wrote that scientists would have to be misled into thinking science is a pursuit of the truth, so that they will be dedicated to their work, even though it is not.
>Bacon >but I didn't say I was a positivist u guize
Xavier Gutierrez
>lel condescending meme arrows >I are's right
Thomas Jones
m8 you can't say you're not a positivist and then quote an obviously hardcore positivist article
Ian Watson
>falsification babby lern'd a new werd
Noah Rodriguez
I need to go back to the dumber boards... I feel like I don't belong here all of a sudden
Jaxon Hughes
Well, you'd probably make a good Pragmatist. Leaving ethos and pathos out as emotional and instinctual "convincing" of the consistency of any narrative through rhetoric, you are left with logos, but that gets to be tricky as well if you are not careful. But, regardless of any narratives consistency, it has to reflect the world at least for the intent of the narrative. Maths are fun, and surely can be "useful to be believed" but one of its strongest points is this:
All we ever have is a story, and the story is never the world, but the way we approach it is by making the pathways (narratives) in our brain first (connecting diverse narratives as consistently as possible if you are a mathematician, and by your feels if you are everyone else), then we check them against the other pathways (narratives) for consistency. But ultimately for them to be useful we have to see if they reflect the world, which assumes the narrative comes first. In reality, it is a recursion, and our givens are just recursions in equilibrium, not some magical platonic forms. The fault is that we only know our narratives and we always mistake them for the world. The world is not the picture in our heads. It is out of conveneience that we think so.
So, I feel your frustration. Cutting out the informal first is noble, but necessary. Finding consistency in narratives not readily accessible to your senses, however, is where the effort pays off.
That takes sobriety, and it is no fun to be around a bunch of drunks.
