From: Ralph Krumdieck <ralphkru@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
[...]
>I'm sure Chris would regard cell intelligence as part of the natural world
>if it could ever be proven that it really exists. Why not? Yes, if ESP
>can be proven and is reproducible in the labratory, then it is part of the
>natural world and not supernatural. I call "a supreme being, eternal,
>all-knowing, all-powerful" supernatural because nothing like that has been
>shown to exist. However, I don't deny that such a being may exist and, if
>it can be proven that it does, then it will no longer be defined as
>supernatural,
>which may be bad news for some religions. Of course, this definition
depends
>hugely on your definition of "exists".
I agree. This raises the subject of what we mean by natural and supernatural
(also material and non-material). I've posed this question before to people
who like to use these words, but never had a clear answer. Here's a copy of
a post I recently made to the Meta Reiterations list, to which I had
virtually no response. Perhaps people here would be interested in discussing
it.
-------------
I frequently see people invoking the dichotomies of natural vs supernatural
and material vs non-material, but I've yet to see adequate definitions of
these terms. The definitions I've seen have always been vague or circular in
some way. Yet these concepts seem to form a major part of some people's
arguments, especially of those anti-evolutionists (such as Phillip Johnson)
who accuse evolutionists of rejecting Intelligent Design out of hand due to
their alleged commitment to "materialism". With your help, I'd like to
explore these concepts, and see if I can make any sense of them.
It seems to me that the two dichotomies are very similar, so I'm going to
concentrate on just material vs non-material for now.
First, let me clarify that the phenomena I'll be considering here are only
those that we might call "concrete"--those which have an independent
existence, and can be said to "consist" of something. I'm not including
"abstract" phenomena, which only exist as properties of other phenomena,
e.g. size, intelligence, beauty. I'm inclined to consider space-time and the
physical forces as abstract phenomena, but I'll set those aside for later
discussion. I'll also set aside the question of "mind" for now, as that's
likely to be controversial.
The usual definition of "non-material" (in the philosophical sense) seems to
be something like "consisting of something other than matter or energy." The
assumption then seems to be that any phenomenon which does not consist of
matter or energy is somehow outside the realm of science. (I take "within
the realm of science" to mean that the effects of the phenomenon are
empirically detectable and, to some degree, predictable.)
But why should this be so? What if science one day demonstrates the
existence of a phenomenon which is neither matter nor energy, and is able to
make predictions about its behaviour? Wouldn't we want to refer to such a
phenomenon as "material" too?
If so, then it seems that "material" really means "that which is within the
realm of science (though it may not be detectable at present)." If not, then
non-material phenomena are *not* beyond the realm of science.
Thus, to say that non-material phenomena are beyond the realm of science is
either tautological (true by definition) or false. Either way, I think we
have a problem with the way the terms "material" and "non-material" are
commonly used.
Note that, when defining a phenomenon which is within the realm of science,
I said "the effects of the phenomenon are empirically detectable" and not
"the phenomenon itself is empirically detectable." It's important to bear in
mind that nothing is *directly* empirically detectable. We always detect a
phenomenon through its effects. So, if we say that a deity is not directly
empirically detectable even though its effects are, this does not remove it
from the realm of science any more than a neutrino is removed from the realm
of science because we detect its effect on our instruments, rather than
detecting it directly.
Furthermore, I hope to show (in another post) that, if we define "material"
to mean "that which is within the realm of science", then non-material
phenomena cannot have any effect on the observable world.
But that's all for now. Comments would be welcome.
Richard Wein (Tich)
--------------------------------
"Do the calculation. Take the numbers seriously. See if the underlying
probabilities really are small enough to yield design."
-- W. A. Dembski, who has never presented any calculation to back up his
claim to have detected Intelligent Design in life.
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