Scientific Study of the Supernatural

This morning I found an excellent paper by Dr. Yonatan Fishman, an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, titled “Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?”. Fishman argues that no field of knowledge is inaccessible to scientific study. He points out that this contradicts the idea of "non-overlapping magesteria" that is often used to exempt supernatural concepts from rational analysis, as well as to exclude Intelligent Design and other religious ideas from science curricula.

This is something I’ve thought about many times and wanted to write about, but Fishman’s paper covers the subject with much more rigor and detail than I’d have been able to supply. Here are some quotes (with page numbers):

9 The findings of modern neuroscience strongly support the dependence of perception, cognition, emotion, memory, decision making, and personality on the function of the physical brain.

11 In general, most believers hold that gods, spirits, and paranormal phenomena have real effects on the world and on their lives. These effects should be testable by the methods of science.

12 The history of science has been characterized by the progressive ‘naturalization of the world’, providing non-supernatural alternative explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be explicable only by appeal to supernatural agents.

17 Demarcating ‘science’ from ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘natural’ from ‘supernatural’ is not only problematic but unnecessary. The crucial question is not, Is it science? or Is it supernatural?, but rather, Is there any good reason to believe that claim X is true?

17 If the fundamental aim of science is the pursuit of truth - to uncover, to the extent that humans are capable, the nature of reality - then science should go wherever the evidence leads. If the evidence were to strongly suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena, then so be it.

17 Naturalism is not a premise or presupposition of science - it is a conclusion of science, albeit a tentative one, based upon the available evidence to date.

18 The best explanation for why there has been so far no convincing, independently verifiable evidence for supernatural phenomena, despite honest and methodologically sound attempts to verify them, is that these phenomena probably do not exist. Indeed, as discussed earlier, absence of evidence, where such evidence is expected to be found after extensive searching, is evidence of absence.

18 Contrary to the positions expressed [in the 2005 Dover Pennsylvania school district trial] by Judge Jones, the AAAS, and the NAS, the reason why supernatural or religious claims, such as those of ID/Creationism, do not belong in science classes is not because they have supernatural or religious content, but rather because there is either no convincing evidence to support them or science has debunked them.

Nobody knows

The most effective way to find truth is not by accepting tradition, but by objective study.

It seems to me that an accurate understanding of reality is the most powerful means to well-being. If our ideas are erroneous, our actions based on those ideas are unlikely to accomplish our objectives. If I think my illness is the result of bad blood, it might make sense to drain some of it, but in reality that would be unlikely to improve my health.

Some people claim that there is no objective reality, only a subjective reality created by each person. That seems absurd to me—a careless exaggeration of the truth that each person has a different view of reality, which seems accurate to that person and on which that person bases all decisions.

There are so many things that so many people agree on that it seems clear that there is an objective reality. The repeatability of experiments is very strong evidence of this. It may be obvious that there is an objective reality, but comprehending it is far beyond our capabilities. To one degree or another, though, we do all have our own views of what it may be.

Since no two people agree completely on everything, it seems unlikely that my views are accurate and everyone else's are flawed. It seems much more likely that mine are not only inaccurate, but that many people have more accurate beliefs than I do.

I used to believe that we human beings were incapable of discovering truth on our own. The only way we could know the truth was by God's revelation to us. When I discovered that there is no belief that all Christians share, I began to realize that none of us can justifiably claim that any of our beliefs is certainly true. Considering the multitude of ways in which our knowledge can be defective, it seems extremely presumptuous to claim to know anything for sure, other than that we exist.

Although we can't assert that we have absolute knowledge, we can have some confidence that, on the whole, our body of beliefs corresponds with reality to a useful degree. We can have this assurance because most of our beliefs agree with the beliefs of most other people, but more importantly because many of our actions based on those beliefs produce the expected results. The unique contribution of science to our understanding of reality is due to its efforts to study things objectively by cross-checking observations and interpretations rather than relying on individual or mystical means. It seems to me that such approaches are the most effective way to discover truth.

It was most humbling to realize that the beliefs I had based my life on were supported only by tradition and anecdotal evidence. My distrust of science became an eagerness to learn from science, and I shifted the focus of my reading from books of Christian teachings to books about scientific discoveries.