Can the scientific method be applied to study supernatural phenomena?

[leroy]

We don't have good testimony for any supernatural thing or aliens. If it's just testimony it would be hard to test for a hologram or a plasma after the fact.
The ghosts are in a similar boat to ufos. We can confirm people saw something but was it an actual spirit of a person once alive or entity from an afterlife dimension? That seems as hard as showing a ufo defying our laws of aviation to be actual alien.

Yes there are no good testimonies about ghosts, which is why I don't belive in them......

But if you show me a testimonie that:
1 was confirmed by multiple independent witnesses

2 the witness had nothing to win and everything to lose..... (for example they had to abandon there house and live in an ugly government shelter because of the Gohst)

3 the experience is clear and unabigous



I would reconsider and probably take ghosts seriously...... But to my knowledge such testimonials do not excist

 

[ppp]

Walking through walls.

In response to the OP the answer r is yes you can test whether if someone can walk through doors or not,

You think that walking thru a wall is necessarily supernatural?

 

[leroy]

You think that walking thru a wall is necessarily supernatural?

Not "necessarily" but likely to be supernatural... Would you disagree?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Why? On what grounds do you question it?

On the grounds that in all the years I've spent working as a scientist I've never used "it", nor known of other scientists (regardless of their field) who have. It is a pedagogical myth, and not a good one at that. There are indeed more general methods that scientists use, rendering epistemological anarchism groundless along with similar radical critiques. But if there were one example I could pick to illustrate a central deficiency of the myth of The Scientific Method it would probably be that for almost a century now physicists tend to be divided and trained before post-doctoral research either as experimentalists or theorists. Such a dichotomy cannot fit into the popular presentation myth found in textbooks. For a simple but more extended summary critique, see the attached.

 

[ppp]

On the grounds that in all the years I've spent working as a scientist I've never used "it", nor known of other scientists (regardless of their field) who have.

Perhaps you are just a bad scientist.

 

[tayla]

it has been claimed that the scientific method and modern technology can be used to determine and validate such supernatural phenomena as the resurrection of the dead and ghosts. And with a high degree of certainty. Do you think that science can be applied to find answers about these and other supernatural phenomena?

In order to study resurrection scientifically, you would need examples to study. But all that exists are accounts of it happening, so really it's more of a historical scholarly endeavor -- are the accounts believable?

If there were a ghost to study, I suppose scientists could measure the light it emits to demonstrate there is no known cause. Maybe they would find fluctuations in the underlying quantum fields that explain it.

 

[ppp]

Not "necessarily" but likely to be supernatural... Would you disagree?

I do not know what you mean by "likely". Probability is calculated.

 

[ppp]

If there were a ghost to study, I suppose scientists could measure the light it emits to demonstrate there is no known cause. Maybe they would find fluctuations in the underlying quantum fields that explain it.

Sure. But no known cause can never warrant a conclusion of supernatural. We would need positive evidence.

 

[tayla]

But no known cause can never warrant a conclusion of supernatural. We would need positive evidence.

I agree that as we study deeper and deeper into the molecular and quantum realms, no evidence of the supernatural appears.

All evidence of the supernatural resides within our minds, within our imaginations and ideas.

But scientific "truths" derived from the scientific method are ultimately also all human ideas within our minds.

That said, I reject the proposition that there are beings in a supernatural realm creating this universe and interacting with its conscious creatures. I have tried to find a reason to believe this proposition, but can't find one.

 

[leroy]

I do not know what you mean by "likely". Probability is calculated.

I don't have the exact numbers to calculate exact probabilities

 

[gnostic]

I don't have the exact numbers to calculate exact probabilities

Try “one”, first.

Because you cannot often more than one evidence...so tried to get the first evidence in...then perhaps we can talk of more.

You said you could provide evidence, but so far you have only offered just multiple empty claims and even emptier make-believe scenario, but no evidence to support your position on the supernatural.

 

[ppp]

I don't have the exact numbers to calculate exact probabilities

You don't appear to have any metrics what so ever

 

[leroy]

You don't appear to have any metrics what so ever

Granted I don't have metrics..... So what?

 

[ppp]

Granted I don't have metrics..... So what?

Without metrics your claim of 'likely' has no meaningful connection to reality.

 

[leroy]

Without metrics your claim of 'likely' has no meaningful connection to reality.

Would you say that evolution is more likely to be true than creationism? (I assume that your answer is yes)

Do you have the exact metrics to calculate probabilities? (I assume not)

My point is that one can assert that A is more likely than B even if you don't have the exsct metrics.

....
Besides all these gymnastics was caused because I said that "a man walking through a wall" would likely be a supernatural event...... Do you agree?

 

[ppp]

Would you say that evolution is more likely to be true than creationism? (I assume that your answer is yes)

If you mean Christian Creationism as espoused by the majority of fundamentalist Christians, it is not a candidate explanation. It has no demonstrable claims, or explanatory value. But even if it were, your question would be senseless. Evolution has nothing to do with how life started.

Do you have the exact metrics to calculate probabilities? (I assume not)

My point is that one can assert that A is more likely than B even if you don't have the exsct metrics.

I don't need exact metrics. And I never said or implied that you did. The problem is that you have no metrics. You have no method to demonstrate that any of your claims are false. Until you have those things, you have nothing but a claim.

Besides all these gymnastics was caused because I said that "a man walking through a wall" would likely be a supernatural event...... Do you agree?

I do not know what you mean by "likely". Probability is calculated.

 

[gnostic]

I agree that as we study deeper and deeper into the molecular and quantum realms, no evidence of the supernatural appears.

All evidence of the supernatural resides within our minds, within our imaginations and ideas.

But scientific "truths" derived from the scientific method are ultimately also all human ideas within our minds.

That said, I reject the proposition that there are beings in a supernatural realm creating this universe and interacting with its conscious creatures. I have tried to find a reason to believe this proposition, but can't find one.

The reasons why Scientific Method is being use, as way to formulate explanations (eg model, hypothesis, theory), way to test and analyze those explanations through observations (eg evidence, experiments), is to determine what is true and what isn’t true, through evidence, and not rely on personal preconceptions such as religious belief and what we personal likes or dislikes, because these lead to bias.

The Scientific Method that you are dismissing as another “human ideas”, is simply procedures and steps required to mitigate as much as possible these biases.

So instead of only accepting what we believe in or what we like, personally, we rely on evidence and data gathering and observations, data that will make our decision for scientists, to reach conclusion if a model is successful and scientific or failure and unscientific.

And when I mean observation I don’t necessarily mean what we can see with our own eyes, because these days, we use technological devices and computers, to do a lot of the observing, measuring, calculating and testing evidence, and turn these observations into data that we can analyze.

Yes, Scientific Method is a human concept, but like I said, it is concept that help us to do science and not based everything on what we like to believe.

That’s the difference between science and religion.

In science, we don’t get to choose what is factual or not factual. Natural Science or Physical Science isn’t about only choosing what we like personally.

In religion, people follow what they would like to believe, and often, these involved in believing in the supernatural, eg spirits, gods, miracles, resurrection, reincarnation, etc. They believing in people who don’t have the benefits of science, writing old holy books that often filled with symbols, with myths and fables that defied the law of nature.

We know from experiences that birds and bats have wings, not all of them are capable of flight. And we have able to designed and manufactured wings for planes and gliders that are capable of keeping us in the air (as well as engines that can propel us).

But something like the Bible, tell us of angels that look like humans, can also have wings like birds, as well as angel with one head, but multiple faces, 4 faces in Ezekiel 1. Are such beings even be possible?

So do we choose accept reality in the natural/physical world, or do we choose the supernatural ones, where something that are made up, like the 4-winged and 4-faced angels?

Which reality actually exist?

There are reasons for using Scientific Method in Natural Science and in Physical Science.

Ps There is also Social Science that have more to do with studies of human behaviors/cultures (eg psychology, anthropology) and human actions (eg political science, economics, laws, archaeology, etc), where Scientific Method are not useful or not even used.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Perhaps you are just a bad scientist.

It is interesting to note the ways in which what makes a good scientist varies with respect to and often just because of issues related to these topics, but I don't think you're there yet. After all, the truth of what I say need not rest on my words but is rather reflected in current and past scientific literature, not to mention the works of the universally recognized greats. Presumably you have a higher opinion of e.g., Einstein:
"it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe."

James B. Conan remarks in his book Science and Common Sense, “[t]here is no such thing as the scientific method. If there were, surely an examination of the history of physics, chemistry and biology would reveal it.”

In addition to being a scientist and noteworthy scholar,Conant was very concerned with the popular misconceptions of scientific inquiry by non-specialists and a “popular science” author. Unlike most other such authors, though, Conant didn’t seek to popularize some field of science. In the book referred to above an in others Conant wrote about what “science” actually involves compared to what most have thought it to who are not practicing scientists.

I have a short personal story that cuts straight to the heart of the issue. Very early in my graduate career a PI (principal investigator) I worked with and whose lab I was apart of ran a weekly graduate seminar (some post-docs were there as well) largely devoted to criticizing a wide-spread theory that he disagreed with. At one point during the seminar, a graduate student scathingly criticized a peer-reviewed study supporting the theory that the head of the lab regarded as so utterly flawed, but surprisingly he actually reined her in. He said that while the study was flawed, it was an improvement on previous studies by the same author and similar researchers and that it addressed many of the “flaws” we had covered in studies in previous weeks. Here comes the interesting/important part. He went on to say that it could be future studies continued to find the evidence for the theory he loathed and do so without any flaws. In that case, he stated, we would have to realize that the methods used by neuroscientists were inadequate. Since my contribution was to the physics of the principle tool in question (NMR, used in the generation of BOLD contrast singals in fMRI) this concerned me rather directly.

Now, as anybody who has taken even high school science classes can tell you, The Scientific Method (TSM) says that if you continually confirm some hypothesis, then you accept it as theory (at least until it is falsified). So why was this distinguished professor, with an academic pedigree few could match, so blatantly rejecting the basis for TSM? I asked him how we could determine when the methods were the problem vs. the theory (that is, given many experiments in some field of science that all support the same theory, how can we determine whether findings reflect reality or poor methods)? He replied with something to the effect of “when you have a really good reason for thinking that certain evidence should exist but you don’t find it, it’s because your methods are wrong.”

Apart from introducing a component that isn’t part of TSM (i.e., after confirming a hypothesis, determining whether the means of confirmation are sound), this part of real scientific research has a much more pernicious, nuanced, and devious side. Scientists who have a “really good reason” to suspect to find X result do so because they aren’t really testing hypotheses. They use their theories to develop hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret the results in order to contribute to these same theories.

 

[Hockeycowboy]

Recently, in another thread, it has been claimed that the scientific method and modern technology can be used to determine and validate such supernatural phenomena as the resurrection of the dead and ghosts. And with a high degree of certainty. Do you think that science can be applied to find answers about these and other supernatural phenomena?

What would need to be established in advance to carry out a legitimate study of this subject using the scientific method?

Fascinating question...but I’d say no.
The scientific method requires reproducibility.
But genuine supernatural events - as opposed to the fake ones, including hucksters.... there are simply too many for them all to be fake - are “performed” by intelligent entities that impersonate the dead....they’re imposters. They only impersonate the dead, to mislead those who want to believe in an immediate life after death. They have no need to convince scientists of it. The last thing they want, is to encourage skeptics to begin searching for Jehovah, the True God! (Searching for false gods, is fine.) They’re pretty much successful.

(After death, the dead person “sleeps”, i.e., RIP’s, until the future Resurrection comes. John 6:44; c.f., John 5:28-29; Acts of the Apostles 24:15.
IOW, ones who died 3,000 years ago, are still RIP’ing....they have no awareness of anything.Ecclesiastes 9:5.John 11:11-14. Only until their future Resurrection, will they again live.)

These impersonating entities simply want to keep people from learning the truth about God and His purposes.

I have a documentary novel entitled, “The Airmen Who Would Not Die,” fascinating read, but I did so through the lens of my perception. It really got to me!
If you’ve got more questions, just ask.

 

[Magical Wand]

Can the scientific method be applied to study supernatural phenomena?

It sure can. As long as it has observable effects on the material world and makes predictions, it can be tested, falsified or confirmed. Indeed, it is essential for religious apologists that cosmology shows (according to them, at least) that the universe began to exist -- which would confirm the predictions made in Genesis.

Anyway, you got the idea.