DAY 11
CHALLENGE
“Science cannot accept the supernatural. The natural world is all there is.”
DEFENSE
At best, this leads to a reductionistic understanding of science. At worst, it reflects intellectual prejudice.
The term “nature” is often used to refer to the visible world we see around us (i.e., the world detectible by the senses and by scientific instruments). The supernatural then would be anything that falls outside of the visible world.
On this understanding, the assertion that science can’t accept the supernatural would mean that science cannot deal with anything outside of the visible world. It would not mean, however, that there is nothing outside the visible world. Just because we can’t detect something with the senses doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. There could be vast realms outside the visible world that would be inaccessible to science on this understanding.
Further, those realms might be capable of interacting with the visible world, which would pose a challenge for science. We might be able to see visible effects of causes in the non-visible world, but science would not be able to explain the effects by their true causes, which it would be forbidden to discuss.
Sometimes people use “nature” to refer to everything that exists. On this understanding, one could assert that nature is all there is, but this also would not mean that the visible world is all that exists. There still could be vast realms not accessible to the senses. They might even interact with the visible world. Using “nature” to refer to everything that exists just reclassifies things that would otherwise be called super- natural as exotic parts of nature.
The claim that the visible world is all that exists is simply an assertion. It is not a scientific claim because it cannot be verified by science. If science, by its nature, is limited to examining the visible universe, then there is no way to perform a set of observations and experiments proving that there are no realms outside the visible universe. The as- sertion that only the visible world is real thus would be a matter of unscientific prejudice against the idea there is anything outside the visible world.