Christopher C. Lund wrote:
I think I agree with both Ed and Doug. But I have a question about the content of the category of statements in between Doug's dashes -- "claims about the supernatural, about the existence and nature of God, about God's desires for humans." Those are the exclusively religious statements, out of the domain of science (and therefore out of the government's ability to promote or disapprobate). Of course, this whole fight was started because many people thought "claims about the origins of human life on this planet" belonged on that list, but evolution changed that. (Those people can still climb the ladder -"claims about the origin of the universe" are still, at this point, out of science's domain.) This isn't accurate. Science does not have a commitment to naturalism in the sense that you imagine here, as a rejection of the supernatural. There is a very important distinction between methodological naturalism (MN) and philosophical naturalism (PN). Science requires the first, not the second. As a matter of methodology, science rules out supernatural causes and it does so because it must, because supernatural causes cannot be predicted or controlled and are therefore not testable. But that doesn't mean it rules out the existence of the supernatural as a matter of conclusion. The mere fact that so many scientists are theists is enough to establish that fact. And science can directly investigate the supernatural. Take the perhaps-sound-but-everyone-has-trouble-believing-them experiments allegedly showing prayer has effects on unknowing subjects that are unexplainable by naturalistic phenomena. (I won't go into the experiments here, but you can find them in Kent Greenawalt's piece, Establishing Religious Ideas: Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design, 17 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 321, 322 (2003), and his book, Does God Belong in the Public Schools?)There is a distinction between investigating claims of supernatural causation and actually investigating supernatural causation as well. For instance, if someone makes the claim that they have an amulet with magic powers that gives them the ability to find flowing water (typically called "dowsing") underground, that claim can be tested. But does that actually disprove the power of the amulet? No, because one can always excuse away the results as being the will of whatever entity is behind the magic. Perhaps the magic amulet does not want to be discovered and hides its magic when under investigation. The supernatural can never be falsified. The most we can ever say is that the claimed effects do not show up under rigorous testing standards. The realm of the purely religious -- the stuff between Doug's dashes -- seems always shrinking. Surely it won't disappear. (Even if science runs experiments showing prayer has no this-world effects, for example, the question of whether it has other-worldly effects would remain.) But I understand why this frightens a lot of people. That much is certainly true. Ed Brayton |
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw
Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
