Reader Feedback: Why Invoking Miracles Is Unlikely to Advance Science
A reader asks why the need for magic indicates a flaw in a scientific idea.
Reader Feedback: Why Invoking Miracles Is Unlikely to Advance Science
A reader posed an interesting question about the last column through Facebook.
Why is it a "fatal flaw" if "the only way to make a theory work is to invoke the supernatural"? It seems to me that that statement indicates you are taking naturalism as a given.
There follows a back and forth with another reader about why gods aren’t part of science. Both invoked philosopher Karl Popper who is famous for the idea that to qualify as scientific, a theory has to be falsifiable. One reader says magical things are not falsifiable and the other says they are. The reader who is more favorable to magic offers the following comments:
In any case, falsifiability was proposed by Popper as the demarcation between science and pseudoscience, not between naturalism and supernaturalism. I don't see what it even has to *do* with naturalism. There is no inherent reason that naturalistic explanations are more falsifiable.
Popper is one of my most admired figures in philosophy of science, but he was never able to entirely solve this problem. He distinguished between "virtuous" and "vicious" ad-hoc additions, but was forced to admit that even the "virtuous" ones could prevent a final falsification.
Whether there is evidence or not is a separate discussion. Faye appeared to propose the claim as an epistemological rule, rather than as a contingent claim about the world subject to evaluation on the basis of evidence.
Here’s the passage in the original column in which I use the phrase “fatal flaw”:
"Some creationists have expressed surprise that scientists are averse to invoking deities. But this kind of a deity is just a placeholder for an intellectual gap. If the only way to make a theory work is to invoke the supernatural, that's a fatal flaw."
The column was based on interviews with cosmologists. It’s more a reflection on their thoughts and opinions than my own.
These scientists are not saying that evidence of a supernatural creator would be a “fatal flaw” in some theory. In fact, that would be downright amazing. But at the cosmology meeting that was the subject of this column, nobody was finding any evidence for supernatural entities of any kind.
If there’s no way to make a theory work except to invoke some magic, and there’s no evidence for the said magic, then I think it’s fair to say it’s a fatal flaw. If you allow enough magic, any theory in science could be valid. The problem is nicely illustrated in the above famous cartoon.
The point of the paragraph in question was that creationists are like the guy in the cartoon, starting with the flaw in a theory and inserting gods, miracles, intelligent designers, or other magical things. It’s not that finding gods makes a theory flawed, it’s that finding flaws does not prove the existence of God.
Christopher Hitchens may not have been a professional philosopher, but he did have a good point when he said: “That which can be asserted with no evidence can be dismissed with no evidence.”
The issue always comes down to meaningful evidence for a claim. If you have meaningful evidence for a "God" that creates rabbits, you very well have to consider that possibility when you're looking at rabbits.
If, however, you just think that rabbit immune systems "just couldn't evolve," there's no call for evoking a rabbit-making God. Or for a flagellum-making God, if you can't imagine how the bacterial flagellum evolved. What, specifically, points to God as a cause, if you haven't seen what God does, or don't even have evidence that it exists?
Science found out how Platonic solids (as crystals) form in the earth because they didn't invoke fictions like "forms" or "miracles" to explain them. Indeed, that is how explanation is even possible--by recognizing that not just anything and everything "could happen."
What has been observed to happen could happen, as well as derivations from said observations, while what cannot be observed or reasonably extrapolated from observations (not from analogies) have no standing to be considered.— Glen Davidson- "Why is it a "fatal flaw" if "the only way to make a theory work is to invoke the supernatural?"
It is a fatal flaw only if you cannot explain how the supernatural works. Those who appeal to the notion of the supernatural have no way to explain how its operations fit into what we already know about the world. And since such explanation is the raison d'etre of theory, that's fatal.— phhht 
Comment removed.- Any evidence as to God's intentions about the Big Bang and Evolution? Any evidence for God's existence? Your statement has no evidence to support it and is both untestable and unfalsifiable. It is not scientific but it is fatally flawed.— Paleo Cello
- Isn't a miracle an event which, by definition, has no rational explanation? Science, on the other hand, is about providing rational explanations. I don't see how the two modes of viewing phenomena could ever be reconciled.— jxxphilly
- "It seems to me that that statement indicates you are taking naturalism as a given"
Precisely! Science is the process of understanding the natural world. "Supernatural" beings by definition are not part of the natural world and therefore not part of the purview of science.
Stuart Hurlbert, in his classic 1984 paper on pseudoreplication in ecological statistics, included a tongue-in-cheek bit about demonic intrusion as a potential source of confusion in scientific experiments. He said, "If a demon chose to 'do something' to each experimental unit in treatment A but to no experimental unit in treatment B, and if his/her/its visit went undetected, the results would be misleading." In other words, scientists have to assume supernatural beings don't regularly interfere with the natural world or else the results of any or every experiment could be dismissed due to 'demonic influence'.— tgamble - We don't need to get into debates about what is the demarkation between science and non-science, or between natural and other-than-natural explanations.
There is such a thing as non-scientific explanation, but "intelligent design" does not fit even as a non-scientific explanation.
"Intelligent design" does not offer any description of what happened, when, where, or how. It does not
tell us the difference between things that are "designed" and things that are not. It does not tell us about the methods and motives of the "intelligent designers", about the constraints on them that would lead them to design things the way they are, rather than something else.
Homer's Iliad offers an explanation for the Trojan War by telling us about conflicts between the gods. That is an explanation, a supernatural, non-scientific explanation.
But "intelligent design" does not tell us anything about why the world of life has certain features. Why do humans, for example, have eyes most similar to the eyes of chimps and other apes, rather than like the octopus eye, or the insect eye?— thoms - What I don't understand is that one someone asks a person who believes god did it for proof, the response is that the Bible says there is only faith and there won't be proof. Yet, any time science is unable to get to an answer, those same peopletry to suggest that it is proof they are right. If there isn't going to be any proof, then how does the lackaof a scientific answer prove anything?— etotheb
- The unfairness of Christians on this topic is disheartening. We can demonstrate that the positive arguments they advance in support of their faith are flawed and would not be considered at all if they were not being offered to support conclusions taken as Truth because of a process that has more to do with the psychology of reinforcement than on honest discourse. But doesn't matter at all to them because they have been trained to ignore us anyway.
Their claim is simple: if we cannot explain everything in the Cosmos, we don't know everything. Since we don't know everything, we have to take things on faith. Therefore we're just another competing faith and the rules of faith apply. And they have the nerve to call us "relativists".— Daniel Hoffman - "Since we don't know everything, we have to take things on faith."
But, of course, we don't have to take things on faith. We could just accept the fact that ignorance exists. Believers, however, point into the gaps in the known and see gods. They claim, often implicitly, that since the unknown exists, ergo God. That's a non sequitur and a fallacy.— phhht - Hmmm, I say that Tezcatlipoca is the engenderer of these invoked miracles. If you want to claim miracles, you gotta show who they are coming from, or they are up for grabs. No evidence for your particular god's actions? Then why assume any god did anything?— Vel
- I'll stick with Quetzacoatl, who's evidence-based.— jxxphilly
- Vel,
In the case of "intelligent design" and related campaigns, not only don't they offer evidence, they don't tell us what the "intelligent designers" did, not even who the "intelligent designers" were. Evidence? Evidence *for what*? This is all they have to offer: somehow, somewhere, something is wrong with evolutionary biology.— thoms
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
