Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Supernatural Does Not Exist

To assert the existence of the supernatural, one has to claim to have witnessed something that allegedly disobeys the laws of nature - i.e. something that cannot be described or expressed in comprehensible words reflecting certain patterns of reality. Here, there are two major aspects: 1) if one can’t explain a certain phenomenon, the reason of his failure to explain it may be an error or his lack of knowledge. That DOES NOT mean that the phenomenon is “supernatural.” 2) if one claims that the phenomenon can NEVER be explained and rationally cognized, what is the source and foundation of this claim? How can one know that in the future a Newton won’t emerge who will discover the laws governing this phenomenon? To sum up, such a claim has no grounds whatsoever.

3 comments:

Lemming Master said...

It is clear from reading the accompanying posts that QM has really led to a strange conception of reality; one that is considered by many to be by its very nature probabilistic.

You can see this point of view in the writings of a Niels Bohr or a Karl Popper, who is a very influential philosopher of science in the social sciences (though modern social scientists find Popper's insistence on the "falsifiability" of scientific theories to be too constrictive and have replaced him with the solipsistic Thomas Kuhn, who popularized the "paradigm" model of science).

The probabilistic view of reality justifies both infinite pragmatism (we might term it "arbitrary" rule) and contradictions in policy. This point of view cannot explain permanence, the laws of conservation of matter and energy, and the reason why QM appears to be "indeterminate" in particle behavior while Newtonian mechanics, which in many cases is very precise, appears to be stable.

It is a basic concept that when the micro-levels of a phenomenon are unstable, thus the macro-level will also be unstable. It boggles the mind that the randomness of the micro-level and macro-level would perfectly cancel each other out. The unintelligibility of the modern sophists' positions suggest to me that they are not really interested in truth, but in destroying the integration of the mind for political ends.

Reaganx said...

Some modern quantum physicists claim that modern experiments have refuted the concept of causality and laws of logic. The claim is absurd because experiments can do no such thing. Causality is a philosophic axiom - it cannot be refuted by any experiment.
What really happened is that some physicists, armed by the irrational post-Kantian philosophy, applied the logical consequences of that philosophy to the interpretation of experiments. However, there are many other interpretations of quantum mechanics, including ones that do not violate the law of causality (see the de Broglie–Bohm theory).
On a related subject, the theory of relativity DID NOT refute Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics applies to a narrower set of objects (non-relativistic objects and velocities) and is still true for them. What Einstein did was to expand modern physics to a wider set of objects. That’s it.

Reaganx said...

To elaborate, the law of causality and the laws of logic are also derived from empirical data (not from some a priori stuff) but the method of philosophical inquiry is entirely different from that of physics. No physical experiment can refute a metaphysical theory. Metaphysics deals with a different realm of concepts.