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Is It Real?

Entry 867, on 2008-10-10 at 21:32:28 (Rating 2, Philosophy)

In several recent discussions, and in a few recent podcasts and other media, I have heard the claim that certain subjects are beyond the ability of science to study. This is usually used as an excuse for when a person who believes in a paranormal, superstitious, or supernatural phenomenon runs out of things supporting their belief. It goes something like this: we don't have to take the evidence from science into account when we are discussing the spirit world (or add your own topic here) because it is beyond science's reach.

Is this true? Are some things beyond the reach of science? Isn't it the ultimate in arrogance to suggest that nothing is beyond the ability of science to study? In some ways it is. There are some things which science has difficulty in studying but this doesn't support the theories of the paranormal believers because these subjects are beyond the reach of everything else as well. In other words, if science can't study it can we know that its real? The answer is no.

Science is just a methodology. To establish the way something works, or whether it even exists, we create a hypothesis and then design a method (or experiment) which will support or reject the hypothesis. We then refine and re-test. There's nothing mysterious or magical about this. Its just common sense.

For example, let's say we want to find out how the Universe started. We could hypothesise it began 6000 years ago when God created it. OK, how would we test this (in an objective, unbiased way)? We could look at the age of various things in the Universe to see how old they are. If we find anything older than 6000 years that would lead us to start rejecting the hypothesis. If many independent types of evidence showed things older than the hypothesised age of the Universe we would reject the hypothesis. It might still be right, but that's not very likely.

Maybe we would create a new hypothesis where we stated the Universe is about 14 billion years old and began in a Big Bang. OK, nothing is older than 14 billion years so that fits. Should we see the remains of the Big Bang in the sky now? Yes, it should follow a certain spectrum centered around 3 Kelvin. We look and there it is. That's strong support for that hypothesis and it becomes a theory. It might still be wrong, but that's not very likely.

So that example was quite easy to study using science. But what about something a bit less obvious? What about god? What about emotions? What about morality? It seems to me these things can be studied using the same methodology as long as the meaning of the concept involved can be sufficiently well defined. For example, if god is defined as an entity which created the Universe using supernatural means we need to look for signs that the origin of the universe doesn't follow natural laws. Although this is a difficult subject to study, the current evidence doesn't indicate supernatural intervention so that type of god is rejected.

But what about something less certain? What about a god defined as a supernatural entity existing on another plane which we don't have access to? OK, if we don't have access to it then we can't study it with science so this would be beyond science. But here's the critical point: its also beyond everything else. We can never show whether this entity exists using science or anything else because it exists on another plane (whatever that means). Essentially this thing can't exist because it never interacts with our universe.

We could extend this to emotions and theoretical ideas. Does love exist? Does morality exist? Within reasonable definitions these things exist but can they be studied by science? Contrary to common belief they can. By using brain scanning, psychological testing and just by discussing a person's thoughts in a structured way it is possible for science to measure these abstract concepts. These techniques might be imperfect but so is any other way of evaluating them.

So when people come back to the old argument that their beliefs are beyond science I tend to disagree. Nothing is beyond the application of simple common sense. If it is then practically it either just doesn't exist or we will never know if it does.

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