The limits of science

Did you know today, Thomas Dolby is a card-carrying Flat-Earther.

As in, almost the first one in line, when they opened the doors.

Kinda ironic, isn't it?

Pretty much but the comic relief is welcome!

So if science is limited to exploration of the material world why do so many moderns act as if science; evolution and cosmology in particular, have relegated all religious belief to the realm of superstition?

Right aboutthe time, religious literalists succeeded in removing the teaching of Evolution in one state (even preventing it being presented as an alternative.). And are pushing for the same, in many others.

And doing it all, without a shred of evidence, to support their own views.

So rejection of belief in the Supernatural (on supposed scientific grounds) is based on a reaction against the political actions of uninformed Supernaturalists?  Seems like a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

you are wasting your time discussing the limits of science with evolution bandwagonners dude.

Na.  Most of them are back over at "The Science of Evolution (no region or politics)".

Rejection of the belief in the supernatural, is based on a lack of evidence.

Just gather the evidence, and people will believe.

But then again, once you have the evidence, then it ceases to be supernatural. So I guess there's a catch-22 there.

That's the whole point.  This conversation is not about trying to disprove evolution.  Whether evolution is true or false contributes nothing to the question of existence of the Supernatural.  Science has nothing to say on the matter.

Good point.

But then again, science has gone a long way, to explaining so many of the Supernatural things in the past. Like weather. earthquakes, tornados, the movement of the stars. Where babys come from. The northern lights.

In fact, i would dare say Science has explained or partially explained 95% of what folks once said was Supernatural, at LEAST.

Now if some naysayer wants to claim Science has now hit some sort of glass ceiling, after Science has proven those same naysayers wrong so many times in the past, thats fine. They maybe right.

But I would expect long odds, before I money on it.

I disagree. Why? Enter politics, as usual. The masses tend to believe what they are told. If the leaders who control the media, textbooks, and news media want the masses to not know about something, or to believe in something, they can do so, and have done so for millennia. Even the ancient Egyptian pharaohs were able to convince the masses that the pharaohs were literally gods.

In modern times all the leaders have to do is suppress certain facts and give an alternative explanation, and the masses, who are always looking for simple answers and who naively trust their leaders, and who can't get their minds around a power structure that is pervasive beyond their imagination and incredibly evil beyond their imagination, would rather believe the nicer and simpler fairy tales told by their leaders. The evidence of surprising truths is right in front of our faces, but most of us refuse to believe. I gave up on my Mars thread here because nobody here was interested enough to do their research even when I laid it out in front of them, and people were becoming hostile when I threatened their world view. That's what the truth is up against.

"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."

--Harry S Truman
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/harrystrum137865.html

That's because the evidence they are looking for is scientific evidence.  If they need scientific evidence before they believe in the Supernatural they won't find it.

I see where you are coing from. And I remember feeling that very same way, many times myself.

Then I remember how many times in the past, those naysayers have been forced to eat their words. For example:

They promised us the Earth was flat. So somebody sailed around it. They don't promise that anymore.

They promised us manned flight was impossible. So somebody built an airplane. That shut them up.

They promised us, we would never discover a transition fossil, to link fish and amphibians. So somebody found it. They cried.

They laughed at the idea of a laser. (Mostly scientists, at that.) So somebody built one. They stopped laughing.

So please, I ask you, did not give up hope, on the Human Obsession for Progress. Yes, the politicians will fight that Progress at every turn, tooth and nail, just as you said.

But history shows, the politicians will always lose, sooner or later. Our will to move forward, is just too strong,

So, if you have something you earnestly believe in, something you just know is true, desite what all the textbooks claim, then pursue it! If you think there's a giant monster at the bottom of Loch Ness, rent a boat, and net that sucker!. There will be a Nobel Prize waiting for you, if you don't get eaten.

True, science has proven to be a very effective explanatory tool for material phenomena.  It is quite useless in helping us decide if the is a reality beyond the material world.

Whether evolution is taught at schools or not is of no consequence: in the modern world, when you need but to turn your TV on on one of the documentary-focused channels to learn about the history of life on Earth, interested people will get the relevant information naturally, and on others classes are wasted anyway. Schools are better focused on fundamental disciplines, such as math, leaving theories on nature to elective courses.

I think there is confusion of terms. From the scientific point of view, "supernatural" doesn't exist. If it exists and affects our Universe somehow, then it is not supernatural, it is a part of nature, possibly one we haven't figured out yet, but nonetheless.

"Supernatural" would be something like other universes in one of the multiverse theory with non-interacting universes: it is there according to the theory, but experimentally we can never find any trace of its existence. It exists in our theory, but doesn't exist in our world, so to speak. Or it exists in our world, but not in the part of this world where we live.

It is possible that something exists that defies the scientific method and is not accessible to it. For example, as I mentioned earlier, any entity breaking the cause-effect pattern would fall into this category. It would be interesting to encounter something like this and to try to make sense of it.

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However, the claims of religions, shamanistic beliefs and so on aren't a part of this category. What they prescribe can be expressed in simple, human terms. For example, the Bible doesn't make any special claims that cannot be checked by the science. It is possible to try to look for angels by using scientific equipment and either find them or not. Something not accessible to science would have to be much more alien, probably incomprehensible to human beings at this stage - and definitely not expressible by means of writing.