Science and the Supernatural

[jason_m]

Somewhere along the way, I remember writing that it does not make sense that science not be willing to include notions of the supernatural. I could not understand why something that can't be incorporated in our notions of everyday reality be automatically excluded from scientific study because it is "not provable physically." To see why such an approach is flawed, consider the following arguments:

1. It is logically possible that supernatural events could exist.

2. If they exist, they can (in principle) some day be studied scientifically.

3. It could also come to a point that they do exist and are studied scientifically, and studying these events could benefit our society.

4. If, however, science takes the approach that anything that doesn't have a realistic physical basis is unscientific, then science automatically precludes itself from studying the supernatural and therefore precludes any of these scientific benefits.

5. Therefore, it is, in fact, unscientific to not at least allow for the possibility of the existence of the supernatural.

(I also don't want to hear that the supernatural is by definition beyond our scientific study, because the word is only applied to the conditions at this point in time; things could change such that what is called "supernatural" today belongs to reality tomorrow - and that's why we can't automatically reject such notions because we disallow the possibility of tomorrow ever coming - my point here.)