That’s what I said when I saw the Teacher’s scale today. It was Open Day at our school, so I poked my head into his room and saw it on display. The scale was taller than me, all wood and ropes. A few large rocks were at the side.
“It’s very impressive,” I said. “Did you build it yourself?”
“Yes, that’s right. I use it when teaching about weights and measures, levers, and so on.”
“Shouldn’t it be balancing?” I asked. Nothing was on the scale, but it was lopsided.
“Well, that’s the thing I can’t figure out,” he said. “I can attach little weights to either side to make it even, but sometimes one side will be heavier, and then in a little while the other side will. Maybe it’s evaporation or something. I don’t understand the physics of it.”
“Huh,” I said. “Maybe if the arms were longer.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe there’s an angel sitting on one side!”
“Perhaps,” I smiled, remembering that angels and fairies have a big part in the Steiner School aesthetic. Then I had a thought.
“Say,” I said, “if angels can influence the weights, they could be doing it all the time and we wouldn’t even know. So how can we ever trust the scales?”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, if I weigh two things on a scale, is one thing really heavier than the other, or is God just fiddling with my data?”
If it’s possible that there might exist a supernatural being that could influence the results of a scientific test or measurement, we could never really expect those results to be reliable. We couldn’t even do anything as simple as weigh anything. Scientific research itself would be impossible. But because scientific research is possible, such beings cannot exist.
Let’s dust off the old believer’s hat and see if it still fits. We could argue that God could intervene, but chooses not to. God works with laws of nature. In which case God is indistinguishable from the laws of nature, and our theory of the universe would lose nothing by cutting him or her out. Occam’s razor again.
This is a striking illustration of how science and spirituality the supernatural are not in harmony. They are two opposing approaches to the universe. One precludes the other.
29 October 2006 at 5:47 pm
I love it when you talk dirty. Richard Dawkins would be proud of you.
However, I would say it was an example of how science and the supernatural cannot work together.
Spirituality can be used linguistically to mean an aspect of experience that people do not ascribe to the material world – as such it is a personal reality although not universal or generalisable.
(I realise I may be treading on shaky ground writing this on a linguist’s blog …)
29 October 2006 at 11:11 pm
Hmm.
Yeah, okay. ‘Supernatural’ is probably a better word there.
I think I do want to define spirituality as ‘the subjective feelings of immaterialism’.
Changed.
31 October 2006 at 7:19 pm
So what do you think about the idea that the “supernatural” or what we call supernatural in many cases are just things we haven’t discovered scientificly yet but when we do they just become part of the known natural world?
31 October 2006 at 9:49 pm
‘the subjective feelings of non-materially defined phenomena’?
or perhaps
‘feelings of indeterminate origin, locally defined in non-material terms’?
(Can you tell my father wrote dictionaries?)
1 November 2006 at 5:21 am
So what do you think about the idea that the “supernatural” or what we call supernatural in many cases are just things we haven’t discovered scientificly yet but when we do they just become part of the known natural world?
I like that actually. If we could scientifically verify the existence of angels, they would become part of science! because scientific theories would have to grow to accommodate them. Science gets all the good stuff. 🙂
But in reality, there’s little chance of this. I’m trying to think of even one example of a supernatural claim standing up under scientific scrutiny. They just don’t. It must be the way they’re made.
I do, however, hear lots of people defending supernatural views by saying that science hasn’t discovered (insert belief) yet, but it will. New-age hucksters (Chopra, et al) are fond of this. “Science is only now just coming to realise what religions have been saying for milennia” and so on. Well, not really. Supernatural claims always fold when you examine them.
Examples to the contrary welcome.
1 November 2006 at 5:29 am
Spirituality: feelings and experiences presumed to be of supernatural origin?
It was a lot easier defining ‘faith‘.
1 November 2006 at 4:22 pm
I was actually thinking more of things that in the past were considered “supernatural” or magic which today we understand. Like say, mixing chemicals together to make fire instead of using sparks. A match would have seemed very spooky magical 500 years ago. Alchemists (perhaps some of the first good scientific observers) used things like this to impress the kings of the day. Science hasn’t so much “debunked” these things as it has simply explained to the public how these things work and as such has taken them out of the supernatural realm.
1 November 2006 at 10:58 pm
Are you assuming that supernatural and non-material are the same thing? I don’t think I am. For example, some people might experience spirituality as a connection to nature in the sense that they are moved by a sunset or walking in the mountains. This doesn’t require a supernatural explanation.
1 November 2006 at 11:03 pm
I accept that thought arises from the interactions of materials (the brain). That sort of means that something non-material but yet controlled within an organising principle of some kind has arisen from matter. I sometimes wonder if it could be possible that something non-material but yet arranged by some kind of organising principle (not intelligent, simpy patterned in the way that chaos theory offers) can explain the illusion of ‘grace’, ‘the universe is helping me’ and so on could arise from the matter of the planet Earth in a way we do not yet understand.