The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)

[tom]

I hate leaving off at such a distant tangent from the original dispute, so I'll return to that briefly.

You said:

How does believing that people can rise from the dead not undermine science? It's nice to put brackets around some religious beliefs and say they are acceptable because they don't undermine science but, in fact, they do.

I think this is probably a better place to hash out our disagreement.

Science describes a set of natural laws that govern the way matter behaves. In principle, those laws are still correct even if a supernatural being occasionally intervenes and violates them. That is to say, those laws still correctly describe the natural behavior of atoms, molecules, biological systems, etc. Science is only trying to describe the system of natural laws, so it is not "undermined" if a supernatural force arbitrarily violates those laws.

By the same token (and maybe this will clarify what I mean by all of that) science can never identify a supernatural event as such. At best it can point to an anomaly and say there's no known explanation. If the "anomaly" happened with predictable regularity, it would cease to be an anomaly and would require some revision of scientific knowledge; until that point it is the equivalent of an open investigation. All of this is to say that supernatural phenomena are in a sense just outside the purview of scientific inquiry.