Consider the case when we infer from abundant forensic evidence that John Smith murdered Fred Jones.
This is certainly inductive, and it is certainly not a repeatable event, since even if Smith was willing to repeat the slaying of Jones, Jones would not be able.
Now the conclusion that Smith murdered Jones either is scientific or it is not. If you say that it is, then you must give up your very narrow concept of repeatability as the hallmark of science; but if you say that it isn't, then you must give up the idea that induction should only be applied to scientific questions. Either way, your argument fails.
(In principle, there is a third option, which is that you should stick to your guns and say that no amount of evidence is sufficient to convict a man of murder unless his victim can be brought back to life and murdered again; this would be consistent with the views that you have so far expressed
and avoid my dilemma, but I assume that you are not going to take this way out.)
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Myself, I think you are wrong about the issue of
repeatability. For example, you object in a subsequent post that even if someone was willing and able to walk on water whenever he was asked, this would still not fulfill the criterion of repeatability, which, you say, would require that
anyone could do it at will.
But by that criterion it would be unscientific for me to believe that some people can slam-dunk a basketball, on the grounds that I cannot do it myself. This would be a strange conclusion, and stranger still because the default position of science is a universal negative --- so that it would then, consequently, be scientific to assert that it is not possible to slam-dunk, no matter how often I observed evidence to the contrary!
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As to methodological naturalism, I think that this is a principle that can be taken too far. We must certainly not frame our epistemology so that it would
a priori exclude us from coming to some conclusion even if that conclusion was both true and well-evidenced.
Now it is true that if we wish to scientifically investigate
how someone walks on water, we must assume that he is doing so by natural means, and that it is in some way a trick. There is no scientific method for investigating the
mechanism of something that is actually a miracle. But this should not, I think, preclude us from provisionally accepting, given a sufficient weight of evidence, that it is in fact a miracle and that trying to find a mechanism is futile.
We should require strong evidence to come to such a conclusion --- what I say certainly does not legitimize God-of-the-Gaps style thinking. We cannot say: "I don't understand it, so God did it"; but in a case such as I have described, we
do understand hydrodynamics, and we know that the man ought to sink. To ascribe supernatural powers to him would be an argument from knowledge and not ignorance.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.