Science and origins

I agree with you on this one. It's like the old saying (about parsimony): If you hear hoof beats, think horses.Of course, this only holds if you are not currently in the African savannah. So far we have no proof that we are on the savannah, and it's been horses every time (metaphorically speaking of course)As long as naturalistic explanations keep working, there's no reason to change them. That is how science works. Newton's laws, for example, work really well. Hell, they got us to the moon. However, once we started looking at really big things moving really fast, and really little things moving in all sorts of weird ways, we developed the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics respectively. That's the beauty of science. We use things that work until they don't and then we find something that works better.

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

Saying science deals with what we can observe is really just saying science does not deal with the supernatural. All supernatural means is above, or beyond the natural, i.e. that which conforms to the laws of physics, biology, etc. The Oxford American Dictionary defines supernatural as

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(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding of the laws of nature

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While we can muse on some ways in which the supernatural can be scientifically tested (Taq's dollar-giving Ubergod) in general I don't really think it's true. Unless the supernatural being manifests itself in ways that we can directly observe it and the actions it does, there's no way to test for it. Being supernatural, and thus not subject to the laws of nature, we have no way to predict anything about it. How do you predict the whims of an all powerful being that can somehow affect the universe without using any of the known natural forces, or leaving any trace of its action? E.g. We can scientifically determine that planes stay in the air due to specific forces having to do with fluid dynamics and such because these are predictable laws, but there's no way to test if it's really just because a god is holding it with is invisible hand that leaves no fingerprints.I guess my whole point is that the word supernatural is nothing special, it just means something outside that which we can observe.

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

That's not my point. My point is that if you have a god that can act without using any natural force (electro-magnetic, gravity, nuclear forces), and without leaving any discernible trace whatsoever of its action, then it's out of the realm of science, because it's unobservable. This does not mean that things we cannot explain must therefore be supernatural, simply that the supernatural, definition is scientifically untestable. This will be true until a so-called god physically manifests himself and allows us to scientifically document his abilities. But even if this were to happen, under the guidelines of the Greater Miracle thread, I'd probably have to assume mass hallucination instead of there actually being a deity

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely

Agreed, my statement was meant more as a joke than not.

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We have many intuitions in our life and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions?
-Dan Ariely