Non-Empirical Worlds

Next: Characteristics: Religion and symbols

The idea of non-empirical I use here is my way of being precise about what sometimes is called the supernatural. For our purposes I think that non-empirical is a better way of thinking about such things. Believers of many religions are likely to be uncomfortable with the idea of god as supernatural. If you are a believer, isn't god as much a part of nature as humans are? At the same time many religions describe god or god's various attributes as immeasurable.

To fully understand the concept of non-empirical you need to begin with the idea of science. Science, in its classic modalities is about observation, recording data, and hypothesis testing In this, the idea of the hypothesis is critical. I think that a lot of school kids are taught that a hypothesis is an educated guess. But this is wrong, or at least incomplete. In order for something to be a hypothesis in a scientific sense, it must pose a question or posit a relationship that can be answered or tested by publicly agreed upon methods of observation and measurement. In other words, in order for a question to be answerable by scientific method, the vast majority of researchers in a field must agree upon what they will observe and how they will measure it to decide the answer to the question. Of course, this doesn't mean observe with unaided human senses. Scientists spend millions or even billions to build devices to observe and measure. CERN's Large Hadron Collider cost 4.75 billion and will be replaced by an even larger instrument that is expected to cost at least 17 billion. Further, there are frequent disputes within science about what to measure and how to measure. But, all this aside, no statement can be considered scientific unless there is broad agreement about what will be observed and how it will be measured.

A further critical fact is buried in this understanding: hypotheses must constructed in such a way that they are falsifiable. That is, to be scientific, a hypothesis must be capable of disproof. A person who formulates a hypothesis must be able to specify what data they would accept in order to cause them to reject the hypothesis as they proposed it. Here are a couple of examples of non-falsifiable hypotheses: 1) I am a brain floating in space. There is nothing but me. I have imagined the entire universe. Obviously, if you believed this, you would interpret any attempt to disprove it as something you created by yourself. In order to disprove your hypothesis, there would have to be a position outside of yourself. But, your hypothesis is that there is no position outside of yourself. 2) The Egyptian pyramids were built using space alien technology but these same aliens took all evidence of their presence on earth with them when they left. Science relies on evidence. A hypothesis that declares that there is no evidence for itself isn't a real hypothesis. BTW, claims that ancient aliens created this or that are almost inevitably racist. They're always based on the claim that THOSE people couldn't have figured out how to do THAT. Remember our fundamental axiom: brain is brain is brain.

All of this is to say that science is empirical. That is, it deals with physical objects that can be agreed upon and measured and it deals with hypotheses that can be falsified.

Biological and social scientists have a lot of useful things to say about religion. We can talk about the prevalence of different beliefs, association of different practices with different societies, the brain waves of monks in meditative states, psychological benefits or stresses caused by belief, the frequency of different symbols, and a million other things.

However, attempts to use scientific method to either prove or disprove the existence of god or gods, angels, ghosts, spirits of any kind... whether they are used by people who claim to be scientists or people who claim religious inspiration, are fundamentally wrong.* All such attempts misunderstand the nature of science, religion, or both. All such attempts fail all of the criteria of empiricism that we have laid out here. In order for science to prove or disprove the existence of God or any other such entity, people intent on proving the existence of the entity and those intent on disproving the existence of the entity would have to get together and agree on what they would measure, how they would measure it. They would have to agree about what a negative result would look like (that is, what result would cause both those who want to prove and those who want to disprove to accept that either the entity does or does not exist). Without such agreements, no meaningful conversation can take place within science. However, no such agreement is possible now... and it's very likely that no such agreement will be possible at any time in the future.

However, the total inability of science to prove or disprove the existence of non-empirical entities such as gods or ancestors, or spirits of any kind should not really worry anyone, especially the religious. In the last analysis, the only things that really matter in the world, the only things that humans really care about, are also non-empirical and not provable or disprovable within the realm of science. All the really important questions, all the ultimate questions, are questions that are not answerable by scientific methods. Here's a famous movie scene that gets at the issue a little bit:**

The point of the scene is that the value of a poem is not something that can be empirically measured and graphed. It relies on concepts of beauty and meaning that are absent from science. No scientist has ever or likely will ever devise a beauty-o-meter or a love-o-meter (devices that measure an agreed upon physical entity to determine how beautiful something is, or how lovable an individual is).*** Scientific method is unable to discern meaning in our actions or meaning in the universe. "Love is the most powerful force in the world" is a classic unfalsifiable hypothesis. And yet...

Our reasons for doing what we do are never ultimately based on a scientific analysis. Instead, they always rely on values that lie outside of science. Some of these values seem pretty basic, for example, a long happy life is better than a short miserable one, people knowing about the world is good, diseases are bad, people should work for the betterment of humanity, it's good to be respected, contaminating our environment is bad... I could go on. The thing is that NONE of these are scientifically demonstrable. As far as science is concerned, as far as science can tell, the universe has no meaning. The planet earth doesn't care about whether humans live or die. Science can't prove that a world with happy humans is better than a world with miserable ones. If anything, science suggests that humans are just a phase the planet is going through... So, from a scientific perspective, we certainly care about us, but the universe does not. The scientist Richard Dawkins wrote a famous book called The God Delusion providing all sorts of scientific reasons why God doesn't exist. But WHY did Dawkins write such a book. Well, presumably for a variety of reasons. For example, he probably thought that people would be better off without belief in God or that he would be more famous for having written such a book, or that he would make a lot of money. However, these reasons rely on reasoning that is fundamentally not scientific, to wit, that people should be better off, that fame is better than not fame, or money better than no money. But, just as science can not prove or disprove the existence of God, science cannot prove or disprove that people should be better off. We (hopefully) believe that. We think that human life should improve. But that cultural belief relies on ideas that come from culture, religion, and philosophy and cannot be proven or disproved by science. Or, in other words, using science we might be able to find ways to make people live longer happier lives. However, that people SHOULD have longer and happier lives cannot be shown by science. It comes from cultural values that are fundamentally not scientific. So, by writing a book attempting to use science to disprove the existence of god, Dawkins demonstrated that ultimately the meanings and explanations of our actions lie beyond science.****

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*In a technical sense, scientific method cannot ever prove that something does not exist... all it can do is fail to find evidence that a thing exists. For example, scientific method cannot prove that a Sasquatch doesn't live in Kansas. To prove that, scientists would have to simultaneously observe all of Kansas at all levels of scale (after all, the Sasquatch might be very large or very small). But this is impossible. So, all scientists can say is that there is no scientifically agreed on evidence that any Sasquatch live in Kansas.

** The clip from Dead Poets Society concerns a fictional book by an equally fictional authority J. Evans Pritchard. He was seemingly based on the SMU professor Laurence Perrine, who did, in fact, come up with something vaguely similar (but suggested it was only an aid for first time poetry readers). BUT it's a funny choice if you're an anthropologist. One of the greatest British anthropologists of the first half of the 20th century was Sir E. E. Evans-Pritchard! Evans-Pritchard was a social anthropologist and expert on Sub-Saharan Africa. Ironically for us at the moment, Evans-Pritchard argued that anthropology was not a natural science and could best be understood as an art of interpretation and translation.

***OK, suppose we could hook everyone up to brain monitors and get a measurement of what happens in their brains when they say they sense love or sense beauty. Would that be the same thing as creating a love-o-meter or beauty-o-meter? NO. It would only tell us that the person is having a particular sensation (which we could find out by just aking them). It wouldn't tell us about the quality of love or beauty present in the person or object in question. Things that create that sensation of love or beauty are wildly different for different individuals. Things that inspire sensations of pain or disgust for one person might inspire sensations of love and beauty in another. For example, when I was (almost) a kid, the city of Philadelphia put up a new sculpture, a 40 foot tall, 10 ton steel clothespin by Claes Oldenburg. It was immediately controversial. Some people loved it. It made others angry. Some people thought it was ugly. Others, that it was beautiful (you can see a pic here). Was there any possibility of using a scientific technique to determine in an absolute sense how lovable or beautiful the sculpture was? We could survey how people reacted to it when it was put up... Using that metric, the city would have probably concluded that it should be removed. However, now, half a century later, it's a beloved landmark tied to the city's identity. As the song goes, "loving somebody don't make them love you." In other words, love is your subjective experience. We don't need a brain monitor, we can just ask you. However, all we find out is that it is present (or absent) in you at a particular moment. We don't find anything about it's objective in the world outside of your brain.

****A related issue is the existence of human free will. But, this is also kind of a pseudo issue. Universally, human experience seems to be the experience of free will. That is, we have the sense that we are agents making decisions and that these decisions matter. In an ultimate sense this may or may not be true. However, what physics tells us is that reality is constituted in such a way that, if human actions are deterministic, humans cannot observe this and thus it is not useful information. Observing it would require access to a vantage point outside of time and space but this is impossible. This is a really complex argument but if you want to get into it I recommend William Egginton's 2023 book The Rigor of Angels.