There is SO much wrong to be addressed here.
Item one: there is ZERO evidence for the so-called “supernatural”, which is merely an apologetic elision erected to try and make “magic” sound less childish than it is.
EVERY TIME a so-called “supernatural” hasis has been asserted to be “necessary”, in order to provide an “explanation” for a real world observable, scientists have subsequently tossed this nito the bin, and replaced with with a genuine explanation based upon testable natural processes.
Perhaps the canonical example is provided by lightning, a phenomenon originally asserted to require the existence of an angry god of one sort or another. Except that Benjamin Franklin decided to fly a kite in a thunderstorm, and by doing so, established that lightning was nothing but static electricity write large, of the same sort that was known to Classical Greek civilisation. Indeed, the Greeks knew that rubbing pieces of amber would eventually allow those pieces of amber to pick up small pieces of paper, and were aware of electrostatic forces, even if they didn’t have an explanation for them. For that matter, physicists named the electron in honour of this - “ἤλεκτρον” is the Greek word for amber.
This precedent - namely the replacement of “supernatural” pseudo-explanations with genuine scientific explanations grounded in testable natural processes - has NEVER been broken.
Item two: Several of the real world observables, that have been hilariously asserted above to lack scientific explanations, DO have scientific explanations. But as usual, the tendency of certain individuals to lack the diligence to check this has come to the fore.
Whenever the usual suspects among the mythology fanboys, come stomping in here, confidently asserting that scientists don’t have an explanation for love, I laugh sardonically. Why? Because I’ve known for decades that the peptide hormone oxytocin plays a key role in the launching of behaviours such as pair bonding, sexual attraction and maternal bonding to offspring in relevant organisms.
Indeed, every human emotion has a basis in brain chemistry. Aggression? Adrenaline affecting a subsystem of the brain known as the R-complex. Social cohesion? Dopamine and serotonin exerting an effect in the limbic system.
Oh, and as for ethics, I’ve covered this at length here, and explained why wethics doesnt need a cartoon magic man in the sky, or any other brand of magic. I’ve also provided in another post, a raft of relevant peer reviewed scientific paper citations destroying infantile wibble about “morality”.
Item three: a word needs to be said about the reach of scientific theories at this juncture.
This is because science has been, to use the words of one biographer of Nietzsche, terrifyingly successful at providing detailed explanations for real world observables, that work, and that possess predictive power on a scale that mythologies and their authors cannot even fantasise about.
But, there are limits. And those of us with the most thorough science education understand those limits.
At some point, it is entirely possible that science will encounter a suitable set of fundamental entities and interactions, that act as the foundations for all real world observables, and that the existence of those entities and interactions will be a simple brute fact, beyond which we cannot go. At some point, there will be things that simply are, and at that point, science will come to a stop.
No amount of wibbling about the “supernatural” will either alter this, or provide anything other than an epistemological dummy for the infantile to suck upon. If we as a species survive long enough to conduct the relevant science, we may hit that buffer, and the science train will halt at that point. But we won’t reach that point, if we allow our species to be distracted by garbage assertions masquerading as “metaphysical sophistication”.
If you wish to assert that there is a better method for dealing with the world than the scientific method, you have a colossal uphill task ahead of you. You have to demonstrate the following:
[1] That your method is reliable - in other words, it doesn’t generate obvious falsehoods;
[2] That your method works when applied to entities and interactions of known provenance, and provides a proper, coherent and rigorously defensible alternative to the testable natural processes already associated with said entities and interactions (once again, magic won’t cut it);
[3] That your method then provides a similarly coherent and rigorously defensible answer for entities and interactions that are supposedly “outside” the remit of science.
Most of the people who wibble about the “supernatural” are too lazy to bother with that level of hard work.
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