[BobbyJo]

(since you are juxtaposing naturalism and magic, I'm assuming by naturalism you mean materialism. If that is incorrect, ignore me.)

Yes, but also no. Materialism is a way of looking at the world that itself encompasses the scientific method. Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology.

I think what's different this time around is that we are saying materialism is likely incomplete, as opposed to 'wrong', which seems like a safe bet given our advancing understanding of the universe. Give the materialists that which is theirs.

[Dudeman112]

>Saying that the scientific method always proves materialism correct is a tautology

If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct (unless, of course, someone came and found out that what actually makes people behave like they do isn't their nervous system).

There is nothing making the scientific method unable ascertain whether there is more to the universe than the physical things in it. The scientific method just fails again and again at reaching the opposite stance.

[BobbyJo]

> If, on a hypothetical example, we could come up with an experiment where you removed half of 100 people's nervous system and most of them kept acting like normal then the scientific method would "prove" that materialism isn't correct

Ah, you yourself are falling into the old failings of combating materialism: Using materialist methods and materialist measures. Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand. Like mentioned above: it has failed time and time again, and I'm fairly confident it would fail in your example.

[Dudeman112]

What method exactly are you going to use?

If the argument is "X isn't encapsulated in the material" then surely removing the material should leave X intact. The other option is experimenting on what actually encapsulates X, but non materialists have a tendency to say what actually encapsulates X cannot be interacted with nor observed.

Yet they somehow claim that the non interactable non observable stuff is the actual mechanism by which things work. Which begs the question of how they reached that answer to begin with... since it's non interactable and non observable

Unless you got good reason to believe that there is more to it, you don't attach additional meta proprieties that no one can investigate, even from first principles (and this part is important, because it could be that the investigation methods simply haven't got there yet)

[jacobr1]

> Trying to prove materialism wrong with materialist frameworks is a fools errand ... it has failed time and time again

Howso? What alternative is there that still uses logical, if albeit not materialist methods?

[BobbyJo]

There are none. Non-materialist sciences are horribly underdeveloped. We have two options for exploring solutions to problems we may suspect non-materialist answers to:

1) Try materialism over and over again anyway hoping it will eventually solve the problem.

2) Develop a new discipline starting with the axioms of the problem at hand.

Number 1 has been so successful and provided so much work for scientists that any problem it doesn't work for mostly gets ignored.

I'm not saying materialism is necessarily wrong or bad BTW, just that it has a limit. It starts and ends at the perimeter of shared *human* experience.