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> For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly. > But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause! > And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle. This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science. In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang. If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc). And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary. |