summerof2010 said:
I'm currently in a YouTube argument with this guy who's apparently a pastor. (It's remarkably civil for YouTube.) He expresses a sentiment that I've heard several times before, both around here and on YouTube, but I haven't gotten a satisfactory explanation of it. The long and short of it is this:
"Science can't answer some questions about the universe, e.g. What is beautiful? What is love? What is good? What happens to the soul when we die? There are truths to be known about these things, and they will be found outside of science."
Usually the person who makes this claim then cheekily implies that science's inability to "explain" their paranormal or religious claim is evidence that it is true, though they'd never be so presumptuous as to say that. From my POV, there are at least 2 flaws with this kind of thinking.
First, it assumes there are answers to these questions. Indeed, I think it's rational to think of concepts like love, souls, and beauty as products of the consciousness and therefore do not have any relation to objective reality. In other words, subjective things are subjective. Don't know why things like this are so hard to understand. Second, even if I accept that there is some absolute truth about the nature of beauty or love or whatever, why should I assume that your opinion about it is that truth? After all, science is an empirical method for discerning the nature of the universe -- it works by creating hypothesis and eliminating alternative explanations (and self-checking by repeating experiments with other scientists). It doesn't matter what you personally believe about the phenomena, science will only yield one answer in the long run. What method supersedes science for these questions? Can anyone describe it? What makes it reliable? This is the most important question, and I've yet to have it answered. It's especially important if the claimant is arguing that science needs to change and "accept the paranormal" or some such thing...
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do you believe this? How do you search for objective truth outside science?
Alright, time to get into the cynicism that makes me hate myself.
The thing is that science can explain pretty much everything mentioned, the issue is the human factor and our desire as self-aware beings to put ourselves mystically above any kind of rational explanation. People hate things like psychology, sociology, and similar branches of science because they show exactly how predictable people are.
Things like "love", along with all emotions, come down to simple chemical reactions. You can remove all emotion from someone with the right drugs, it's not healthy and does damage, but it can be done. Likewise with brainwashing/hypnosis/mental deprogramming you can pretty much make anyone feel any emotion you want to.
When it comes to things like "beauty" being ultimatly subjective, that's less true than you might think. There are many things such as natural features (landscapes) that are considered to be universally beautiful, and despite people argueing about how the standards of human beauty have changed, there have been tests done by showing large groups of people pictures of other people and asking them if they are beautiful or not, and to rate them, and there ARE universal responses. I remember a big deal being made a while back about how a certain set of eurasian looks were pretty much universally beautiful accross the board.
Of course one thing to also understand is that as people are basically programmable, even general insticts can be changed. Just as a hypnotist can make someone think they are a dog (and run around like one) as part of a show, and not remember it, someone with the right skill set could make someone see something they find hideous as beautiful. On a cultural level it's possible for a culture to program people away from their normal instincts to have truely abnormal standards. In such cases your not dealing with proof that beauty is entirely subjective, so much as to show that there are people who are deviants.
I'm probably not articulating this perfectly, the point is that science has gone there on a lot of this. People however are more comfortable in thinking that love and attraction is more than chemical reactions (albiet very complicated ones), and that everyone is a unique and individual flower, differant from all others, and beyond any real intristic understanding.
When it comes to issues like the soul, ghosts, and things like that, the situation becomes more complicated because of all the religious politics involved. There are a lot of people with a vested interest in holding the "key" to the answer to questions like that, they have lots of followers (organized religion) and can get very nasty.
In general "ghosts" and the "paranormal" or "supernatural" are accepted to exist in a general sense. For all claims of "it's all bunk" understand that there are real estate laws out there about having to reveal the history of a property to buyers before they purchuse it, largely because of the experiences people have had with certain kinds of properties. It's not something most people like to think about, but we've all probably heard this before, think it's creepy, but then either move on or rationalize why such laws exist. The areas where this overlaps into law are simply put few and far between however.
In general most "supernatural exploration" shows by definition aren't going to find (or be allowed to broadcast) anything too contreversial, leaving everything as "was there something, or wasn't there?".
On the other hand there have been a lot of successes in tracking people's natural electromagnetic fields and tying them to the entire "haunting" thing even if nothing really impressive has come from it.
The point here is that right now we have yet to have any real proof of ghosts or "the soul" and what happens after death, we are on the other hand working on it, and in the traditional (and unsatisfying) baby steps of development, we're getting there despite all the vested intersts on each side.
Truthfully though, I am a Christian (just not a deeply spiritual one), I think the end result is simply going to be that we wind up scientifically proving the existance of god more than anything and find that science and faith are not quite the contridictory things that a lot of people try and make them out to be. Whether I'm right about what the answer winds up being/leading to, I think we're a lot closer to an answer about things like the soul than people want to think.
