2020-02-29, 09:21 PM
Do the Laws of Physics Rule Out the Paranormal?
Allan Cybulskie
Allan Cybulskie
Quote:So, while reading the posts I looked at last week, I came across this post by Sean Carroll. Carroll is rather well-known in atheist circles for constantly arguing that based on what we know about the laws of physics certain phenomena can be ruled out a priori (which, I suppose, since he bases it on empirical and scientific examination, also makes it a posteriori. The perils of reading Kant [grin]). This is also what he attempts to do here: to show that by what we currently know about physics (in 2008) telekinesis and telepathy are ruled out.
Quote:So, even we were looking at the phenomena scientifically, why would we try to balance that? Why wouldn’t we just show that the phenomena that we’re considering were those sorts of cases? The only reason to invoke that they clash with the existing laws of physics is that we can’t or don’t want to take the time to actually show that they fall into the former category. And even if Carroll didn’t want to bother examining each individual case, surely it would make more sense to say that the ones that he and others have carefully examined and studied have always turned out to be in the former category, and so in order to bother investigating the new ones he’d need something special to make that worth his time. So not saying that he knows that it can’t be true, just that he needs something special — very reliable person, the phenomena is very repeatable, etc, etc — to make him think that this time will be different. So the only reason to bring in the “laws of physics” argument is to be able to dismiss the phenomena without having to actually demonstrate that the phenomena isn’t actually happening. Thus, it’s an argument that useless if they could demonstrate that it isn’t worth considering, just as we saw last week. Naturalists keep building theoretical commitments whose only use is for dismissing claims that they don’t have the evidence to actually show false, because if they had the evidence, they’d just use that instead of those commitments. Carroll’s use of the laws of physics here is no exception.