Useful

darkCheese:  I don't have time to do this justice, current comments in bold for now.


What I find interesting is that most people here seem to be on the same page with respect to scientific investigation - there isn’t really anything which says that particular ideas aren’t amenable to scientific investigation a priori. And this showed up in the An Alternative Look at Naturalism thread, where there was general agreement that the claim that the “supernatural” was excluded from methodological naturalism was incoherent. 

In theory, naturalism could include more than what we consider natural. In practice, is this the same?

Science doesn’t confine itself to material or physical causes. It only appears to do so because the products of science have turned out to be “material” and then “physical”.

The scientific method lends itself well to testing repeatable phenomena in controlled conditions. Additionally, it is performed by humans. Thus, in addition to phenomena which are more easily understood, and thus replicated being more common, those that are monetizable or useful in other ways (military) would be preferentially explored.