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Eugine_Nier comments on I Stand by the Sequences - Less Wrong
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I don't entirely agree with Will here. My issue is that there seem to be some events, e.g., Fatima, where the best "scientific explanation" is little better than the supernatural wearing a lab-coat.
Are there any good supernatural explanations for that one?! Because "Catholicism" seems like a pretty terrible explanation here.
Why? Do you have a better one? (Note: I agree "Catholicism" isn't a particularly good explanation, it's just that it's not noticeably worse than any other.)
I mentioned Catholicism only because it seems like the "obvious" supernatural answer, given that it's supposed to be a Marian apparition. Though, I do think of Catholicism proper as pretty incoherent, so it'd rank fairly low on my supernatural explanation list, and well below the "scientific explanation" of "maybe some sort of weird mundane light effect, plus human psychology, plus a hundred years". I haven't really investigated the phenomenon myself, but I think, say, "the ghost-emperor played a trick" or "mass hypnosis to cover up UFO experiments by the lizard people" rank fairly well compared to Catholicism.
This isn't really an explanation so much as clothing our ignorance in a lab coat.
It does a little more than that. It points to a specific class of hypotheses where we have evidence that in similar contexts such mechanisms can have an impact. The real problem here is that without any ability to replicate the event, we're not going to be able to get substantially farther than that.
Yeah, it's not really an explanation so much as an expression of where we'd look if we could. Presumably the way to figure it out is to either induce repeat performances (difficult to get funding and review board approval, though) or to study those mechanisms further. I suspect that'd be more likely to help than reading about ghost-emperors, at least.
Quite. Seems to me that if we're going to hold science to that standard, we should be equally or more critical of ignorance in a cassock; we should view religion as a competing hypothesis that needs to be pointed to specifically, not as a reassuring fallback whenever conventional investigation fails for whatever reason. That's a pretty common flaw of theological explanations, actually.