Lovely turns of phrases there, darlin', but they all net to zero. We can observe and measure things. We can deduce things from those measurements. Nowhere in those deductions can we say "here a supernatural entity stepped in." That conclusion has no applicability, no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig.
And ditto with respect to mathematics and geometry — but they are not physical things either. Are they thus to be considered supernatural? Yet they, too, seem to have something to do with the natural world. And how about time — how "physical" is time? Does its lack of physicality mean that it is supernatural?
The nature of "time" is a fun subject and the basis for many a Star Trek episode. And quantum physics is the are that attempts to deal with it. But nowhere is there a spot for "here is where God intervened." Again, even if true, it has no applicability.
Then again, perception and consciousness are not "physical." Certainly they are not less "objective" for all that; nor arguably can they be "supernatural," for the simple reason that we observe that natural entities like human beings have percepts and are conscious. In the end, it seems that the fundamental presupposition of methodological naturalism is questionable. It states that natural entities MUST have natural causes exclusively.
These are interesting philosophical questions. Yet, in the realm of physical science they are best left to the individual scientists's musings after they have had a hard day where the results are not forthcoming. But you can only measure "exclusive natural causes."
The question then becomes: What exactly is a "natural" cause? Does it have to be physically observable? Is Nature really reduced to physical causation only? If so, a whole lot of things in this universe would be utterly inexplicable.
In a word: yes. Philosophy deals with the questions you pose. Science has to deal with the physical world.
I strongly disagree with you, freedumb, that no "supernatural entity" has stepped into this scenario. For what was doing the observing and measuring? What was doing the deducing?
Your last essay/post simply screamed "Newtonian Paradigm at work!!!"
The role of the machine metaphor in science goes back to Descartes. Newton and those who followed built it into what has become modern science. The success of this world-view was so great that it became as strong as any of the other belief structures we might identify as religions. In this case, however, science was to liberate us from superstition and myth and to give us a basis for evaluating those things that were to be candidates for truth.I'd love to ponder these insights further right now, but it's past my bedtime. I hope we can resume our discussion tomorrow.Hence physics dealt with the fundamental laws of nature and chemistry and biology were to use these laws to deal with specific applications of the general laws physics discovered. In other words, the relation of physics to biology, in particular, is that of the general to the special. Rosen was able to see that, in fact, this was a prison for our thought and an extreme handicap to our understanding. It was a legacy of the machine metaphor. How could this be? It is so because the world of the machine is a "simple" world. Its laws and inhabitants are simple machines or mechanisms. What if the objects in chemistry and biology are not that simple? Then we must reduce them to subunits that are. By this reductionist path we will learn all that there is to learn about the real world. Robert Rosen discovered that this approach was a dead end. He discovered that when the reduction is performed, something real and necessary is lost and in a way which made it unrecoverable. This profound realization turned the ontology of our world upside down. It isn't the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality, it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things called processes which are at the core of the real world....
Traditional science as described above is the result of many efforts, yet it has a core set of beliefs underlying it which Rosen refers to as The Newtonian Paradigm. There is no strict definition of what this is, but it is the entire attitude and approach that arises after Newton introduced his mechanics, especially, his mathematical approach. It certainly embodies the ideas of Descartes and the heliocentrists, for example. It also embodies all of the changes brought about by quantum mechanics. It is so much what modern science is that it could almost be used as a synonym. For these reasons, it has had a profound effect on our perception. It is so powerful a thought pattern that it has seemed to make the modeling relation superfluous. For The Newtonian Paradigm, all of nature encodes into this formal system and then can be decoded. All our models come from this one largest model of nature. In the modeling relation, the formal system lies over the natural system and the encoding and decoding are masked so that the formal system is the real world. The fact that this is not the case is far from obvious to most. The task then, is to understand why. [from the Mikulecky paper cited earlier, emphasis added]
Thank you so much for writing freedumb! Good night!