Can science or history be used to examine religions claims despite it being a naturalist enterprise that denies the existence of the supernatural?

Question

Some religion defenders accuse science of being naturalist therefore it cannot be used to examine claims of religions that prove the religion's truth. The scientific side probably has a lot of grounds to attack this conception.

"Claims of religions that prove the religion's truth" is vague so let me clarify a bit - when I speak of this, I mean things such as miracles, good character of the person claiming to be a prophet. I understand that there is a lot of baggage here, it requires granting that such things do, in fact, grant you proof of the religion's truth.

I find such lines of reasoning to be fallacious as science may be naturalist but that does not stop it from being able to examine claims of a religion to conclude that the source is actually supernatural. It may not be able to tell much about the supernatural thing but it definitely can tell you that it doesn't follow some scientific laws, at the very least. I am suggesting science may be the best route to proving if something supernatural happened.

My question then is: Can science or history be used to examine religions claims despite it being a naturalist enterprise that denies the existence of the supernatural? Why? Why not?

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(added by @mudskipper)

To further motivate this question, we can see that in the historical development of both science and religion, certain claims that were based on religion (or closely tied to religion) were undermined by rational discussion and by new scientific theories, meaning that they also gradually were abandoned by mainstream religions.

• One example is the discussion started in the 17th century about the age of the earth - which was prompted by the discovery that Chinese historical records seemed to go back to a pre-diluvial time and by questions about the nature of fossils.
• Another example might be the claims of orhodox Mormonism about the ancestors of native Americans being a lost Judaic tribe -- claims that are untenable given archeological data and given modern DNA analysis and that are now no longer believed as "literal" claims by Mormons.

It seems clear that rational argument and mainstream scientific theories influence religious claims and are -- at least sometimes -- accepted by religious people. In the light of this, the question then could be reformulated as: Is it possible to clarify the boundary between what is and what is not valid (or justified or acceptable) as "scientific" criticism of religion? Or must this always remain a fuzzy area in which each critical attack (or defense) can only be validated ad hoc (if it can be validated at all by both religious and non-religious people)?

Answer 1

To the extent that one finds many scientists among believers as well as non-believers, one would not expect science to be able to resolve fundamental issues such as the existence of the Creator (unless one postulates that vast numbers of scientists work in contradiction to their basic beliefs, which in itself would be a hypothesis requiring further scrutiny).

However, sciences such as physics, archaeology and history can shed light on specific religious claims, in some cases even claims elevated to the status of dogma/canon. Thus, catholicism canonized the transubstantiation interpretation of the eucharist (on which the common practice of the communion is based). Such an interpretation is rooted in the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, which many hold to be in direct conflict with atomism. Since modern science largely endorses atomism (though of course in a different form than the one originally propounded by Democritus), this creates tensions with the canon as postulated at the Council of Trent, Session 13, canon 2 in the 16th century.

Similarly, Muslem claims that the Hebrew Scriptures are a falsified version of the Kuran and other books runs into difficulty with historical accounts of translations of the Scripture into European languages many centuries before Mohammed was born. Similarly, numerous archeological findings testifying to continuous historical presence of the Jews in the land of Israel over the course of millenia contradict Moslem claims denying such presence; similar remarks apply to archeological findings testifying to the presence of the Hebrew Temple in Jerusalem.

All such inferences can of course be challenged, but they may provide a starting point for the evaluation of certain claims by certain organized religions (including canonical claims, as mentioned above).

Answer 2

Science doesn't deny the existence of the supernatural.

Science is merely (very roughly speaking) the process of investigating things that are consistently and repeatedly observable (or which has or had effects that are so observable).

This doesn't entail denying the existence of the supernatural or things without direct or indirect observable effects. There are a wide range of beliefs about the supernatural among scientists.

The issue is just that you can't investigate things through observation, if those things aren't directly or indirectly observable, so science doesn't say anything about those things - that's roughly what methodological naturalism is. Those things are instead in the realm of philosophy and epistemology (it's arguable whether one can have justifiable beliefs in unobservable things... or undeducible things).

In this sense, someone who wants to say that science fundamentally can't investigate the deity they believe in would need to commit themselves to the position that said deity never directly acted in reality (e.g. deism), for otherwise there would be effects we could observe that science could investigate.

* Every time the natural/supernatural distinction comes up, I feel I should point out that it's typically believers in the supernatural who are insisting on that distinction. I reject the supernatural for a similar reason to why I reject srofmogruesh: I don't know what that is, and none of the things that seem to exist have that label. Attempts to define the supernatural have severe issues. When people say that others presuppose that the "supernatural" doesn't exist, that generally comes across as them trying to distract from the fact that they can't meet their burden of proof for their supernatural claims.

Comparison to a meteor impact

If we consider one particular (natural) meteor impact as an example:

This is a one-time event, so it's not consistently and repeatedly observable directly. We may not have direct observation of it at all.

But we can consistently and repeatedly observe the soil around the impact event, and we can take measurements and compare that to soil elsewhere, and we can simulate the effects of such an impact on the surrounding area, and take measurements to look for those effects.

Through these means, we can gain confidence that a meteor impact indeed happened.

Replace "meteor impact" with some deity flooding the world or whatever, and it could be investigated similarly. Note that none of what I said above relates to where the meteor originally came from (even if there could be evidence for that too), so if someone says a deity summoned a rock and slammed it into the ground, all these lines of evidence would be the same. This raises the question of how you can differentiate "it came from space" from "God did it" - more on that later.

For a meteor impact, a strong line of evidence is the comparison to other meteor impacts (and that also relates to how we know the effects of meteor strikes). For a "miracle", this may explicitly be a unique event, so it may be harder or less viable to compare it to similar things. But there are often still similarities - if we're trying to investigate a worldwide flood, local floods would be somewhat similar, we can observe soil layering elsewhere, we can observe the effects water has on things elsewhere, and so on.

Getting to the supernatural

Science can investigate whether there was a meteor impact.

If someone says their deity caused a meteor impact, we can investigate whether the effect happened, but there's still a gap between the cause and the effect that's difficult to cross. It's hard to end up at "God did it" instead of there having been some natural cause, especially if the existence of the proposed deity would entail a whole bunch of other things that are contrary to what we see, e.g. the problem of evil/suffering or divine hiddenness. See also: God of the gaps.

I wouldn't say this effect / supernatural cause boundary is impossible to cross:

• If some text were to spontaneously materialise in the air all across the world at the exact same time, in the language of the locals, that would go a long way to making a case for the existence of some intelligent ultra-powerful being. As Clark said, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and this is still a long way from the truth of any given religion, but we'd certainly be a lot closer than where we are now.
• Claims of levitation, telekinesis, mind reading, etc. should be exceedingly easy to scientifically verify, if those are things someone can reliably do in ways that can't easily be explained through more mundane ways (e.g. hot reading and cold reading). See also: James Randi's million dollar paranormal challenge.

The issue with supernatural claims is that they often don't cross the cause/effect boundary to justify why that particular explanation is the best one, they avoid specificity, they avoid claims that can be verified (a claim that can be verified can also be falsified), they mutate to avoid falsification, etc.

Let's say someone says e.g. God prevented a car accident - maybe they saw a deer on the side of the road which caused them to slow down. If we had video evidence of the deer suddenly materialising out of nothing, that might still be a few steps from "God did it", but we can certainly say that would be outside of the laws of physics as we understand them. But we don't have reliable evidence of such things. More likely, we may have evidence of the deer walking or running up to that spot, with theists saying God made the deer do that. But if God acts through natural processes, that's largely indistinguishable from God not intervening at all (unless there's unambiguously a message there - the spontaneous materialising of clear and complex text messages as above may be attributed to a powerful being even if it happens due to natural processes).

* Some theists say that DNA contains messages (or "information" or "instructions"), but that's only the case if you use that term very loosely, or if you make some rather big leaps to get to a deity actually wanting us to "read" those things (which we couldn't do for most of human history). DNA is just chemicals that interacts with other chemicals in certain ways to achieve certain results (disclaimer: I'm not a biologist), and evolution explains how we ended up with the DNA we ended up with. This can't reasonably be considered a message intended to be read by humans.

History?

I didn't mention history, but a lot of what I said above about science could apply to history as well. You have some observations like historical writing, ancient ruins, etc., and you're trying to come up with the best explanation for those observations. You can't say much for things you don't have observations for.

Answer 3

Science or History can have something to say about religions only in so far as they make scientific or historic claims. Although some religions make such claims, those are usually not the core part of their message. For example "there is an omnipotent and benevolent God who will judge you after your death based on his moral values" is neither historical nor scientific, as it isn't about any observable facts of the natural world.

There are, however, religious myth that make claims about the natural world. One could see, for example, the various verse of the old testament who point to the Earth being flat and the sky being a dome with stars fixed on its surface as scientific claims. It is clear that those claims do not hold in regard of our scientific knowledge. But to be honest, those can be dissmissed as being exclusively the view of the scriptures' authors, who after all were people of their time. From the fact that they were wrong about the shape of the earth it does not follow that they were also wrong about the afterlife or the nature of sin. Of course it is not a good look about their credibilit, and certainly brakes the theory of Bible literalism who claims that everything in the Bible is factually true, but literalists are far from being the majority of religious people.

In your question you specifically ask about miracles, and miracles particularly escape the scope of science. A scientific can at most tell you that people don't usually raise from the dead, or that fig trees don't wither just because someone curses them. But they certainly can't tell you that it never happened, because after all when magic is involved anything goes. Geologues can tell us that a global flood that submerged even the Everest would leave obvious traces, but a magical flood would leave no trace because, after all, it's magic.

History on the other hand is a more tricky subject. Miracles are more often than not claimed to have been witnessed by many people, and historians can tell us if such mass sighting are credibly reported. For example, if every first born in the kingdom of Egypt had died in the same night as is reported in Exodus, egyptologues should expect to find traces of it in their studies, but nothing of the sort is reported. In the same way, if hundreds of dead people had risen at the death of Jesus and appeared to many people in Jerusalem, as is related by Matthew's gospel, we should expect to have other sources about an event of this magnitude. The fact that we have no traces of those events suggest they didn't happen, at least not as related in the scriptures. Unless for some reason God made every witness forget about it, which would both make no sense and be pure speculation, as no such thing is related in the scriptures.

There are also non miraculous yet historical claims that can be investigated. For exemple there is no trace of the Massacre of the Innocents outside the gospels, when one would expect the summary execution of all children under 2 in a region by king Herod would create quite a commotion.

Again, this suggests that part of the Bible are false or at least heavily fictionalized. But it does not give us the ability to conclude on its metaphysical claims.

Although scientific inquiry and academia can point to the idea that some very specific religious claims are most probably fiction, this will usually not be a problem for many believers who admit that part of their myths are fictional - albeit inspirational in nature, like a cautionary tale - and even have integrated this into their approach of religion. Only particularly extreme believers will be rebutted by a scientific argument.

Answer 4

Science is not in a position to examine miracles. By definition they are events beyond the natural law, and not easily structured into scientific tests (unless you find a machine which can repeatedly do the same miracle over and over).

However, science is in a position to examine the consequences of the miracle. If a miracle is phrased in something that can be construed as "at this point, a miracle happened, and physics once again held as normal after the miracle," the science can speak to whether the current state of the world is consistent with the after effects of a miracle.

This must be done on a case by case basis. Some phrasings of miracles are more conducive to looking for such after-effects than others. If an individual is supposed to not die, and instead be taken directly to another plane, it will be hard for science to say anything about this. There won't be a body. However, there is considerable back and forth about whether there is evidence of a flood substantial enough to wipe all life from the planet, with both sides seeking to use science to argue their side.