Posted: May 25, 2014 12:54 pm
Shrunk wrote:UndercoverElephant wrote:Loads of things are beyond science. Ethics, art, philosophy, and an endless list of other things. Science is an activity, and a form of communication, but reality is much bigger than that. All sorts of things (not even woo things) exist even though science can't examine them. Was Beethoven a musical genius? Science can't answer the question, but it doesn't follow that the question is unanswerable, or meaningless.
But there is no question over whether Beethoven or his music exists.
True. There is a question about whether or not he was any good though, and science can't answer it. All I was saying is that just because science can't answer a particular question, it does not follow that the question is unanswerable or meaningless. Although I accept that what we are talking about here is a bit different, because it is something related to causality (if it exists), and science is good at investigating causality. However, just because science has a serious track record of investigating certain sorts of causality, it does not follow that science could discover and investigate all sorts of causality that exist. It is very easy to propose types of causality which, if they existed, science could never find. The most obvious example is "the will of God". If you define God in terms of something which is forced to respond to situations just as reliably and predictably as the laws of physics, then science could, perhaps, identify this sort of causality. But who would accept that as a definition of what God is? No theist, that's for sure. And probably not many skeptics either.