Posted: Oct 06, 2018 7:07 pm
SafeAsMilk wrote: There are, however, innumerable examples of people deciding that ghosts or gods were behind something, but turns out it was just atoms and forces all along.
What are these claims like though? Saying gods did something is not the same as saying how they did it.
I don't believe religion and superstition has ever really proposed competing explanations. It is easy to attack ancient explanations by people without the tools and ideas of modern science and grasping for reason and explanation. People still to this day grasp for explanations of their life circumstances.
Someone could claim truthfully that humans created the computer. That is not an explanation of how humans created the computer but is still an accurate claim.
A genuinely competing serious supernatural explanation would have to be rigorous to be critiqued as opposed to straw manned and mocked.
It is easy to dismiss the supernatural when its claims are very one dimensional but I don't think serious opposition to the physical and materialism are anything like that. A lot of serious Opposition to physicalism comes from the philosophy of mind and the gap between descriptions and concepts of mental and physical. That is where my objections to physicalism came form.
For example in what sense can the meaning of a word or any concept be physical? And what is the conceptual relationship between neurons and thought?