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Comment by sarabad2021 | Hacker News Reader

sarabad2021·

The same can be said of science in that science can't explain the supernatural or the after-life. Science was never meant to explain those things but we have tried to make it a replacement by trying to naturalize everything. Things that go beyond this realm of understanding and reason.

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The whole point of science is to explain "the supernatural". Lightning was once considered "supernatural". Now it isn't. Science did that. Science does not acknowledge the existence of an afterlife because there is no evidence to support such a conclusion.

In my opinion it explains both perfectly well: The human mind is not perfect and sometimes it gets confused, believing that the supernatural is real and that there is life after death even though time and again these phenomena turn out to have completely naturalistic explanations. If you want to go one level deeper I encourage you to read Darwin’s Cathedral where you’ll learn this tendency to believe in the supernatural is not a bug but a feature.

There's a lot of conceit in this notion that just because _you_ can't understand or explain something means that it goes beyond understanding and explanation.

Religion exists because of that conceit, that notion that either something is immediately explainable or that it is supernatural. Science exists because the idea that something isn't understood now doesn't mean that we (as a species) won't ever understand it.

We stand on the shoulders who have come before us, and not one of them was a god.

> Science was never meant to explain those things but we have tried to make it a replacement by trying to naturalize everything. Things that go beyond this realm of understanding and reason.

Criticizing a flashlight for being a poor saw is a flaw in the criticizer, not the flashlight.

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