Don't confuse methods with standards. No matter the method used in the various sciences they all are subject to the same verification process as described by Popper, called the scientific method.
Determining whether there's a scientific method, and if so what that method is, is still an active area of debate in the philosophy of science. Just as a sample, there's discussion of Euclidean-style axiomatic systems, deductive-nomological covering-law models, hypothetical-deductive schemes (of which Popper's is only one), there are taxonomies, classification schemes and cladistics, there's the instrumentalism vs scientific realism controversies, causal explanations, probabilistic explantations, functional and teleological explanations, there's problems of discovery and induction, concilience of inductions, C.S. Pierce's logic of abduction, mathematical modeling, thought experiments...
Science certainly can evaluate the realty of such claims. It may have nothing to say of claims about the relationship between two unevidenced spiritual entities, but it can evaluate claims of such entitie's effects on reality.
It something from outside nature was interfering with nature, those interventions might just look like causal anomalies to science. Conceivably, science might not even be able to detect interventions from outside, if the interventions involve classes of events that people already feel confident that they understand.
It's rare that people fully understand the causation that goes into a particular event. Scientists come closest in carefully controlled experiments where there's only a small number of significant variables. But in everyday life we don't have that kind of knowledge. So we end up classifying perceived events into classes and then feel confident that a particular event in question isn't problematic if it's a member of a class of events that one would expect given the prevailing conditions.
If there was a 'miraculous' intervention from outside nature, about all that science could say about it is that an event happened whose cause is still unknown and as yet not fully understood. And unless the intervention was a dramatic attention-grabbing violation of our expectations of what the natural order is, probably nobody would even notice.
Yazata said:
The most obvious problem is that many/most religious claims concern what are supposed to be 'transcendent' objects. Natural science appears to lack the necessary epistemological access to these supposed non-natural realms of being.
Grumpy said:
Because they probably do not actually exist. It's really hard to study the breeding habits of the wild Unicorn, you know.
The issue is whether or not natural science has any epistemological access to non-natural being. If science doesn't have that access, then it wouldn't seem to be of very much use in describing, explaining or even determining whether or not such being exists.
Yazata said:
Science, particularly physics, often seems to be interested in subsuming individual observed events as instances of general "laws". But the alleged actions of religion's supposed transcendental being(s) are typically more along the lines of one-offs and don't appear to be law-governed in the same way that physical events appear to be. The actions of these hypothetical religious objects seem to be captured more naturally in a narrative story line than by a mathematical equation.
Grumpy said:
We call those story lines "fiction".
Or if they're true, we might call them 'history'. There's a vast critical literature on the applicability of physics-style 'covering law' or 'deductive-nomological' models in history. There are questions about what kind of general laws supposedly govern history. And it's been noted that these idealized nomological philosophies of history bear no resemblance to what historians actually do and to how they go about their work.
Problems multiply tremendously if we turn our attention to a hypothetical transcendent creator whose existence is said to be prior to whatever laws of nature exist. Simply by definition, the laws of nature would only apply in the created realm of nature and wouldn't even apply to such a being. So all the models that have science subsuming particular events as instances of general laws wouldn't even apply in this situation.
Yazata said:
And third, science just seems to miss the point of religion somehow. The goal in religion typically isn't conventional propositional understanding of anything, even supposedly divine things, or forming predictive theories about them. Religions seem to offer rather different sorts of psychological benefits, such as a feeling of meaning and beauty amidst the chaos of life.
Grumpy said:
There are sciences that study these things, generally in the Psychological and Anthropological fields. That's hardly missing the point, it's just not attributing these things to unevidenced things.
Somebody can approach music by studying the psychology and anthropology of music if they like. I prefer to listen to it. It's a very different psychological process and a very different experience.
This suggests Frank Jackson's famous 'Mary black-and-white' argument published in the '
Philosophical Review' in 1982. He imagined a scientist becoming the world's greatest authority on the science of visual perception. But unfortunately, she was totally colorblind and could only see in black and white. So no matter how many details of the science of color vision she learned, she still didn't know what color
looks like.
