Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Sure but science isn't restricted to physics , algorithm , numbers , abstract objects of mathematics , QM , biology , microbiology , geology , weather etc .
Science is also about the unknown , NDE , and the afterlife . Which both have thousands of examples that people experience both . Both of which should be investigated more .
I think that if natural science has a distinguishing quality, it's probably its methological naturalism. That's the attempt to explain natural events through natural means. Natural science needn't be our only source of knowledge nor is it synonymous with sound productive thinking in any and all aspects of life (as some here on Stupidforums would have it).
Mathematics seems to address something far more abstract and does so by use of pure cognition. But mathematics isn't just pure speculation where any speculation is as good as any other. It has a distinct methodology to it. It possesses an objectivity, since mathematicians all around the world often agree on the validity and soundness (or not) of particular proofs. Yet it's all conceptual, abstracted from the senses, something very different from whatever it is that natural science is doing.
It's possible that something analogous to natural science might be created to address your spiritual stuff. If you want that to happen, then you and those like you (that's you, MR) should try to invent a new "science" and think up a research program and methodology for it. What phenomena should it address? What sources of information about those phenomena do we have? How might those phenomena be explained? How can successful explanations be distinguished from unsuccessful ones? Do the new theories lead to any unexpected discoveries and new areas of exploration?
Parapsychology, ufology and creation science never seem to generate any theories of their own that have any hope of explaining any of their material, apart from 'God did it!' or 'It doesn't have to conform to known physical principles!' And that doesn't really tell us anything, because it's consistent with any possible observation.
I think that people like MR and River are doing what they do less because they want to understand and explain their material, than because they want their material to announce that the universe is wondrous and transcendent. They want to inject a bit of anything-goes into a physical worldview that they think is confining and dead.