Commentary on the Patterson/Walters Exchange. Origins Research 10:1. Gange, Dr. Robert A.

Volume 10, Number 1

Commentary on the Patterson/Walters Exchange

Dr. Robert A. Gange

An important perceptual difference between Tracy Walters and Dr. Patterson appears to lie in the relationship, if any, between science and the supernatural. Accordingly, I offer the following remarks as context for the particular points discussed below.

Natural science is an enterprise committed to discovering physical truth. It functions under a feedback cycle that gathers reproducable data, creates falsifiable hypotheses, and makes logical predications that direct the gathering of future data. The latter is used to retain, alter or replace the hypotheses. An hypothesis is retained when it answers every question we can think to ask of it, and discarded when it can no longer be altered to make its predictions fit the data. This latter condition is known as "falsifiability."
Supernatural explanations -- while they may, in principle, be true -- ordinarily lie outside the jurisdiction of science because they are not falsifiable. To say that when "natural processes don't operate" we can "call that supernatural" is a choice motivated by theistic philosophy. But, of course, we are also free to view the matter as originating from a natural cause yet to be discovered. This seems to be Dr. Patterson's view. However, while it is true that "the working assumption in modern science is that all phenomena in the universe are natural ones," the assumption is, in principle, unessential to the operation of science. In this case the belief has its origin in materialistic philosophy -- not demonstrable fact. The freedom to interpret unexplained events in terms of supernatural cause versus incomplete knowledge is, it seems to me, something that neither can deny the other.
Natural science is provisional knowledge about the physical world acquired through the feedback cycle outlined above. However the pursuit of that knowledge does not demand, apriori, that its ultimate cause have a natural origin. It merely requires that the feedback cycle be operative. For example, if at some future date it should be suspected that starlight originates from interstellar cheesecloth designed by galactic imps to deceive us, the hypothesis might inspire novel decoding and communication attempts that could prove successful e.g., the imps might acknowledge their identity and activity, thereby giving us knowledge regarding the origin and nature of certain measurable signals that permeate the "universe." This process satisfies the feedback cycle and, therefore, qualifies as natural science i.e., we would have discovered provisional knowledge about our physical world. Yet the relationships engineered by the imps for the radiation amplitude, phase, intensity and angular spread can hardly be regarded as data from a "natural" origin. I cite this highly unlikely possibility to illustrate that the investigation of natural phenomena is quite a separate matter from its presumed natural cause. The latter is an apriori commitment that stems from materialism -- not science -- and it presupposes that all that exists is matter and motion.

Dr. Gange received his Ph.D. in 1978 for extensive research on the application of cryophysics to information systems. He has been on staff for over 25 years at the David Sarnoff Research Center in princeton, New Jersey. In the course of his scientific career, he has received nine corporate awards and has been honored seven times by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. More recently, he is the author of the book, Origins and Destiny, published in 1986 by Word books, Waco, Texas. In this article, Dr. Gange addresses some of the points raised by John Patterson and Tracy Walters in the last issue of Origins Research.