Can science deal with the supernatural?

[AgnosticBoy]

I just found an interesting article that covers the issue of science and the supernatural. The article is 10+ pages long, but it covers so many good questions that I could probably create 2 or 3 good topics from it. Here are some statements that the article deals with:

…because ID relies on the existence of a supernatural designer it is a religious concept, not science, and therefore does not belong in the science classroom. (AAAS, 2006)

Similarly, in the NAS publication, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science, the following statements appear:

Because science is limited to explaining the natural world by means of natural processes, it cannot use supernatural causation in its explanations… Explanations employing nonnaturalistic or supernatural events, whether or not explicit reference is made to a supernatural being, are outside the realm of science and not part of a valid science curriculum. Evolutionary theory, indeed all of science, is necessarily silent on religion and neither refutes nor supports the existence of a deity or deities. (NAS, 1998)

Source: https://www.naturalism.org/sites/naturalism.org/files/Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews Final Author Copy (Fishman 2007).pdf written by Yonatan I. Fishman, PhD.

What are your thoughts on this statement?

Later on I'll post some relevant responses from the article.

 

[AgnosticBoy]

Here's a response from the same article in post #1:

Thus, contrary to the positions expressed by Judge Jones, the AAAS, and the NAS,
the reason why supernatural or religious claims, such as those of ID/Creationism, do not belong in science classes is not because they have supernatural or religious content, but rather because there is either no convincing evidence to support them or science has debunked them.
For instance, a major claim of the ID movement is that certain biochemical pathways such as the blood-clotting cascade and cellular structures such as the bacterial flagellum are “irreducibly complex” and hence could not, in principle, have evolved by stepwise Darwinian evolution (Behe, 1996). This is a testable claim, which has been tested and empirically falsified, along with many other ID claims (Perakh, 2003; Stenger, 2003; Shanks, 2004; Young & Edis, 2004; Monton, 2006; Pallen

I think this is a very good point. It's one thing if a subject matter is shown to lack evidence or be shown false, but it's another thing to not deal with it at all. In my view, there should not be any taboos in science.