#STRask - The Reason Why Science Can’t Explain the Supernatural Is That the Supernatural Doesn’t Happen

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Questions about the claim that science explains things that happen and that’s why it can’t explain the supernatural, whether there will be morality in Heaven, and reconciling the idea that we all intuitively know morality with the argument that Christianity gave our culture its morality.   If science explains things that happen, then the reason it can’t explain the supernatural is that the supernatural doesn’t happen, for if the supernatural happened, then science would explain it. Will there be morality in Heaven? If there are no bad choices, would it only be free will and not morality? How do we reconcile the idea that morality is objective and we all just know it with the idea that Christianity gave us our Western moral values—i.e., if we all intuitively know morality, why do we argue Christianity gave it to our culture?

Welcome to hashtag STR Ask. We have been talking a lot in the last few episodes about theology, so we're going to shift gears now, Greg, and go to a question from Carl. How would you respond to this statement? If science explains things that happen, then the reason it can't explain the supernatural is because the supernatural doesn't happen. For if the supernatural happened, then science would explain it. Ouch, outch, outch. I'm sorry, but it's such bad thinking because, okay, now I have an illustration that I use in my talk on this issue. In fact, I'll be giving this talk locally here tomorrow night.

And the illustration is, can't, the question I asked the audience is, can you weigh a chicken with a yardstick? and I don't mean, you know, trying to make a balanced beam out of that and put the baskets down and wait. No, I mean, can you use a yardstick the way yardsticks were intended to be used to weigh a chicken? And of course, the answer is no, a scale does that. But that doesn't mean the chicken has no weight because you can't use that means of measurement to determine its weight. There are different ways to measure different things, okay, by the same token. Science, now here we have to make a distinction, and that is one that's often not made, but it needs to be made to understand this properly. There are two definitions of science.

The first definition is science as a methodology. It's a method for discovering and discerning and understanding and learning about those things that science is capable of measuring. And the nature of the method of the science requires the five senses. It is examining the physical universe. We know of the physical universe through the use of our five senses. And so that's how we gain information from it. We are using a yardstick to find out how long a chick it is. Okay.

and there are limitations to any means of gathering information. Since science is geared, at least in one understanding of science, that is the methods of science, it is geared to measuring the physical universe, it cannot in principle tell you anything directly, certainly, about the non-physical universe. if you say, well, science gives us information about everything that exists, and it doesn't give us anything information about God and the supernatural, therefore the supernatural doesn't exist, now you've added a new dimension.

You've defined science as giving you information about everything that exists. You smuggled in a metaphysical assumption. That is, since science measures the physical realm and it measures everything that exists, that means there is nothing but the physical realm by, exactly. Yeah. By definition. By definition. And boy, this kind of thing happens all the time. He's defined it out of existence and then used that to prove that it doesn't exist.

Exactly. Exactly. It's done all the time. You can very easily show the problem with this if you just replace supernatural with history. So listen to what this says. If history, wait, let's see. If science explains things that happen, then the reason it can't explain history is because history doesn't happen. For if history happened, then science would explain it.

That's great. You cannot do scientific experiments to figure out history because history is the result of agents. In the same way, if I came up to a stop sign, can science explain why I turned left or right? Now, science can explain your brain sent signals and it turned your body this way, but why did my brain send signals? It can describe that you turned left or right. It's descriptive. Right. But it can explain why I did it.

that's because agents make decisions that are not natural forces. Yeah. Not determined. So science can explain things that happen naturally by natural laws, and they can do experiments for that, but there are certain things that it can't measure, as you explained. So here's another way of putting it, and I think this is in the Street Smart's book, but somebody says, no, this may take a moment to sink in, but it's making the same point. a person says, well, I can't believe in the supernatural. Why not? There's no scientific evidence for it.

I said, well, you shouldn't believe in science then either. Why not? Because there's no scientific evidence for it. In other words, that which justifies the principles of science is something that comes from outside of science. Right. And gives us reason to trust science as a means of knowledge. But, and there are all kinds of things that if science gives you knowledge of the universe

that you put inside the box and you call this truth, right? There's got to be a bunch of things inside that truth box for science to even begin working. One of them is the basic reliability of the senses. That's got to be in there. You've got to have the principle, the concept of empiricism as a philosophical notion and as something basically reliable put in there before you can add anything else by the scientific means. that uses the empirical method. And there's a whole bunch of more things

that have to go into the box. But you made an important distinction between, as we were talking together, between description of things happening and the necessity in many cases of an agent for those things to happen. In forensic pathology, it's exactly what we're doing.

Jay Warner Wallace talks about, you know, in the room and out of the room. If there are a whole bunch of things at a crime scene that can't be explained by everything in the room, then you know that something from out of the room was responsible for that. Okay, and that changes from a, like a dead person situation to a homicide situation, because there's a, there's a knife in the back of the person. It can't be explained from inside the room, you know.

Anyway, so the same situation we're working with here. There is this tendency for, especially the kind of the scientific crowd, to smuggle into their enterprise metaphysics. And the idea of scientism is an example. And that's the view that science is the only reliable means, the only reliable way of knowing anything. Well, if that's the case, the history is out the door, as you pointed out. And sometimes the smuggling is subtle. Now, it was really obvious to Amy and I write off because we've seen this before. And that's why you heard me chuckling, oh, and it's so painful to hear it.

But others don't see it. And the person who's doing the smuggling doesn't even see it. They've been taught to think this way without even realizing this. So anyway, there you go. Okay, let's go to a question from Madison. Will there be morality in heaven? If there are no bad choices, would it only be free will then and not morality? Hmm.

I think there's some confusion here. Morality is, well, it depends on how you want to construe it, but it's based on goodness. It's about what is good. You know, people talk about the classic questions of what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful, right? The good, true, beautiful. These are quests of human beings and trying to make sense of the world because it does seem that there are true things, there are beautiful things, and there are good things, okay? So morality is what a word that we use to describe that arena of behavior. or virtues or awarenesses that, when theologically characterized, are consistent with the nature of God.

So, God is the foundation of morality. God is good by nature. If God is in heaven, then heaven is a moral place. The only other option would be to say it's amoral, which means there's no moral judgment on what's happening there, which isn't true. Well, they could be a moral judgment because there's no moral judgment good or bad. You couldn't say good. You couldn't say bad. But yeah, only in an amoral. Yeah.

Yeah. But obviously, God is good. Good. Yeah, all right. There's still going to be a value to that, even if there's not any evil there. Uh-huh. Now, I think this is maybe connected to the question of how can there be evil in heaven. Well, they can't.

Well, maybe it's because there's no morality. I'll tell you where there's no morality on earth with no humans. All you have is animals. Well, animals aren't moral creatures. You can't make, it's not appropriate to make moral judgments about animal behavior. We can say, if we encounter it, oh, that's, we could say, you know, it's not good that that jogger got attacked by a mountain lion or something like that. But we're using the words good in a very different sense.

But if humans, animals have no moral nature. And so that's what you'd get. And if in heaven, you have no morality. There is no good or bad. There's just stuff that happens. But that doesn't restrain anything from happening. Then if there's no morality in heaven, then people could kill each other and it would be wrong.

People could be nice to each other and it would be right. There wouldn't be any right or wrong. That would make no sense. It's not that whatever we do is right because we do it. It's that we will only do what is right because that's what we want to do there. Well, yes, that would be the next step. The answer then, because of these problems, is, yes, God's there, and it's a moral place. So how do we participate?

We have resurrected bodies. You know, the mortal is put on the immortal, the perishable is put on the imperishable. When we shall be changed. And when we see him, we'll be like him because we'll see him as he is. And there is not going to be any evil in heaven by the pictures there in Revelation 21 and 22. All the bad guys are outside the gate. They're out there. They're not inside.

And so consequently, there's no evil there. So will we have free will? Sure. We'll be doing things and making choices. In fact, we will, on our view, be in the same circumstance that God is in. God can do whatever he wants, but all the things that he will, that he wants to do are good, because his nature is good, and we will then be able to do whatever we want, but as you pointed out a moment ago, we will never want to do something wrong.

We will never want to do something that's an offense to God's nature. Well, wait a minute, then we're not free. Of course we're free. We're free to make the decisions, all kinds of decisions. Well, we're not free to sin. Why is that a vice in heaven? It's not a vice in God, for sure. Yeah, God's not free to sin.

This is perfect goodness. And to say that we're going to have the free will to sin in heaven, but we won't use it, just I think misses the entire point of the resurrection and the nature of goodness and perfect goodness. I think part of this question might come down to what is meant by morality, how Madison is using that term. So hopefully what we said can help make sense of the question, however that was meant. Well, morality is goodness.

It's, I guess morality functions to help us see badness, too. But morality is a term that makes no sense if there isn't perfect goodness as a standard. Maybe that's the best way to, because, yeah, because when people violate morality, they're immoral. So morality has got to be goodness because immorality. is badness. Mm-hmm. And you don't have to have badness in order for goodness to exist. Correct.

Yeah. Just like you don't need a darkness or for light to exist, you know, but you do need light to have shadows. Right. You can't have shadows without light. Yep. Which is another way of saying exactly what you just said. I'm still thinking about it.

Did she disagree? It was just saying it from the opposite direction. Yeah, you were. Okay. So here's a question from Sam from all. How do we reconcile morality being objective, and we all just know it, against the idea that Christianity gave us our Western moral values? If we all intuitively know morality, why do we argue Christianity gave it to our culture? I'm sure there's something I'm missing here.

Yeah. And I guess I would say it. I'd be curious about your response to the same. Christianity, mm-hmm, hmm-hmm. morality exists and it's accessible to human beings in some measure just in virtue of the kind of beings we are and the way God created us. Okay. This is why we can feel guilt because we know that we've done something wrong, and I think the dread in guilt is the dread of punishment or something like that. But what's different about Western civilization is that our values, that is all a value is, is what anyone considers that has worth.

Okay? So you can have people who value wealth. Their values are wealth. You could have people who value power. So values are not the same as morality. Values can be very different. That's why I've differed with Dennis Prager in the past. You know, he said everything's about values.

Either you have values or you don't. And if you have values, then that makes things good if you don't have values. No, everybody has values. The values, it depends on which values you have. Okay. What happened in Western civilization is that Christian morality became embedded in the values, in the things that cultures considered to be valuable and good and worthy of encouraging. So that human beings are special, made the image of God, is a moral truth or a theological truth that has moral consequences.

And then that was reflected in the values expressed in the Constitution or the, I should say, the declaration. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that he has endowed by his creator was certain in any liberal rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And there you see the bridge from the moral truth, created equal, to the values, to the things that the founders said, we believe in this and we are going to live according to these things. So that's their value system. And I think what we see in Western civilization is a value system that has been informed by biblical concepts. In Muslim countries, their value system has been informed by the Quran. So the values are different, and therefore the behaviors are different, okay? But they're undergirding all of that as a foundational understanding of morality.

That, by the way, can be refined and be more consistent with what is good, or it can also be seared. A conscience can be seared by immorality. So tell me if you would agree with this way of explaining it. We all know the concept of morality. We all know that there are objective moral values because we all have a sense of right and wrong and of guilt. But it can be the case that some are better at that than others, just like you can know math exists

without knowing all of the ways to do math in a proper way. Sure. Does that seem... Well, yeah, there's a difference between kind of the formal and the material. So the formal is morality exists. What's the material thing? Well, all the particulars of morality. We know that math exists and have a little sense of that, but then they're the particulars of math.

But I think it goes further. There are material things that are embedded in us. It isn't just that we know there's math. But we have the ability, and this is important because sometimes morality is taught to us. but it's only can be taught effectively to us in the same way that math can be taught effectively because we have a predisposition or a faculty. We can perceive it. We can perceive it.

Well, yes, that's right. There is a perception, but it's beyond just perception. It is an ability to manage it and understand it. So if I said the square root of two is four, I'm sorry. Four is two. You would laugh because that would be right, but you'd do it right away. And I actually had this conversation when I election at Berkeley a number of years ago with the Q&A. And I was just trying to find some common ground with a student.

And okay, about how we think. This is a very postmodern period of time. Everybody was into this postmodernism. There was no truth. I said, so you know that the square root of four is two, right? He goes, well, that's what my culture taught me to believe. I said, wait a minute. You know what four means, right?

You know what two means, right? You know what a square root is, right? I do. Can't you just, now watch, here's the language. Can't you just see that given your understanding about those three things that the square root of four is two? And he said, well, that's what the culture taught me to believe. And that, I ended the conversation after that. People were throwing paper wads at him and everything because they were bugged in him. But he, but it was like, it was ridiculous because now we have no, no, no way to communicate if that's what he really believes. But notice what I was appealing to, a certain ability to see,

It's not just that we have awareness of this, but we can, oh, that comes together. I get it now. And that's how square roots work. I can. So we have that faculty with math, that, that, and we have the same thing with morality. I was looking for a different word because I think JP Moreland uses. Apprehension? No, not a, no, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, but we.

Intuition? No. No. But there is intuitions involved. These are things that we know that we don't know how we know them because we never learned them from the outside. That's built in these intuitions like this. But I'll just call, I'm just going to call it faculty because that's close enough. But we are born with all these faculties that probably in about 15 minutes on another hour, it'll download.

But the point is we're born with all these faculties that do take developmental changes in our brain and the rest of our body to manifest. Look at you may have a musical capability, but you're not going to be able to use that until you can move your fingers on the piano key, on the piano keyboard. You might be able to do that three years old if you're really clever, but a six-month-old is not going to be able to do it. But you still have that capacity. Is that? Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, capacity. Yes. Now you go, J.P. If you're listening, you have that all capacity. And I think the same thing is true of morality. I think this is a great question. I think we actually had a similar one in the past because I thought it was so good because the idea that if we are going to say that we recognize that we have a better value system, but if we're trained by the Christian value system, then of course that's the system we would recognize. Like that all, I can see why people would ask a question about this.

But hopefully we've come at this in a way that shows you there can be an objective system, even if you aren't aware of all of the ways it works out until someone teaches it to you. Right. And I will also say, I think... That's right math is such a good... Yeah. I think we can recognize it when we see it just as we can recognize beauty. So it's not just, we're so steeped in relativism. It's hard sometimes, I think, to grasp this.

But, I mean, think about beauty. Think about, I think it's Bach that's really popular in Japan. I think that's who it is. Now, Bach didn't, you know, he's foreign to their history. But when his music came there, they recognized it as beautiful. Right. So as humans, they were able to recognize it regardless of their culture. Yeah.

And we can recognize beautiful things in their culture. So there is an objective beauty, and I think morality is recognized in the same way. So when someone shows you, for example, let's say you weren't familiar at all with the Christian story, and then you see someone sacrificing himself for someone else. you can perceive the beauty of that and the goodness of that without having ever known it before. So I think that learning morality works in the same way. And that's how I would argue. I think just look at how the values of Jesus have invaded our world and taken over our world. This is Tom Holland's book, Dominion, because the beauty of it and the goodness of it,

when seen is recognized to be beautiful. And not by everyone and not all the time. And what's curious is Tom Holland, I think, is an atheist. Is that right? I'm not sure if he still is. I think he's going to church, but I don't think he would say he's a Christian, but I think he is going to church now. But he's made these observations about culture prior to any spiritual interest.

Actually, it's one of the things that I think made him interested in Christianity. So when he wrote that book, he was an atheist. Yes. Yeah, demeanor. All right. Thank you so much for the great questions, Carl and Madison and Sam. And we'd love to hear from you. You can send us your question on X with hashtag STR Ask,

or you can go to our website at STR.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.