[marmight]

> I wonder if there's some nuance missed here. The natural follow-up question in my head is: can the scientific method ever support a supernatural explanation? What could such an explanation look like? How could it have predictive power whilst maintaining its supernaturalness?

In principle religious prophecy could fit the bill. You could imagine a surprising and unambiguous religious prophecy about a future event, such as that the Yellowstone Caldera will erupt in February of 2025. If a series of such prophecies were successfully made about various events spanning a variety of disciplines or topics, each attributing the knowledge to the same deity, it would be difficult for me to not attribute the predictions to the supernatural.

In practice though, religious prophecy tends to either fail in being surprising or in being unambiguous. And when it is not unambiguous, it is not falsifiable.

edit: I would also add that it is important that the prophecy be about something that is independently verifiable as well.

[n4r9]

Religious prophecy is an interesting example. It highlights the distinction between "explanation" and "prediction". Here, the explanation takes the form of a hypothesis that there is an omniscient deity. Is this a falsifiable hypothesis? Yes we can point to the accuracy of the predictions as an argument in its favour, but that doesn't differentiate between the deity hypothesis and - for example - an alien species with advanced predictive power that lives secretly among us. And if there were other tests that could be used to distinguish the deity hypothesis from alternatives, then I feel that the deity is behaving within the laws of nature.