In this article, philosopher Evan Fales argues that the laws of physics establish that disembodied minds (such as an immaterial God, for example) could not influence the physical world. Is it true?
(The article can be read in the book Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. The book can be downloaded for free on Z-library)
The very short answer is "no". Neither the article, nor physics, rule out the existence or agency of Gods.
Somewhat Longer Answer:
The author is trying to stake out a very peculiar position. Most Anti-spiritualists assert ONTOLOGICAL naturalism -- I.E., that there is no such thing as non-material. They generally concede that the methodologies of science and reasoning, which combine to form methodological naturalism, could be used to investigate whether spirits influence our world.
This author seems to have put himself in a box, however. He WANTS to assert Ontological naturalism, but admits that the test cases of abstract objects -- Poppers World 3 -- exist. He also admits that minds exist, and that he cannot rule out that they are world 2 rather than world 1 objects.
This leaves him searching for a justification for his belief in an effective ontological naturalism, and this effort to redefine methodological naturalism to exclude certain categories of hypotheses, is a very blatant kluge/rationalization. Note how he describes it:
it would be a mistake, I think, in the present context, to bind naturalism to a commitment that minds are material. That is arguably not something that science alone can settle, but however it is settled, we should not hold psychology and the social sciences hostage to the outcome. Thus I propose that the right sort of gerrymander here, to give us what matters, is one that rules out disembodied minds. Naturalism, then, is committed to there being none of those.
Note he admits up front, that he is "gerrymandering" the normal usage of methodological naturalism, to try to prevent study of subjects he wishes were not the case. The methodology of naturalism is not committed to excluding acceptance of certain answers of "what is our world like". His admission that whether minds are material or not is an open subject, but that he is ALSO excluding trying to answer this open question from any kind of scientific inquiry, shows exactly what this sort of ideological effort to constrain science leads to.
In prior centuries, the Church, or the Commissars, banned study of certain subjects because they contradicted their ideologies' dogma. Evan Fales is trying to do the same today.
Even More In Depth Answer
Fales makes an implicit assumption about science, and physics laws -- that science laws are ABSOLUTE LAWS, not regularities. This is clear in his discussion of conservation principles. But this is not how laws work in science. Laws are regularities. They do not always hold. A good discussion of how all science laws break naturally is in this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.93.25.14256
Not only are conservation laws not absolute, but causal closure for the physical is not a valid assumption either. First, it is simply inconsistent with science as an active and open field of inquiry. So long as we are still doing science, current science cannot be closed, and future science cannot exclude any logically possible causal paths.
Further, physicists do not treat causal closure as absolute, and cannot. It is not difficult to find examples of this. First, it is not possible to have any isolated system within the universe, as fields (gravitational, E-M) from outside will always cross any boundary. Hence one cannot have causal closure even within physics for any minimal physical system, other than our entire universe.
And for our universe as a whole, cosmologists basically have rejected causal closure. Whether it is the continuous matter generation of the Steady State Model, the spontaneous oscillatory excursion of "the equations don't exclude this" of low odds finally creating a universe from a void, the bouncing interaction of two adjacent brane-world universes, or the spontaneous spawning of baby universes in a multiverse universe -- cosmologists don't restrict themselves to conservation laws OR universes being causally closed.
Fales would have to say that cosmologists are not doing science, and banish them from the AAAS...
Aside -- Hoyle tried to find away to tweak the definition of conservation of energy to fit his model inside of it, and some Big Bang cosmologists have tried to do the same to say the spontaneous appearance of our universe in an instant did not violate COE. For a discussion of these efforts, and what they mean for COE and spiritual interaction, see this question and answer https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/494408/the-zero-energy-hypothesis-and-its-consequences-for-particle-creation-and-dualis
Note that expanding the "system" (to include consciousness, or Gods) and asserting a new term that is still conserved in the larger system, is a typical strategy that has been used in many of these past speculations.
And second, "matter" is only about 5% of the known energy of the physical part of the universe, with the rest in poorly or non-understood dark matter and dark energy. And finally, unless one is claiming that all subjects reduce to physics, and Fales explicitly rejects that, then real events and phenomena are characterized in disciplines OUTSIDE physics, and therefore physics CANNOT be closed to non-physics phenomena.
As a further challenge to fixed laws -- the current understanding of the Cosmological Constant is that its value is set by the energy of virtual particles, and the energy of these particles comes from the "laws" and constants of the standard model of quantum mechanics.
But our Cosmological Constant was very large in the first instants of the Big Bang, and it is changing today. So -- these "laws" have and are continuing to change.
Referring to the title of your reference -- Karl Popper defined pseudoscience as the act of claiming to be doing science, while rejecting the possibility of refutation.
Naturalism is, per the author here, the belief that consciousness, or any world 2 object like a God, cannot causally affect the physical world. Your author is trying to redefine science, so that any examination of the possibility of spirit causation is not allowed as a scientific inquiry. IE that his view of naturalism cannot be refuted by science. Popper would label your author an advocate of Pseudoscience.
Since the laws of physics says nothing about minds, it can't say anything about embodied minds, never mind disembodied minds.
Physicalists, who view everything as physics as the ground of everything, including both matter and the mental argue that the mental is nothing other than some emergent epiphenomena from the play of energy and matter in spacetime. Yet whilst this follows from their position, they have yet to describe, in detail, how the mental arises - other than simply positing by fiat. Some proponents point to AI as being conscious, but this proves nothing as the imitation of something is not the thing itself. Turing himself was conscious of this when he devised the Turing Test, but simply avoided the question. Avoiding a question is not answering it ...
This sounds just like a person who is prefacing his beliefs by adding the sentence "Physics teaches that..." to give his beliefs more credence. There is the rather gaping issue of methodological naturalism that all hard science adheres to that this person so very conveniently forgets.
Science tells us nothing except that of which is. What exists in a reality beyond the physical is completely not in the magisterium (as Stephen Jay Gould would put it) that science operates.
It looks like there are so many people with a completely overlapping magisterium these days. They really should inform themselves over the article entitled Nonoverlapping Magisteria by Stephen Jay Gould. It was an incredibly important landmark article on the issue of how science and religion interact with each other.
I personally hold to a partially overlapping magisterium. Scientific discoveries have had a tremendous effect on religious thought in the last half of the 20th century.
The discovery of background radiation led to the belief that the first three words in the Bible was true after all. Funny how things turn out like that.
I would like to offer a different answer on this.
First of all, relying on current physical theories means one accepts that they are adequate enough or complete, which is not the case. So I will leave this path and base the answer on something else but close to that.
What we do know about minds (eg human minds, animal minds , ..) is that they are embodied in bodies. This is a fact. A fact of nature in this world if you like.
Another fact we know about these minds is that they are recognized, among other things, by their actions and consequences upon other things(*). This means that such a recognized mind needs some matter-energy substratum (ie a "body") in order to manifest its consequences.
Can a mind have manifest consequences without a matter-energy substratum (ie without a "body")? This is an interesting question, but the simple and at the same time profound answer is no. Why? Because once one defines these manifestations, at the same time one provides (even unintentionally) an alternative definition of what a "body" or matter-energy substratum can be. So we come back to previous point.
A mind without consequences on this world, is equivalent to being non-existent. We don't lose anything by taking it as non-existent.
(*) If mind is only an epiphenomenon of matter, then by definition it is always embodied regardless producing consequences or not.
So to sup up:
Either a mind has consequences on this world, which when defined and measured provide a definition of a matter-energy substratum (a "body" to operate), or mind is an epiphenomenon of matter-energy thus always embodied by definition, or it has no consequences, in which case it can be taken as non-existent (for this world) and absolutely nothing is missed.
In this sense, the arguments in your reference can be taken as true.
We can say as Sean Carroll does that God Is Not A Good Theory.
There are two sources of issues that I think will prevent any final, totalising resolution here though.
(1) On the religious side, the fundamental flexibility and ambiguity in how god/s are defined. This has led to the framing God of the Gaps, a deus ex machina to reconcile any plot holes in the scientific narrative, whether abiogenesis or the source of the Big Bang. Whatever source of doubt, like asking if we can somehow conclude there must be a Creator, how did they arise, just gets contorted around by those determined to believe.
The diversity of views within modern Christianity, even the diversity held just among modern Catholics, would have triggered Inquisitions and heresy charges as little as two centuries ago. Iterations of the fine points of doctrine were powerful political tools in the past, but after being forced to accept secular governance by the expansion of religious wars following the arrival of the printing press, religion has become largely a private recreation.
In Islam and Judaism it is made very explicit that God is beyond our ability to imagine or define, a difference that I think has kept those traditions more vital, but also seen them generate less philosophy (still plenty, but less).
(2) On the scientific side, the source of issues is that experimental knowledge is necessarily tentative, and relational, contextual, and subject to revision. Proof belongs in mathematics, not physics.
Even in a causally closed universe where an immaterial being can't directly tracably impact causality, there can be indirect influences involved, retroactive narratives made about divine purposes come good in the end. But conversely, you might be surprised to find there are scientifically compatible framings of a deity, like the idea of an Omega Point (obviously, debatably, but Tipler's picture satisfied David Deutsch as possible even if not actual).
A physics-plausible deity would face limitations. An outside-physics deity would be undetectable, even if with theological tools like immanence and inspiration through faith they can be meaningful to theists.
I see the reduction of how we understand religions to them being sets of statements about reality and cosmology as a fundamental mistake, though. Following Durkheim, we can see religious behaviour as fundamentally about social cohesion, the system of finding group cohesion through enactment of values held sacred or put (at least for now) beyond question. In this framing we can understand 'religious entrepreneurialism', and Scientism.
We should shift the debate from, what is true, to what do beliefs do for us, and are their consequences good?
Holding habeus corpus, or universal human rights, to be sacred has unfolding complex impacts. I go into detail about how we need to reform rather than sever cultural traditions here: What are some philosophical works that explore constructing meaning in life from an agnostic or atheist view?
My first doubt regarding this questions is whether physics rule in embodied minds. I think you will have to add other subjects for doing so. If this is true I can't find any significance to this question.
Evan Fales argues that the laws of physics establish that disembodied minds (such as an immaterial God, for example) could not influence the physical world.
When physics proves embodied mind emerges from disembodied mind this argument will fail. We cannot confirm whether this will never happen.
This article might give some ideas about mind: Is the Mind Immaterial or Material?
Does the mind effect the physical world?
Physics deals with only a few areas of our physical / ephemeral world. It cannot explain clearly anything immaterial. In other words, it cannot confirm or prove anything immaterial.
If physics has developed from something completely physicals, that limitation will always be there. Nobody can blow it off. The limitations of our senses and instruments also prevent us from doing so. If an ‘immaterial being’ such as God cannot influence the material world, we can say that the material world is influenced by an unnamed 'something' that is beyond the laws of physics and it must be something material. Even then physics cannot rule out that 'something' though it has not yet been proved to be material or immaterial. So the laws of physics cannot rule out (an immaterial) God
Different ideas related to the concept of God do not suit here.
