For me, the phrase "working hypothesis" refers to anything that I take as given in deciding what to do in life, including politics -- even though it might be proven to be wrong in practice. I don't know _for sure_ whether the working hypothesis is true or not, but I act _as if_ it were true.
Because I don't think that it's possible to ever know the truth, I find that working hypotheses of this sort are extremely necessary.
> Plate tectonics isn't a claim about the supernatural, so, however
> improbable a claim about it seemed in the early twentieth century, it
> could eventually be evaluated as methods of observation improved.
> But a claim about the supernatural isn't subject to such progress. A
> claim about God is an add-on that cannot be proved or disproved
> naturalistically, so it doesn't improve any explanation of natural
> phenomena. Those who make an improbable claim that it does ought to
> offer evidence of it.
Perhaps plate tectonics was a bad example. But there are a bunch of theories in physics that seem almost supernatural to me ("dark energy").
After seeing Star Wars episode III (much better than eps. I and II), what would one think of the hypothesis that the Force exists? If faster-than-light travel exists (another premise of these movies) why not the Force? It seems supernatural, but what is "supernatural" anyway? Maybe we don't understand the "natural" very well?
Some respected people (e.g., Michael Polanyi) thought that Rhine's experiments showed that ESP was a natural phenomenon. It turned out that the experiments were bogus (though not intentionally so), but it indicates that we may not be able to define the line between natural and supernatural in an _a priori_ way. One hundred years ago, people may have thought that the idea that an atom could be split was "supernatural." How about the current view that a subatomic particle over here can affect another subatomic particle far away from it? sounds pretty supernatural to me, almost like telekenesis.
If some god were to appear out of cloud (see Monty Python's Holy Grail) and threaten to smite me with lightning, then that would move the existence of of gods from being non-existent (my current working hypothesis) to being existent (a new working hypothesis). I doubt that this will ever happen, but it could.
> The virtue of science is that it has made it unnecessary for us to
> have any hypothesis concerning God or gods or goddesses. Science
> doesn't seek to disprove the existence of God or gods or goddesses,
> though it can and (if called upon) does disprove specific miraculous
> acts attributed to God or gods or goddesses. God or gods or
> goddesses -- and hypotheses concerning their existence or lack
> thereof -- are merely irrelevant to science, so they are not included
> in it. It is science's lack of interest in God -- rather than any
> argument against God's existence any scientist makes -- that really
> outrages theists who are not content to reduce God to a matter of
> ethics.
I think it's more than that. I think that the theists read science as saying that gods don't play the role that theists believe in. Darwinian evolution leaves gods out of the causation, so it says that gods don't play a role, so gods aren't relevant to life on earth, so gods are either dead or indifferent or never existed. To a theist, the absence of gods in the story is akin to the view that since Jesus Christ isn't in the Hindu holy books, those folks in India haven't accepted JC as their personal savior and should be converted. -- Jim Devine