What follows is from Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestrial Civilizations (1979):To transcend the laws of nature, be "supernatural" is ... impermissable in the Universe as interpreted by science, in the "Scientific Universe" ....
It might easily be argued that human beings have no right to say that this or that is "impermissable"; that something that is called supernatural receives its name by arbitrary definition out of knowledge that is finite and incomplete. Every scientist must admit that we do not know all the laws of nature that may exist, and that we do not thoroughly understand all the implications and limitations of the laws of nature that we think do exist. Beyond what little we know there may be much that seems "supernatural" to our puny understanding, but that nevertheless exists.
Quite right, but consider this --
When we lead from ignornace, we can come to no conclusions. When we say, "Anything can happen, and anything can be, because we know so little that we have no right to say 'This is' or 'This isn't,'" then all reasoning comes to a halt right there. We can eliminate nothing; we can assert nothing. All we can do is put words and thoughts together on the basis of intuition or faith or revelation and, unfortunately, no two people seem to share the same intuition or faith or revelation.
What we must do is set rules and place limits, however arbitrary these may seem to be. We then discover what we can say within these rules and limits.
The scientific view of the Universe is such as to admit only those phenomena that can, in one way or another, be observed in a fashion accessible to all, and to admit those generalizations which we call laws of nature) that can be induced from those observations.
