Can't prove the supernatural God

[Redbeard The Pink]

How would one go about ruling out all possible naturalistic causes for something? How would one account for natural causes that he just doesn't understand or know about? I'm also still waiting on a definition of "natural order."

Feel free to jump in on my answer to Rob above. I think I covered your questions there.

Well...no, actually.


For one thing, that first paragraph looks like mostly word salad. If a thing is "powerful enough to act on the natural world," and it actually does so, then the natural world should reflect its interference (which is to say that there should be evidence of what happened).


For example, if an all-powerful being really had flooded the planet a few thousand years ago, and we were all descended from the only survivors, then there would be a SIGNIFICANT baseline of expected cultural, geological, ecological, and biological evidence of the fact.


As it stands, there is not. Likewise, there is no documented case of a phenomenon being caused by something beyond the laws of nature. There are stories and phenomena that we can't currently explain, but if we don't have enough information to explain them, then we don't have enough information to say that they fall beyond the realm of natural possibility.


It is not an argument from ignorance to say that unexplainable phenomena most likely have natural causes because that assertion is based on something we know (in particular, the fact that all known causes, events, and objects are natural, and none are "supernatural").


Once you start throwing the word "miracle" around, you're basically screwed. In the same way that a "blessing" is the sort of enchantment that a god bestows, a miracle is the sort of magic that a god does. Miracles are magic, and magic isn't real.


That thing YHWH does where he makes a little man out of clay and breathes life into it? You know, the act of creating humanity? That is the "Golem Spell." That is literally how magical golems are (allegedly) made. That's why Jesus makes spit-mud to fix a blind man's eyes that one time; if you're god, and your little dirt-person has defective eyes, what do you do? Why, whip him up some new eyes...out of dirt, of course!


So yeah...if you're talking miracles, you're either talking about something from a story in a book, or you're talking about Jesus showing up on toast, or you're talking about anecdotal medical mysteries that occur at the same rates amongst theists and non-theists of all shapes and sizes. In any of those cases, you've got a long way to go and a lot of things to rule out before you get to cry magic...sorry...miracle.