(September 17, 2013 at 3:59 pm)John V Wrote: I don't know...that's why it's called a faith.
So you have faith that you were born in the right country? What do you base that faith upon?
Quote:Living happily seems quite relevant to life to me.
Why would you need supernatural beings you can't prove one way or the other for that? What about all the things and the people you know do exist for certain right here and now?
Quote:Yes, that would be supernatural, but you've changed the scenario from everyone to the two of us.
Why did things like that only happen thousands of years ago and not in our current media age where everyone could potentially see it happen? You could have had Christ resurrection or Moses parting of the Red Sea uploaded on Youtube if it ever happened today. But it seems to me like God holds off the miracles once a civilization enters a certain phase of development when they would be detectable and open to scrutiny. The ones he does apparently still do are all ones we can't study or prove or can be faked or just a coincidence. Back in the day there was so much more going on. Another possible explanation is that the world was much the same as it is now but people were able to get away with more in terms of the tales they could tell. You just have to look at a modern religion like Mormonism to see the limitations of what could be done in a scientific age.
Quote:Key words bolded. Phenomena that are observable like any other are considered natural, even if not yet explained.
Why couldn't everything that exists just be a part of everything that naturally exists and always existed? What explanatory power does adding anything outside and beyond the natural world have? It's like if say ghosts were to exist perhaps there could be a natural explanation for them that science could study and we could understand what they are and how they're formed. This way you leave everything potentially open rather than saying "We can't know about this because it's magic".
Quote:And how do you detect that it originates outside the natural world?
You can't but that's the point, this could be entirely natural even the stuff that would seem supernatural to us because we wouldn't know how it works. But if all the supernatural claims made by religion were true then modern science would be all over it and we would all be certain of the reality of these claims.