Okay, well I think we've played this one out, thank you

No, I wouldn't expect an ant to be able to understand general relativity. But if it did, I wouldn't label this occurence "supernatural", I'd simply call it "unexplained". The explanation may seem obvious in the future, or to someone with a more objective viewpoint than humans can ever have. If it happened, it was possible. Simple as that. If you're saying "X is impossible, so if X happened it would be supernatural" you've contradicted yourself. If it's impossible, it can't happen at all. The premise was wrong.

Nothing of any practical use is gained by calling it supernatural. It's just giving up all hope of finding an explanation. And predicting that if such a thing happened we could never explain it is similarly of no practical use. It's just subjectively ranking it against our current understanding, and noting unusual occurences.

Other than trying to make it sound more like something "God" might do, what is ever to be gained by use of the word? We can't ever distinguish a supernatural cause from another supernatural cause; or from no cause at all.

I appreciate you're not trying to defend supernatural occurences, but I respect that you believe they happened nonetheless.

To me supernatural is a cop out. Its like invoking "magic" and being the end to further investigation.
I refuse to accept it as a premise until something, anything has been proven to be supernatural.
Until then the supernatural is not a thing.

Yeah, that's the problem. Every definition I hear makes it untestable and unverifiable. So if it's real, we wouldn't know about it.

It's up to the supernatural person to make the case, and it's always an argument from ignorance, or an appeal to current scientific knowledge. It's not up to the scientist to disprove the claim, merely to note it's unfounded.

I suspect there is plenty going on that we will never even know about, ever. I just don't claim to know anything about it, because...

I really can't get where people are coming from with this.

Something that is impossible... happens? Normally impossible? Really really unlikely? It's all an appeal to incredulity.

It seems there's a clear implication that there are outside influences, and these are the supernatural things. There may well be such things. They may be involved in absolutely everything that happens, for all we know. But we can't identify them, because if we could, they'd be natural. Wouldn't they? If we can identify them just fine, why are we calling them supernatural? What's the distinction?

I guess it's appealing to (what is claimed to be) an unbalanced equation, and asserting something "supernatural" must make up the balance. But something "natural" may also make up the balance. Or nothing does, and we just don't understand it properly.

It actually seems to correlate with my own definition, which is things that can act upon our reality but can't be themselves acted upon by it: and this is relative. Maybe there are yet more things that can act upon these "supernatural" things, but which can't be acted on in return. Super-supernatural things.

So this is the big question: what practical use is labelling an event "supernatural" rather than simply "unexplained"?

No matter what God is, as soon as there's any interface between God (whatever it is) and the universe, then God/universe is now a single framework, and God is part of the universe. One single miracle, one atom moved, and this must necessarily be so.

The only supernatural God would be one which cannot interact with the universe in any way, including creating it or destroying it.

(June 1, 2016 at 8:06 am)robvalue Wrote: So this is the big question: what practical use is labelling an event "supernatural" rather than simply "unexplained"?

Because "unexplained" isn't a thing for people who think they can just explain everything with magic. Anything unexplained is probably just magic. Like, you know...fire, lightning, earthquakes, wind, reproduction, consciousness, the diversity of life...pretty much everything, actually. Magic.


Magic, Rob.

SteveII Wrote:John, Peter, James all wrote letters that agree with the claim that Jesus was God and came to redeem mankind through his death and resurrection.

Thanks for the information. Too bad they weren't as forthcoming on his life as his afterlife, that might have lent more weight to the historical Jesus.

The authorship of each of those is questioned by scholars; from seven possibilities for James (if it was James the Just, he at least had an editor or scribe who was very proficient in Greek if he dictated or wrote some original epistle that has been lost), the epistle of Peter being likely pseudonymous, to majority agreement that John the Apostle did not author the epistles of John.

This is all par for the course for writings in ancient and medieval times: People were comfortable ascribing their work to another, more famous, author; for instance, to get it more attention. I don't think the NT is unusual in this regard compared to other, similar literature of the time. Which is part of the problem, it SHOULD be unusually well documented if the Lord of the Universe was directing its composition, unless the LotU wanted the NT to be so questionable. If the latter is the case, who are we (and how are we) to uncover a LotU that doesn't want to be revealed?

(June 1, 2016 at 8:06 am)robvalue Wrote: So this is the big question: what practical use is labelling an event "supernatural" rather than simply "unexplained"?

The significance, meaning or the conclusions we could draw from a supernatural event. Simply putting an event into the "unexplained" column sheds all significance and meaning.