(March 15, 2016 at 4:02 am)robvalue Wrote: The supernatural is usually defined so that there can be no evidence of it.
When that is the case, you have stuffed yourself. It's unfalsifiable, and therefor useless.
It is always premature to jump to an unsupported conclusion. We can't possibly ever rule out every natural possibility. There's nothing to be gained by predicting that we won't. It's just relabelling "don't know yet" as "we'll never know" and calling that supernatural. Maybe we'll find out one day, in which case such a claim is categorically wrong. Maybe we'll never find out. Even in the latter scenario, jumping to useless, unfalsifiable conclusions achieves nothing. We don't know. It's as simple as that.
Also, just because we might never know what the explanation is, what on earth makes that supernatural? Is it defined in terms of our ability to study it? If a more advanced race managed to study it just fine, would it then be natural?
It's not at all clear that there is anything that isn't natural. Trying to define it is extremely problematic and unscientific.
"Might be supernatural... Might be God... Might be my god..."
Wild speculation, used to make a theist feel better about conclusions they have already come to.
The miracle would be the evidence of a supernatural cause. So to argue against miracles because we can't define the supernatural cause is not logical.
You talk of unsupported conclusions. If all of our science says it is extremely unlikely that event x happened in y circumstances yet it happened, that is not unsupported. You cannot rule out every natural cause, but you can assign probability. For example, the probability of a man crippled from birth eventually walks would be low. However the same man starts walking at the exact time some stranger tells him to is significantly lower.
