Can't prove the supernatural God

[SteveII]

I answered the question "what practical use" is there in distinguishing between a supernatural event or an unexplained event. I said nothing about imposing any personal interpretation or significance on an event nor did I say by simply labeling an event supernatural it is somehow endowed with significance.

As I have said many times in this thread, arguing whether an event should be put in the supernatural or unexplained columns is a probabilistic argument.

While I in no way want to start the NT/evidence discussion up again, it is useful to have an example of what I mean. 

If all we know was a man crippled from birth started walking (and that is all we can discover) we are rationally required to put it into the unexplained column.

If on the other hand the context and timing indicate the event has significance beyond the actual walking part, then we are rational to investigate what that might be in judging which column the event should be placed. So, in Matt 9 Jesus told a man his sins were forgiven. When the religious leaders grumbled that this was blasphemy, he asked what was easier to say that your sins are forgiven or to tell him to get up an walk. He told the man to get up an walk and the man did. There was plenty of context to give this even far more significance than just a man walking away.

But, see, without a mechanism that can be detected and investigated, there's no reason to add any special significance to a given theological explanation. Taking your Jesus example, yes, it could be that the contextual interpretation you have for that event is what really happened, but it also could be that the specific phonemes, spoken in that specific place, with a specific celestial alignment above (at any resolution you happen to want) caused our understanding of biology to change in that specific instant. It could also be that Jesus was a theologically motivated time traveler who deployed advanced technology under the guise of a miracle because it just so happens that in the future the time traveler owns a major stake in a bible printing company.

Let's just ignore the validity of the account and presume, for the hypothetical, that this is an event that we witnessed together: given that you have no way of detecting or demonstrating a divine source for the event (and cannot, I hasten to add, even show that such a thing is possible) how can you assign a higher probability to your miraculous explanation, over and above the time travel or unknown quirk of the universe explanations?

Merely because, contextually, an explanation is asserted or hinted at at the time, does not mean that this explanation is any more likely. Every magician who has ever performed relies on this being the case. Hell, con men rely on the same thing: implying a cause is not the same thing as there actually being that cause.

The very definition of a supernatural event make detecting and investigating the cause logically impossible. So we are only left with the result and the context. 

Continuing to ignore the validity of the events for the purposes of a philosophical discussion...

Perhaps you are right for one event. If there were hundreds of similar events and other events that illustrated power over matter, life and death, knowledge that should not have been available, etc., the contextual interpretation becomes become stronger and the probability increases that supernatural forces are at play. This would all be in addition to the fact that Jesus clearly explained the source of this power--which at the very least lends additional context clues.