Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Whateverist]

Addressed to Steve, primarily.  Astonished here brings up what I was just thinking too.

Extraordinary evidence is first and foremost evidence that the extraordinary phenomenon exists at all and in what its nature lies.  If you insist on defining 'God' as that which is beyond nature, then you have defined it right out of our known universe.  You've as much as said it does not exist in any way already known..

To show that an ordinary, garden variety common-as-dirt event occurred it is relevant at least to show that the opportunity was there.  But when the phenomenon in question is of the absolutely mysterious variety, the opportunity is indeterminable.  No one knows under what conditions it could be induced.  

With the ordinary, you can argue that X is precisely the sort of occurrence one might expect for a well-known phenomenon.  But with the deeply mysterious, no one knows what is or isn't likely.  No one knows under what condition the mysterious phenomenon would be expected to occur.

Extraordinary evidence would be that which grounds the extraordinary phenomenon in the world as we know it.  By defining it as outside the known, you raise the bar for what would constitute acceptable evidence by first and foremost establishing what it is and by what it is known.

Not to mention, how one would determine the cause of said phenomenon. He probably wouldn't give half a shit if the extraordinary thing didn't let him be all like,

Not the video, but the words.  Supernatural events probably lie outside our senses altogether.  We don't see the miraculous, we infer it.  All we can see are common place actions: rising from a prone position, walking albeit on a surprising surface, etc.  It is only our inability to account for a sequence of common place actions which leads some to infer a category of causation outside of the known, what we're calling supernatural, miraculous or extraordinary.

In the real world, things with substance do not behave as if they were figments of the imagination.  I do assume that real objects do and only can be moved by natural means, natural meaning by way of forces already understood and those not yet discovered but which are equally part of the fabric of reality.  The idea that real objects are for some class of beings (gods) like thought objects are for us is fanciful.  To be taken seriously you must convince the skeptical that is even possible.  Pointing to events recorded by people living 2000 years ago who apparently observed sequences of comprehensible events whose causation they could not explain is not enough.

While we don't have any unambiguous instances of real objects behaving as thought-objects do, we certainly have plenty of unambiguous instances of people's perceptual/cognitive faculties working in aberrant ways.  We project the objects of the mind into our fields of perception all the time, sometimes in disturbing ways but also in fleeting and ordinary ways.

Since there exists a plausible pathway for explaining the extraordinary it is a small step to attribute the miraculous/mysterious to such a well known cause.  To even consider that there are beings for whom real objects behave as their actual thought-objects (in other words, not by natural means) you must first point to an unambiguous instance of the phenomenon.  But all you have is your favorite holy book just as other cultures have had theirs.  Likely the whole tendency to god belief and the miraculous is rooted in our minds capacity to misfire.  While those misfires may actually have had some beneficial use in our development as a species they are no longer a useful way to explain surprising sequences of events.