Atheism

[LadyForCamus]

I’m a stay at home mom with 4 year old and 18 month old boys; give me a break, will ya? 😛  I’m gettin’ to it, just as soon as I have a few minutes to be alone with my brain. 😉

Ok no problem.... I just wanted to clarify that their is the issue of what the category error is, and why it’s wrong. Or if you want to change your mind on that statement that’s fine too.

Edit: didn’t mean to sound like I was rushing you.

Naturally caused events, and “super” or, “beyond” or, “outside” or, “seperate from”, naturally caused events are indeed two distinct categories.  Most importantly, they’re the inverse of one another.  We know that naturally caused events have natural causes, because they’re explainable, describable, demonstrable and repeatable within the natural world.  The supernatural?  I’m not even sure what that word means beyond, “not natural”.  What is a “not-natural” cause?

I think that I am wrong, but not about the category error. Attempting to draw conclusions about an allegedly supernatural event by holding it to the same evidentiary standards we use for naturally caused events is absolutely a category error.  That’s like trying to recite the alphabet using only numbers. But, I’ll retract my proposition that, “supernatural claims demand extraordinary evidence.”  I don’t know how you could even coherently describe a supernatural cause, let alone have any evidence for it. Where the rubber hits the road for me, is that I don’t have any reason to think a “not-natural” thing could even be in existence at all.  That seems like a logically contradictory statement. What is a thing that is in existence, but not natural?  

Now, if you’re saying that the “supernatural” is really just an extension of the natural world, then we’re talking about a single category of things. Naturally caused things. In that case, we can expect some physical evidence for these extra-natural...(?) causes, and correctly apply our evidentiary hierarchy to draw reasonable conclusions about those claims.  Unfortunately though, you’re still faced with the problem that an alleged “extra-natural” event like the virgin birth is a claim that contradicts an overwhelming body of high-quality, scientific evidence to the contrary. All available evidence indicates that human semen is necessary for conception. Heresy, at the very bottom of that hierarchy, certainly wouldn’t even come close to overcoming or overriding that fact. Extraordinary natural claims certainly demand extraordinary evidence.