RE: Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?
October 17, 2018 at 12:10 pm
(This post was last modified: October 17, 2018 at 12:22 pm by Angrboda.)
(October 17, 2018 at 9:08 am)SteveII Wrote: The key would be not if supernatural things obeyed physical laws, it would be if they had to obey or constrained by physical laws.
Regarding the argument from ignorance. I think you have to distinguish between a definition of a supernatural entity and a supernatural cause of a natural event--the latter being the definition of a miracle. Your example is about what makes a supernatural cause. I think one major distinction between it and natural causes is that it has no regularity/predictability/not testable. Something like gravity is extremely regular/predictable/testable. Therefore I don't think it reasonable to infer that gravity is a direct result of supernatural causes. I am a firm proponent of Methodological naturalism (I think most Christians are) when it comes to general scientific investigation of the world. The main difference is that as a Christian, I would allow for exceptions (the possibility of a miracle) when no naturalistic cause seems reasonable or likely. Can I prove any of them to a skeptic, no.
There's no way to demonstrate that anything had to obey a physical law or was necessarily constrained by a physical law, so this sets up a rather absurd situation that we can't demonstrate that anything is natural, which was the point in asking you about gravity. (I also want to point out parenthetically that we accept the existence of laws which only partially describe and predict the outcome, such as quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and fluid dynamics. Your criteria regarding extreme reliability/predictability would seem to exclude a large part of modern physics.) I think part of the problem may be in a confusion over the metaphysics here. Metaphysical explanations aren't themselves evidence of anything, and natural laws aren't forces that cause things to behave certain ways. (I'm reminded of the rather silly trope that "a law requires a law giver" -- your complaint about laws forcing things to obey them or constraining things seems to embody a similar confusion.) I also have to wonder if, upon encountering a novel phenomena, say a black swan, we should conclude that it is supernatural until we can prove that it necessarily "obeys" some physical law? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that seems to be where your criteria lead.
In regards to something else you said regarding miracles and the supernatural, I forget your exact wording but you essentially said that there is no way to show a cause behind a supernatural or miraculous event. In the past you've suggested that having foresight of a miracle, such as Jesus announcing that he is going to perform a miraculous healing, is evidence of that effect being a miracle or supernatural event. As stated in the past, I'm skeptical that such events are recorded accurately or that there are not alternative explanations, but let's take it at face value for a moment. Suppose Jesus did foretell himself healing someone. Effectively you're implying that Jesus knew the cause of the effect that he was about to produce. Since he couldn't know that by natural means, the only way we can regard his report as a reliable indicator of the occurrence of a supernatural event, the only means he might have in that case would themselves be supernatural. But we can't invoke the existence of supernatural powers themselves in order to provide evidence that something supernatural occurred, much less that the cause indicated by Jesus is reliably true on account of that belief. (I've suggested in the past the possible interference by aliens. Perhaps they really were among us, and followed Jesus around, planting thoughts in his head, and causing the healing of people using their advanced technology. It's a possibility you can't rule out. At the very least, it's likely a more probable scenario as it depends upon the existence of technology which is based upon natural laws rather than invoking the unknowable, indescribable supernatural.) So the question I have to ask, which I may or may not have asked before, is in the case of Jesus having reliable knowledge about a future miraculous event, how do you argue for that without begging the question and using the supernatural to explain and justify belief in the supernatural?
ps. I am looking forward to your thread on arriving at belief in the supernatural to begin with. That is somewhat related to the above, and I'm eager to hear what you have to say about it.