Why Religious Proof Or Disproof Is Unimportant

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The claim, as I understand what you are saying, is that naturalistic explanations have a track record of kind of "demystifying" supernatural claims.

Correct.

Following the patter that naturalistic explanations have shown, if we wait long enough all things will be explained though this natural method.

No, that isn't what I said, and apos if I implied it. There may be things that we will never know, but that isn't a justification for a supernatural explanation. What I said was that theists need to find a phenomenon for which there is no possible naturalistic explanation. As long as naturalistic explanations remain a possibility, however remote, supernaturalism fails the 'reasonableness' test by default.

Suppose, for example, your car has stopped running. You check a dozen or so things on the car and announce, 'Well, since I can't find anything wrong, the only possible explanation is that someone has placed a curse on my car.' Since 1) you haven't eliminated naturalistic explanations for the trouble and 2) curses placed on cars are non-natural events you don't have a reasonableness of belief for your car being under a curse.

So the real question is, "Can we really know everything?" If there are some things that cannot be known for certain within the naturalistic method which you propose, then they MAY (notice: not 'must' only 'may') go on as being defined as supernatural.

Correct, but no one has ever proposed a phenomenon for which there is no possibility of a naturalistic explanation. Even the biggies, such as NDEs or the origin of the universe, have plausible if unproved naturalistic proposed mechanisms. My point (again) is that until naturalistic explanations are exhausted, it is not reasonable to believe that there are supernatural ones.

People seem fond of invoke supernatural explanation - particularly God - at nearly every turn. We've all seen athletes thank God for their victories (odd how they never seem to blame him for their defeats, though) when a much more natural, reasonable explanation is that they simply played or performed well enough to win. Or Aunt May makes a remarkable recovery from a disease and every starts throwing the word 'miracle' about, even though we know that some diseases do go into remission on their own.

You said that clearly we can't in response to my original question "Can we really know everything?" I'm curious on why you said that.

Carl Sagan's 'Broca's Brain' had a terrific chapter called 'Reflections On A Grain Of Salt'. He made the point that a salt crystal (1 microgram, I think) has more atoms than the number of connections in the human brain. Clearly then, we cannot know the position of every single atom in this speck of salt. However, we know beyond all possibility of reasonable doubt how sodium and chlorine atoms behave. The rules of valences and the nature of these atoms determine how they are arranged within the crystal. We may not know where they are, but we know where they have to be.

So without knowing everything, we can clearly know enough to get by.

Boru