SanDiegoAtheist

Tercel -

The problem with that sort of reasoning is that ANYTHING which is unknown can be taken as a 'miraculous supernatural occurence'.

This is, of course, the crux of the problem when dealing with supernatural claims. How does one determine if in fact, a supernatural event has ACTUALLY occurred?

The answer? One CAN'T determine that a supernatural event has occurred - one can only determine that a supernatural event has NOT occurred - and that can only come from examining naturalistic possibilities that we can in fact test in the natural world.

This is the point behind Mal's wonderful synopsis "Supernaturalism cannot, by its nature, be a "missing piece"; it is merely the observation that a piece is missing."

The only thing that an event which has no known explanation can show is that there is no known explanation for it. Any so called "supernatural event" must be a priori ASSUMED to have happened - because without knowledge of how an event happened, the only logical conclusion is that "We don't know" - e.g. a "piece is missing".

This should be OBVIOUS to anyone who has studied the history of science. For an example, only a few centuries ago, a supernova was ALWAYS taken as a divine sign. Why? Because supernovas are rare, and behave very differently from normal stars. No KNOWN agency could cause a star to suddenly flare brightly, then dim beyond the ability to view it. Ergo, goddidit. Yet today, we have sufficient knowledge about stellar life cycles that supernovas are perfectly explainable WITHOUT needing divine intervention.

Without claiming perfect, omniscient, knowledge, YOU cannot make a claim that a supernatural event has happened - because to do so, you would have to be able to show, either the supernatural agency behind the event, or that no natural agency could have caused that event. You can only make the claim that "we don't know how this event happened."

That, of course, is the problem with the God of the Gaps, since the amount of things that we can make the claim that "we don't know how this event happened" shrink daily. While it's certain in my mind that there WILL always be a gap somewhere in human knowledge, it's a poor argument, because you constantly have to move God from one gap into another, smaller gap, as God is displaced from his previous niche by the advancement of human knowledge.

Cheers,

The San Diego Atheist

Tercel

Of course. Some amount of common sense and rational thinking is always required in such situations.

As with all things in life, absolute complete and utter surity is clearly impossible. However we can still evaluate the "most likely" explanation of an event. We may feel that it's "quite likely" an event was supernaturally caused or that it's "beyond reasonable doubt" etc.

No. It is IMPOSSIBLE to determine a supernatural event has NOT occurred. Even if you can provide a naturalistic explanation for an event it doesn't actually PROVE that the event WASN'T supernatural.

Apart from restating the assertion that "One CAN'T determine that a supernatural event has occurred" are you going to present ANY evidence for it?

Not necessarily. The interpretation of any event depends on its context

Which demonstrates a major danger of playing God-of-the-Gaps with anything we don't yet understand. If you are trying to imply that this undermines the case for supernatural claims in general, then it would seem to me to only demonstrate a misunderstanding of how a supernatural event could be identified.

A useful rule is that we should not infer a supernatural event from what we don't know but only from what we do know.
Only if an event is in contradiction to a well-known and well-understood area of natural law should we even consider pulling in the supernatural explanations.

Examples:
The people in your above example knew stuff all about stars except that they weren't often observed to explode. Thus their falling back on a miraculous explanation for their observations is simply God-of-the-gaps.
We know that people dying on a cross absolutely dodn't naturally rise to life and walk through locked doors. Hence the use of a supernatural explanation is not God-of-the-gaps.
We are sufficiently knowledgeable of medicene etc that we know broken bones absolutely don't spontaneously heal themselves naturally and neither does brain tissue spontaneously regenerate naturally. Hence a supernatural explanation is not God-of-the-gaps.

We should conclude supernaturalism only from what we do know, not what we don't.

I cannot be absolutely 100% sure of the cause of any event. However I can be sure a given event is supernatural to whatever degree I can rule out naturalistic explanations and to whatever degree that the context implies a supernatural explanation.

No. If our knowledge of the natural world assures us that the event could not have been a natural one then we can conclude such.

Good. Lets get rid of God of the Gaps completely! As we progress in our understanding of the natural laws then we'll be able to identify more and more miracles when they happen based on what we do know. Hopefully then people won't confuse Gods of the Gaps with appropriate supernatural explanations.

Tercel

Kent Stevens

Thinking that there are supernatural agents would undermine your confidence in natural laws and explanations in general. How do we know that mass and energy/mass is conserved or it is God just having a joke with us. God just makes energy/mass be conserved for the last five hundred years on the planet earth. At all other times and everywhere else in the universe energy is actually increasing over time. Newton's Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and evolution could also be something that God deceived us into believing were true over immense periods of time. So the existence of God just undermines our ability to explain things generally in times and places that we can not directly access ourselves.

What is miraculous may vary on which theist you ask. Something like creation in general would have been thought to have been miraculous. But now many of our gaps in understanding about the universe's formation has been filled through natural explanation. The creation of humans and the earth would have thought have been miraculous but these events are now thought to be explainable by natural laws. The theists fighting for the existence of the supernatural keep on ceding grounds to natural explanations. Theists started out saying that all creation was attributible to God, but they now only have a small part of creation that they say is attributable to God.

Something like the miracles performed by Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad if believed, would start presenting evidence for God. But anything that says we are ignorant about this, therefore Zeus must exist to explain this situation, is wrong argument. To prove that Zeus existed you would need to have clear evidence that Zeus presented himself to people through the ages. Something that is vague like sea breezes is not proof of the existence of Zeus.

HRG

I'm saying exactly the opposite: a god of type A is equivalent as an explanation to a god of type B. Of course they have completely different argumentative value for a particular faith.
And as I've pointed out, this pragmatic approach does not fit into the acceptance of supernatural explanations. It amounts to the desire of having one's cake and eating it, too.

How can a supernaturalist ever decide between a vision and an observation of an actual event, without referring to a pre-conceived faith ?

Not so: my perceptions don't.
This is not a question of having pre-conceived notions about reality. It is simply a realization how much the reliability of our perceptions depend on naturalism.

When I see something rising from the dead, at least one of the following hypotheses must be wrong:

1) Dead people stay dead.
2) Photons travel in straight lines and are not generated in midair.
3) Rods and cones react only when struck by photons.
4) The optic nerve propagates impulses only when excitated by retina cells
5) No supernatural power influences my brain in some other way.
6) I haven't taken a drug which produces hallucinations
7) I am not the victim of a mental disease
8) This is not a trick of David Copperfield's
....

Even if I think that I have successfully excluded naturalistic explanations like 6) to 8), is there any non-arbitrary reason why I should pick specifically 1) as false ?

BTW, if I have a perception which seems to be inconsistent with the regularities of nature, I might reconsider - after consulting a psychiatrist, of course. Right now we are dealing with reports of other people's alleged perceptions.
Tercel,

it's not that my perceptions disagree with naturalism. Apologists make a claim that a report of someone else's perceptions 2000 years ago disagrees with naturalism, and suggest one specific supernatural explanation.

In order to infer this specific explanation, they exclude not only plain "measurement error" (which would be my explanation), but also supernatural intervention which do not fit into their pre-conceived mindset.

Regards,
HRG.

[ April 04, 2002: Message edited by: HRG ]

[ April 04, 2002: Message edited by: HRG ]</p>

Tercel

Actually, that's not the case. I am a very firm believer in the existence of natural laws and the ability of science to uncover those natural laws.
I can but echo Kenny's statement: I feel that my belief and confidence in these natural laws finds its justification in and is most at home in my theistic worldview. I see no reason to believe in such things if the Ultimate is nothing more than blind chance and brute necessity.

I do not believe my God would trick us.
Even more, I am of the opinion that major tricks by a deity can/must be a priori disbelieved for pragmatic reasons.

Hence for this reason we probably should not commit ourselves to the belief in a god who plays tricks. However, if we believe in a God who acts consistently and intelligently (eg the Christian God) then not only does your objection here not apply, but it provides a positive reason for believing that such "natural laws" apply consistently.

Tercel

All right, I can agree with that.

That is debatable. Agreed, you could explain it by suggesting that the Christian God turned the water into wine, or that some other God did it in an effort to trick us into thinking the Christian God did it.
Of course, either would serve to disprove naturalism/atheism. I'd be happy with that for starters...
Clearly you can't absolutely prove it was the Christian God and not some trickster deity. (Unless of course you define the Christian God as "the deity who did it")
This is where faith (aka trust) comes in somewhat.
Well, faith along with a few pragmatic considerations as well: Commiting ourselves to a belief in the existence of a trickster deity isn't very helpful as it only serves to undermine our entire grasp of reality since any thought, memory or experience could thus be non-factual and only a result of the deity tricking us. Hence, I believe that pragmatically we can ignore the trickster deity option and go for belief in whatever deity is implied by the context of the miracle.

Could you expand on this?

But they don't, which is the whole point. I believe that my perceptions are reliable. This belief finds support in my supernaturalism because I believe that my perceptions were designed by an intelligent an trustworthy being and are hence reliable.
My theism implies reliable perceptions it implies reliable thought it implies natural laws it implies consistency in the universe it implies the sucessfullness of science. Telling me I need to assume naturalism to get these things is simply a bad joke: It's my very acceptence of supernaturalism which has me believing these things.

I'm not sure I see why it matters. It's still a miracle if God created photons in midair as opposed to actually raising the dead person to life. Either way it disproves your naturalism.
But to answer your question: yes. I think there some compelling pragmatic reasons (I gave an example of one above) for accepting that what we are seeing accurately models reality. Hence upon ruling out 6 and 8, 1 is to be preferred as an explanation over any of the others (lacking other evidence of course).

If however there exists evidence to suggest that it may really have been one of the others that happened then by all means we can accept that. As you pointed out:
"BTW, if I have a perception which seems to be inconsistent with the regularities of nature, I might reconsider - after consulting a psychiatrist, of course."

I do not personally think the argument from the resurrection is strong enough by itself to warrent belief in Christianity. Forturnately there is plenty of other evidence around. So much so that I don't normally even bother arguing the historicity of the Resurrection. (I've discussed it only twice in the past year that I can remember and one of those times only becuase it was Easter)

"measurement error" is rather a euphemism isn't it? You're not really suggesting they read 9.6cm off a ruler when they really should have read 9.7cm. Rather you're effectively saying that since the reported reality does not fit your notions of how reality works you're simply going to discard the report.
Can anyone say "naturalistic presuppostionalism"?

Tercel

Kent Stevens

Miracles are said to occur when natural laws are subverted. The resurrection is supposed to be a miracle as it could not be due to natural biological patterns that people rise from the dead. If God raises Jesus from the dead, why not have other people being raised from the dead. There goes your confidence in people who are dead staying dead on this earth. If the resurrection is just for a spiritual body being resurrected and not a physical body being resurrected, there is nothing unique about this from a theological viewpoint.

For each miracle that God performs your confidence in a regular universe goes down for you see a violation of a natural law, a natural regularity. Each miracle shows that God does not have natural laws applying consistently. If God still performs miracles in the future we may not know which physical regularity that God wants to flout next.

Unintentially, God is a trickster. For someone might grow up and they might think that dead bodies never come back to life after a day or two. But then someone believes that God resurrects Jesus. So God mislead us into thinking that resurrection was impossible. He might also have mislead us into thinking that people can not walk on water. For his next miracle God might have mislead us into thinking that pigs do not fly until we see a pig flying as proof of God's existence. God could make day into night to demonstrate his existence. He could make black become white to demonstrate his existence.

You could be a Deist and not believe that God performs miracles and so the violations of natural laws goes away. But since most theists believe in miracles they must believe that God does act inconsistently with natural laws at least for some of the time.

HRG

And you believe this exactly because of .... ?
Your theism implies laws, consistencies etc. only because you have accepted as an axiom that you have been designed etc. by a trustworthy being (except when said trustworthy being decides to relax them, to make a point ...). Fine for you; but why should others accept that convenient postulate - especially when it restricts the supernatural interventions to those which fit into a pre-conceived mindset?

I observe those laws, consistencies, as well as they can be observed. It is obvious that all observations (especially those which rely on alleged and unobtainable "witnesses") may suffer from errors; that's why there are sophisticated statistical methods to deal with them.

That's the way you treat sightings of Elvis, don't you ?
Into "measurement error" I include all kinds of errors in the chain from the purported event to our reading of the reports: perceptual mistakes, hallucinations, misunderstandings or exagerrations in telling the story (fama crescit eundo...), pious lies etc. etc.

Regards,
HRG.

Answerer

Well Tercel, according to physicists, God play dice so isn't it true that God is having a joke with us?

Theli

This is a good point. That's why you should assume an unobservable deity to be non-existing by default, until proven existing.
If you open your mind to accept explaination such as "Your god doesn't exist, my god just made you believe that he existed" you also reach a logic dead end where you really doesn't know anything.
That's why I find the idea to claim that a specific omnipotent god exists logicaly false, since an omnipotent god can supposedly change reality after it's own will. To specify that god's attributes is nearly impossible.

I don't see how. There is another ugly fish in the sea - Extra Terrestial Intelligence.
If we were confronted by superior an ETI it could be mistaken to be god. And the technology it possess would probably be mistaken as "magic" or "supernatural" since it defies all natural laws known to man.
There has been a thread about this before.

I find the task to accept god as existing to be virtually impossible. Since by doing so you also open the door to a bilion other explainations, equally possible.
Assuming supernaturalism as being a valid explaination makes it impossible to specify the source. I think that's why christian miracles only happens to christians, and muslim miracles only happens to muslims.

I don't really see how you can trust god (if he existed). Basicly, since I haven't seen any sign of his goodness. "Good" people dies just as ofter, and just as horribly as "evil" people does if the cause is other than humans.
Weither this means that god can't help them, or doesn't wan't to is irrelavent. It all comes down to that he doesn't protect anyone.
And if you examine the source of the trust.
1. If god speaks to you, how do you know wich god it is? Remember the trickster god.
2. If god doesn't speak to you, then it's not really god you put your trust in.

Why should you ignore it?
It's probability is atleast as high as for the truthful deity.

This doesn't really hold as an argument. If we just assume for a minute that the christian god exists and is the only god, that god can trick you just as any other omnipotent creature would.

Even worse, when your story reaches a second person another possibility rises. You are lying. This I must say is the most probable of them all.