Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I'm open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
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Paraphrasing I believe — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
No nothing is “supernatural “. We may not yet know what we’re seeing or exactly what happened… we simply don’t understand it yet.
Yet is relevant point there IMHO. We will.
and not understanding how something functions isnt a reason to assign intent or awareness to the thing.
But there is also a possibility that what we don't understand transcends the laws of nature. That's what supernatural means. A possibility that our universe is also governed by supernatural forces, as much as it is governed by natural forces.
If something can "transcend" the laws of nature, then the ability to do that is part of the laws of nature, and thus it transcends nothing. We just didn't know all of the rules.
If ghosts are real, then they aren't breaking the rules of nature because clearly the rules of nature allow for ghosts, we just don't understand how yet, but then ghosts are natural.
By definition, anything real is natural, and anything supernatural is not.
That's just a weak reformulation of the "God of the gaps" fallacy.
The difference is that science is observable and testable, god is not. This key difference, changes it from being a fallacy.
So, in the god of the gaps fallacy it goes like this:
- GotG: Something unknown = GOD!
- Science: Something unknown = "We don't know!"
- GotG: Ghosts = GOD!!
- Science: Ghosts = "We need a way to reliably test and confirm!"
Science isn't anti-god either. It's just pro-knowledge. Observable, testable, verifiable knowledge.
Science isn’t anti-god either. It’s just pro-knowledge. Observable, testable, verifiable knowledge.
This part. If ghosts are observable, testable, and verifiable, then we would have a way of measuring things. Maybe ghosts are 4th dimensional entities. It's very possible they are real and it's purely something we haven't been able to measure thus far.
Science gets stuff wrong all the time. The point of science is to be adapting and learning. And part of that involves verifying credibility of a new source of information.
Unfortunately, almost all of the sources of "proof" of things like ghosts are heavily biased in favor of proving things over disproving, and there are a lot of people throwing clear scams into the mix. Science needs to go in with an open mind. "I want ghosts to be real, and the wind moved this door, therefore it was a ghost" is not valid proof of ghosts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohbNt18wNs Things like this. A pastor that can walk on air, which is clearly fake. If the pastor believed he could walk on air, why would he fake it. This is not proof that people CAN'T walk on air, but it's a great example of why when someone claims they can, you should figure out why lying about it benefits them (this guy clearly wants more people to tithe to his church).
GotG benefits from the default being "GOD!" for all things, because it leaves them in power. Science has no benefit from anything except the truth. Sure there will be liars in science as well and a lot of people will optimistically want to believe the lies if they sound nice, but looking at things like LK-99, it winds up disproven when it's a lie. Capitalism and industry don't care about your fake superconductor. That doesn't benefit them, they only care about real superconductors.
Saying that I’m making a god of the gaps argument would also mean that you are making a science of the gaps argument.
Except, when you fill the gaps with science, you have evidence and proof. Not superstition and ancient myth.
But you're still leading yourself into a fallacious argument. It's not any better.
It's only a fallacious argument if you don't say "we can't answer that yet" and maybe add, "but here are some theories..."
"I don't know" does not mean "therefore the supernatural is real."
My goal really is to convince people to sit on the fence about it.
Convince people that the supernatural is real? Because that is exactly what you're not doing with this line of argument.
But we still need the word "supernatural" to describe such things. Otherwise, what do we call the phenomena?
Fictional
Er um— no.
There is nothing that is “supernatural “
There is nothing that is proven and repeated not beholden to the laws of nature.
Yes it is possible, but there isn’t any proof of anything transcending nature. You’re making a “god of the gaps” argument. It is illogical to assume that god or anything supernatural keeps getting smaller and smaller so as to hide in those ever shrinking gaps.
But we need a name to describe such extraordinary events. If you erase it, what do we call such phenomena? There's a reason why the word exists. Also, saying that I'm making a god of the gaps argument would also mean that you are making a science of the gaps argument, where you assume that science will always have an answer, and that it is the only truth. It's why I believe that it's best to sit on the fence on this topic, your mind being open to ideas of supernatural phenomena, as you still consider rational scientific explanations.
This "then why do we have a word for that" is such a a strange argument
We also have a word for elves, doesn't mean they exist
It's the same logic I see people applying to Korean, with arguments like "they have no word for depression, therefore they're happier", completely ignoring the fact that they have a bridge called "suicide bridge" (guess why)
If you think the word supernatural is so unneeded, you can petition for it to be taken out of dictionaries and Wikipedia.
If by natural forces we mean things like gravity, electromagnetism, color (strong force), and flavor (weak force), then absolutely there are phenomena that transcend those.
Those things are logic, causality, time, identity, math, etc. Ontology or metaphysics would be the formal subject. A lot of people in philosophy already study this, and it's considered one of the main branches of philosophy alongside epistemology and ethics/morality.
I've been studying causality lately, and it's fascinating how one of the best theories of it is that we diagnose causal relations based on how regular/reproducible they appear (Regularity Theory of Causation or RTC).