indiechick
New member
This is a repost, but I posted it in the middle of the night and wanted more feedback 
I was talking the other day to someone about what kind of proof one would need to believe in God and I suggested a few hypothetical "supernatural" events and we went back and forth and the convo basically ended without really coming up with anything that would be believable.
So I was thinking about it and it really does seem like kind of an impossible concept. I mean, if something exists in the world, it is by definition, natural. If we saw evidence of another dimension, that other dimension would be natural. If God exists, he is natural. And the way we deal with strange things we can't explain is just that: we consider them as part of the natural world that we just haven't ever seen before.
Take for example the platypus. Scientists had all their definitions in place of what animals fit in what category and then they go and find what looks like a Nazi experiment gone very wrong (or right? they were Nazis...). Instead of viewing it as supernatural, we added another category. We changed our definitions of the natural world to include this thing that defied them.
In 1986, about 2,000 people--almost the entire village--dropped dead without any obvious signs of injury or struggle. Some appeared to have burns, and the survivors reported smelling sulfur, but the only thing they actually saw was a fog descending quietly over the village; no heat, no explosion, nothing. It seems to defy what we know about the world, but instead of viewing it as a supernatural event, they theorized a new natural disaster called "lake overturn". The theory is that a huge pocket of carbon dioxide comes to the surface and sweeps across the land like a fog and people suffocate in it.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is the correct way for the scientific world to behave. We SHOULD include new findings and reshape our laws to include new info. But the other side of that is, if we WERE to see some sort of divine event, wouldn't we just readjust our laws to account for it? If we happened to find an invisible pink unicorn, wouldn't we just add unicorn to Equidae family and invisible pink to the color spectrum?
Is it even possible for something to have the quality of being supernatural? And if so, would we even view it as such? How can something be unexplainable by natural laws if when we find something unexplainable, we change the laws?
Someone else brought this to my attention, but I thought it was a very good point:
If someone were to propose a supernatural event that defies not only our current understanding of a physical law but the actual physical law (an exception to your argument), it would still be logically impossible as would be essentially saying that the physical laws are true and untrue simultaneously. That is a logical impossibility. Not just a natural impossibility but a logical impossibility which allows for no exceptions.
I was talking the other day to someone about what kind of proof one would need to believe in God and I suggested a few hypothetical "supernatural" events and we went back and forth and the convo basically ended without really coming up with anything that would be believable.
So I was thinking about it and it really does seem like kind of an impossible concept. I mean, if something exists in the world, it is by definition, natural. If we saw evidence of another dimension, that other dimension would be natural. If God exists, he is natural. And the way we deal with strange things we can't explain is just that: we consider them as part of the natural world that we just haven't ever seen before.
Take for example the platypus. Scientists had all their definitions in place of what animals fit in what category and then they go and find what looks like a Nazi experiment gone very wrong (or right? they were Nazis...). Instead of viewing it as supernatural, we added another category. We changed our definitions of the natural world to include this thing that defied them.
In 1986, about 2,000 people--almost the entire village--dropped dead without any obvious signs of injury or struggle. Some appeared to have burns, and the survivors reported smelling sulfur, but the only thing they actually saw was a fog descending quietly over the village; no heat, no explosion, nothing. It seems to defy what we know about the world, but instead of viewing it as a supernatural event, they theorized a new natural disaster called "lake overturn". The theory is that a huge pocket of carbon dioxide comes to the surface and sweeps across the land like a fog and people suffocate in it.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is the correct way for the scientific world to behave. We SHOULD include new findings and reshape our laws to include new info. But the other side of that is, if we WERE to see some sort of divine event, wouldn't we just readjust our laws to account for it? If we happened to find an invisible pink unicorn, wouldn't we just add unicorn to Equidae family and invisible pink to the color spectrum?
Is it even possible for something to have the quality of being supernatural? And if so, would we even view it as such? How can something be unexplainable by natural laws if when we find something unexplainable, we change the laws?
Someone else brought this to my attention, but I thought it was a very good point:
If someone were to propose a supernatural event that defies not only our current understanding of a physical law but the actual physical law (an exception to your argument), it would still be logically impossible as would be essentially saying that the physical laws are true and untrue simultaneously. That is a logical impossibility. Not just a natural impossibility but a logical impossibility which allows for no exceptions.