Has The Supernatural Hypothesis Failed?

CS you have finally taken the first steps to understanding why it is that we can confidently and rationally reject supernatural possibilities even if they are unfalsified. Well that has been your position in every thread up until now. Including your position on dancing fairies as the cause of gravitational effects in this very thread. So this is a radical departure from everything you have ever previously said to me. CS - Welcome to sanity. So you are now rejecting an unevidenced unfalsified supernatural possibility on the basis that it contravenes everything we know about the world and the way it works. CS - Welcome to sanity. Fuck me!!! You are now dismissing claims on the basis that they have no evidential basis and demanding positive evidence before deeming them worthy of consideration. CS - Welcome to sanity.Why didn't you apply this same thinking to your gravity fairies earlier in this thread? And indeed all of the other wholly unevidenced entities we have ever discussed? You could have saved us both a lot of frustration and effort. Double fuck me!!! Now you are dismissing unevidenced unfalsified supernatural possibilities as being nothing more than products of the human mind. CS - Welcome to sanity. I knew your complete conversion was too good to be true........All of the evidence indicates that rather than supernatural entities somehow overriding natural laws to reveal themselves to people these experiences, like everything else the supernatural has ever been posited as a cause for, are due to wholly naturalistic mechanisms.If you apply all of the same thinking that you have done to the supernatural suspension of gravity scenario above you will see that all of the same arguments apply to supernatural entities causing religious experiences. Yes it is. And the evidenced conclusion is that supernatural entities are almost certainly human inventions. Who ever claimed to have calculated any probabilities? And yes the "deeply improbable" conclusion is very much is based on the evidence.You agree with me that we can be rationally and evidentially confident that gravity will not be supernaturally suspended this time next month. But in the absence of certainty (which we have both agreed previously is philosophically impossible) how else can this confidence be expressed other than by saying that the posited scenario is "deeply improbable"?How would you express this? And in doing so you used practically all of the arguments against unevidenced unfalsified supernatural claims that I have put to you on numerous occasions previously.I'm proud of you

You are conflating individual examples of god concepts with attempts to define what the term god means. OK. That is an example of an ambiguous god concept. The Greeks believed in a wide range of gods. Each of which was responsible for a different aspect of nature of reality. However no single one of the Greek god concepts is an attempt to define the word god. Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite are examples of gods. Not competing definitions of the term god. You are conflating definitions with examples. The concept of the Sun god Apollo is not a definition of the word god. Nor is Thor and his thunder inducing hammer. Or Zeus or Odin. Nor is the ambiguous deistic god concept. They are examples of gods not definitions of the term god. If you want a definition rather than an example look up the term god in a dictionary. What does it say?I suspect the definitions you find will consistently state that the term god means a supernatural conscious being that is responsible for some aspect of reality. Something like the following dictionary definition: 1. (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) a supernatural being, who is worshipped as the controller of some part of the universe or some aspect of life in the world or is the personification of some force Related adj divineA god can take pretty much any form you want whilst adhering to the definition of what a god is. Just like a superhero can. Me. You. A bog standard wooden pencil unimbued with any supernatural properties. A mindless wholly materially explicable piece of cheese. I could go on. Almost indefinitely. What specific requirement? Is it any more specific than the criteria defined for being a god? I don’t think it is. Citing different examples of gods and then conflating these with definitions doesn’t make the term god meaningless.The word spagglebooboo is meaningless. But the term god you can lookup in a dictionary and get as much of an idea of what it means as you can the word superhero.

So, by listening to the claim you can tell whether or not it is 'supernatural'? What in the claim will tell you it is 'supernatural' merely by listening? So, you also test the claim against 'real world evidence'? What relationship to 'real world evidence' does a supernatural claim have?Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

That was funny, well done. You failed, but you get an A for effort, even though the effort was all put into quote mining and spinning.

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Of course we can have confidence that the pen will drop, and mass bending spacetime is the best explanation we have for that, and we can have confidence in that explanation. But this is not saying that, to be ridiculous, there are not undetecable angels dancing on the pen to make it drop. And it doesn't matter how many times you reproduce your result, that fits within your prediction, you are still not providing evidence that the angels are not there. But if your explanation works, then fuck the angels... nobody cares.

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We can have confidence that they aren't there, and our predictions will be met, all the while not having anything to say about whether or not those angels actually exist.

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Gravity has been the exact same for my entire life and I think its going to continue to be that way. Not technically a rational position, but oh well.

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Not quite. I'm not dismissing it because of its lack of evidential basis, I'm dismissing them because it didn't follow any observation whatsoever, regardless of what king of evidence leads to whatever observation. Um, no. I'm not dismissing any possibilities, I'm talking about this one specific instance. No, it doesn't. There's plenty of unexplained phenomenon. Typically, if a naturalistic explanation can be imagined, then it is assemed over any supernatural one even though there hasn't been any conclusion either way. That's part of the reason the conclusion doesn't follow, and can only be reached illogically. No, that conclusion doesn't logically follow from the actual evidence we have. What evidence? That natural explanations are assumed in unexplained cases even though we don't really know? Did I? "Pfft I doubt it."But I'd be willing to admit that it wasn't some conclusion I arrived at logically from the available evidence. Apparently you can only see things one way and no matter what I type, you're gonna see yourself being right.

That's somewhat of a non-answer. Are you saying, though, that claims are supernatural if those proposing the claims tag them as such?Pardon me, but I'm still having trouble getting at the specifics of your criteria.Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

Sanity is back out of the window I see. So you think it is irrational, illogical and evidentially unjustified to be confident that gravity will not be supernaturally suspended next month.Are you serious? You don't think confidence in the continuation of gravitational effects as per consistent natural laws and the absence of overriding supernatural interference is a logical conclusion made on the available evidence?CS in your view is there any scientific conclusion or prediction that we can logically and rationally have confidence in? It honestly never occurred to me you would actually take the position of declaring confidence in gravitational effects remaining in place next month as being irrational and illogical.I am stunned.

I am saying that those who invoke causal agents for observable phenomenon and then define these causal agents as being themselves materially inexplicable due to being neither derived from nor subject to natural laws are invoking causes which are supernatural.The supernatural hypothesis as discussed in the OP is essentially the claim that something inherently materially inexplicable (e.g. but not limited to - God) is responsible for some aspect of nature. Whether it be the rising of the Sun, the formation of life, the creation of the universe, the cause of human theistic beliefs or whatever else a supernatural cause is claimed for. Whether such claims are correct or not is very much within the scope of science. In fact overturning such claims has constituted much of the history of science.Given the fact that humanity has a long history of wrongly claiming supernatural answers to seemingly puzzling natural phenomenon is it now ever rationally justifiable to cite the supernatural as the answer to anything? That is essentially the question posed in the OP — Has The Supernatural Hypothesis Failed?

Not my position. Yeah, the ones that don't make predictions about supernatural activity in the future... so what's that? All of them? I don't think that you can make a logical inference about what supernatural things will happen in the future.

So you are genuinely agnostic about the possibility of gravity being supernaturally suspended next week but highly confident that gravity will continue as per natural law next week as well.Does the term "mutually exclusive" mean nothing to you? CS can you give me straight answer on this please - Rationally speaking how confident do you think we can we be that gravity will continue absent from any overriding supernatural interference next week?

Those are two very distinct questions. How do you justify failing something without first testing it? How do you test something that is inherently untestable? One may say a supernatural explanation is irrelevant, but to say it has failed is preposterous. How does something with no relation or connection to the material and natural world effect actions in that world? Just because someone tags their proposed 'causal agent' as 'materially inexplicable due to being neither derived from nor subject to natural laws' does not make it so. Perhaps looking at the claim itself when determining its 'supernatural'/'natural' status would be more productive than looking at what other people say about the claim. Why trust them? Hypotheses, by definition, are materially testable claims. As noted above, supernatural explanations are not materially testable. The notion that one can have a 'supernatural hypothesis' is oxymoronic. To suppose a supernatural explanation can exist for natural phenomena is equally as ridiculous.So now that we're clear again on your use of 'supernatural', can you explain how you reconcile your contradictory applications of the term?Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

<------This. /of thread.

LOL. Confidence in something is completely unrelated to the amount of knowledge held on that something. Case in point: Biblical Literalists - they know nothing about what the Bible says yet are 100% confident that what it says is true. As human beings surviving in complex societies we must often put high degrees of confidence into things about which we know very little.If you claim to KNOW gravity will continue existing, you are a liar. If you claim no CONFIDENCE that it will, you are stupid.An honest, intelligent person will admit they cannot know the status of future events, but will also be confident that the fundamental workings of the natural world will continue to operate as they have for billions of years.Why do you think knowledge and confidence are necessarily related?Jon

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

Huh?Edited by Jon, : Spacing... out

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"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer

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"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar

The whole point in a nut shell Jon. At least the nutshell I agree with.

Supernatural Hypothesis: If you sacrifice a goat to Mubu, it improves your chances of your crops growing without disease as Mubu will use magic powers to hold back evil spirits.Test: compare crops grown with the sacrifice to crops grown without.If the result is that crop disease distribution is basically the same over a large number of trials then the hypothesis is a failure by any reasonable standard.Hypothesis 2: If you sacrifice a goat to Mubu, it improves your chances of your crops growing without disease as Mubu will use magic powers to hold back evil spirits...as long as you don't check to see if Mubu is working.Problem: How can anybody have rational confidence that this is true if it cannot be checked for truth? Many are testable, have been tested, and have failed.The ones that have not failed have done so by being untestable. Since they are untestable, there is no way anyone can have confidence in them.When 'immaterial causal agent' can be tested, it fails.
When it can't be tested, its useless since we can't hold any confidence in it.How is this not the very definition of a failed hypothesis? Either it consistently fails or gives us nothing.