If it has been discarded in favour of a naturalistic alternative, refuted to all practical intents and purposes (i.e. rendered "irrelevant"), in what sense has it not failed as an explanation?
Worse - supernatural "explanations" fail automatically
because they don't actuially explain anything.
To continue your Thor example:
quote:
Question: what is the mechanism that causes lightning and thunder?
Hypothesis: Thor, God of Thunder, swings around his hammer.
That hypothesis doesn't
explain anything. You can't make a single useful prediction. You don;t understand anything more than you understood before positing the hypothesis.
Supernatural "explanations" are not actually explanations; they are curiosity-stoppers. They're passwords that emotionally satisfy our curiosity without actually increasing our understanding at all.
quote:
Question: how did life on Earth arise?
Hypothesis: God breathed life into all living things
Again, this hypothesis doesn't answer the question. How can you "breathe life" into something? What the hell is this "God" thing, and how did it come to be? You can't make any useful predictions, you can;t test it, and you
still don't have a clue how life began.
quote:
Question: How did the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat?
Hypothesis 1: Magic.
Hypothesis 2: The magician actually pulled the rabbit out of a rabbit cage hidden inside of the table in front of him, through an openeable flap in the top of the hat and a concealed hole in the table.
Hypothesis 1 might stop our curiosity...but only hypothesis 2 actually increases our understanding. It's longer, it's more complicated, but you can make actual predictions about reality. For instance, I could predict that the magician would be unable to do the rabbit trick if I removed his table and asked him to do it in mid-air. I could predict that, were I to examine the table closely, I would find the trap door through which the magician grabs the rabbit. With hypothesis 1...I can't predict anything.
All supernatural "explanations" are this way.
Every single one. They don't explain anything at all, and thus fail right from the start.