Tell me why supernatural explanations of phenomena should be considered.

Gary writes:This response puzzled me and to this day I don't understand why any reasonable person would accept a supernatural explanation for anything when an explanation based on evidence and logic exists.

I'm inclined to think, that supernatural events are all in the heads of the people experiencing them, the product of imagination, and in some cases, mental disorders.

The same could be said about why anyone would accept that a logical/evidential reasoning for an event is the 'right' one. Logic and evidence don't sit in a vacuum. They are moored to a foundation. And that foundation is something we don't really know very much about. From where the laws of nature that produces an apparently ordered universe?

If that mooring was supernatural then all that derives from it is supernaturally enabled.

The fundamental flaw of evangelical theology is in the way that it ties itself to the supernatural.

The same could be said about why anyone would accept that a logical/evidential reasoning for an event is the 'right' one. Logic and evidence don't sit in a vacuum. They are moored to a foundation. And that foundation is something we don't really know very much about. From where the laws of nature that produces an apparently ordered universe? From where logic and reason which allows us to deduce order? Mystery.

nwr writes:No, that's wrong. We know exactly where they come from. They come from trial and error experimentation, followed by thorough testing.........when it all boils down it is the procedures that make it work, not the stories.

Every new scientific discovery slices of a portion of the supernatural and adds it to the natural. The supernatural is left as a grab bag of what is currently not understood and what is known to not work.

If evangelical theology wants to survive, then it must allow its domain to extend into the natural.

RobinRohan writes:What I get from this is that you're saying that Reason itself is supernatural. Is this what you're saying?

C. S. Lewis argues that there's no way you can get from stimulus/response to ground/consequent without a supernatural leap.

Not familiar with it but I like reading Clive. Where is this

There is . . . no question of a total skepticism about human thought. We are always prevented from accepting total skepticism because it can be formulated only by making a tacit exception in favour of the thought we are thinking at the moment just as the man who warns the newcomer 'Don't trust anyone in this office' always expects you to trust him at that moment. Whatever happens, then, the most we can ever do is to decide that certain types of thought are 'merely human' or subjective, and others not. However small the class, some class of thoughts must be regarded not as mere facts about the way human brains work, but as true insights, as the reflection of reality in human consciousness.
One popular distinction is between what is called scientific thought and other kinds of thought. It is widely believed that scientific thought does put us in touch with reality, whereas moral or metaphysical thought does not. On this view, when we say that the universe is a space-time continuum we are saying something about reality, whereas if we say that the universe is futile, or that men ought to have a living wage, we are only describing our own subjective feelings. . .But the distinction thus made between scientific and non-scientific thought will not easily bear the weight we are attempting to put on it. The cycle of scientific thought is from experiment to hypothesis and thence to verification and a new hypothesis. Experiment means sense-experiences specially arranged. Verification involves inference. 'If X existed, then, under conditions Y, we should have the experience Z.' We then produce the conditons Y, and Z appears. We thence infer the existence of X. Now it is clear that the only part of this process which assures us of any reality outside ourselves is precisely the inference 'If X, then Z . . .The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels 'science' to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken . . .The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought. I mean, the proper distinction for our present purpose: that purpose being to find whether there is any class of thought which has objective value, which is not merely a fact about how the human cortex behaves. . .Now let me go back a bit. We began by asking whether our feeling of futility could be set aside as a merely subjective and irrelevant result which the universe has produced in human brains. I postponed answering that question until we had attempted a larger one. I asked whether in general human thought could be set aside as irrelevant to the real universe and merely subjective. I now claim to have found the answer to this larger question. The answer is that at least one kind of thought--logical thought--cannot be subjective and irrelevant to the real universe: for unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe. We reach our knowledge of the universe only by inference. . . .A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us that inference is invalid. That would really be a bit too nonsensical. I conclude then that logic is a real insight into the way in which real things have to exist. In other words, the laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.This admission seems to me completely unavoidable and it has very momentous consequences.In the first place it rules out any materialist account of thinking. We are compelled to admit between the thought of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer's brain, considered as a lump of matter. . .To talk of one bit of matter being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense. ..When logic says a thing must be so, Nature always agrees. No one can suppose that this can be due to a happy coincidence. A great many people think that it is due to the fact that Nature produced the mind. But on the assumption that Nature is herself mindless this provides no explanation. To be the result of a series of mindless events is one thing; to be a kind of plan or true account of the laws according to which those mindless events happened is quite another. Thus the Gulf Stream produces all sorts of results: for instance, the temperature of the Irish sea. What it does not produce is maps of the Gulf stream. But if logic, as we find it operative in our own minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then it is a result as improbable as that.

I tell you, your one hell of a Christian for a bloke who isn't a Christian. You in the closet or summit??