Has The Supernatural Hypothesis Failed?

How likely do you think it is that human imagination will chance upon some aspect of an immaterial reality that we have no reason to think exists?Would you agree that this is equivalent to simply guessing?

Given that this has been my consistent position regarding any completetely unevidenced supernatural claim throughout this thread and many others it has everything to do with it. So what?If something is as yet unfalsified why does it's future potential falsification (or otherwise) affect how likely you think it is to be correct?

Sure. But what humans think is supernatural in the sense of being materially detectable changes as knowledge progresses.What was once "unknowable" and materially unable to be investigated, what was once attributed to the supernatural, is now not. That is kinda the point. Have you read the OP at all? At the time of writing the proposition that gravity will be supernaturally suspended in a weeks time is just as unfalsified and just as "unknowable" as any other supernatural claim.Of course I have made the rather radical step of making my claim obvioulsy testable where most supernaturalists seek to do quite the opposite.This is because I want to know just how agnostic they really are about unevidenced unfalsified claims.

The minus connotations of being desperately unreliable and subject to desire and confirmation bias you mean? The negative connotation of being almost certainly wrong?Those negative connotations?

Entirely imperceptible entities which have no observable effect on material reality must necessarily be products of human imagination even if by some absolute miracle of coincidence they do actually exist.You seem to agree with this so I am not sure what your point is. I have repeatedly said what I mean by supernatural throughout this thread. That which is neither derived from nor subject to natural laws and which is thus materially inexplicable. Then you are wrong. Well when you do so bear in mind the following:1) We are talking about supernatural causes. Thor is a supernatural being by the terms of the definition above. The fact that we have found a naturalistic explanation for thunder etc. effectively refutes this supernatural cause. But that doesn't make Thor not a supernatural concept now does it?You seem to be conflating materially inexplicable causes (e.g. Thor) with phenomenon which have turned out to be materially explicable (e.g. thunder).2) At the time of writing the following proposition is as unevidenced and unfalsified as any other supernatural claim. Gravity will be supernaturally suspended this time next month.This is a supernatural claim because the causal agent is supernatural and "unknowable". We cannot investigate this claim materially prior to the event itself. It will either happen or it won't. The fact that the phenomenon itself is ultimately testable does not stop this being a supernatural claim as you seem to be suggesting.In fact the only evidential difference between this and any other supernatural claim is that I have taken the radical step of making my supernatural claim testable.Anyway - I say this proposition, like all other wholly unevidenced supernatural propositions, is deeply deeply improbable.What do you say?

But this proposition hasn’t been falsified has it? Which makes your confidence in this conclusion completely at odds with absolutely everything you have ever argued about being necessarily and rationally agnostic towards unfalsified possibilities. I can quote you extensively on this if you want me to? Then it is a good job that nobody but you is making that rather stupid argument. Is that really the basis upon which you have discarded the possibility of gravity being supernaturally suspended in the near future?Or do you think the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that this whole proposition is far more likely to be a fantasy scenario concocted by the human mind than anything with any actual basis in reality?If you are dismissing this unevidenced unfalsified supernatural possibility as deeply improbable — Then on what basis are you making this conclusion? Be very very specific. The only evidential difference between the supernatural proposition that I have put forward (i.e. that gravity will be supernaturally suspended this time next week) and any specific supernatural claim made by anybody else is that mine is ultimately testable.That is the only difference. So until it is tested why do you make any distinction between this particular unevidenced unfalsified supernatural claim and any other in terms of reliability or accuracy?I suspect you cannot answer this question without some serious special pleading.

The same way that I can tell that Jesus was born of a virgin and is the son of God.The concepts are defined by those who propose them.I think all such concepts are nothing more than products of the human mind. But those who think otherwise insist that they are supernatural in the way I have defined.

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.

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?

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?

You don't think Thor banging his hammer around has failed as an explanation for thunder? Are you perhaps conflating failure with disproof? Nobody is claiming to have disproved anything. But failed - Yes. 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? Yes how did Yahweh induce the immaculate conception of Jesus? How does a non-empirical deity create the material physical universe? How do empirically imperceptible entities reveal themselves to people?If the supernatural concept under consideration is immaterial and wholly empirically undetectable, how can it have originated as a human concept from anywhere other than the internal workings of the human mind?I completely agree with you.But I suggest you ask your question of supernaturalists who make such claims rather than I who does not. A hypothesis is "a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon." A scientific hypothesis is necessarily materially testable. I would agree with you that hypotheses advocating materially undetectable causal agents are not scientific if that is what you mean.This however does not mean that such explanations cannot be effectively refuted by evidenced naturalistic alternatives. As per Thor and his hammer Vs static electricity as the underlying cause of thunder. And yet supernaturalists continually cite supernatural causes for physically observable phenomenon. And yet supernaturalists continually cite supernatural causes for physically observable phenomenon. Observable phenomenon such as the human proclivity to believe in the existence of the supernatural.I suggest you take up your objections with them rather than me. My contradictory application?BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!You must have me confused with someone making supernatural claims.

Don't be silly. The amount of confidence we can rationally have in a conclusion is directly related to how much we know in the form of how much evidence we have.Making conclusions in the absence of any knowledge is called "guessing". Making conclusions on the basis of evidence and an epystemology that is known to be able to demonstrate itself as reliable is NOT the same as guessing. Is it? Ah I see you are conflating emotional and irrational confidence with the sort of confidence that can be derived from demonstrably reliable methods of knowing.More fool you. I have stated that I think the rational, logical, evidentially and philosophically valid conclusion is that it is deeply deeply improbable that gravity will be supernaturally suspended next week.Which part of that do you actually disagree with? I have stated that I think the rational, logical, evidentially and philosophically valid conclusion is that it is deeply deeply improbable that gravity will be supernaturally suspended next week.Which part of that do you actually disagree with? I know what my sons name is. I would bet everything I own on this name being on his birth certificate.What name do you think my son has? And how much will you bet (i.e. how confident are you) that your conclusion matches his birth certificate?Come now Jon - If knowledge and confidence are unrelated you should be just as confident as I am in your ability to conclude what name is on that birth certificate. So guess away.

All sorts of hypotheses "fail" when they are superceded by mutually exclusive evidenced alternatives.I have never claimed that anything in science has either been proven or disproven. In fact I would strongly argue that "proof" in the absolute sense is beyond the realms of evidence based enquiry full stop.But refutation to all practical intents and purposes, to a point beyond which any tentativity is essentially philosophical - Yes.As per my conversation with CS. Where he insists that we must be genuinely agnostic to all supernatural claims. Whilst I point out to him that by being all but certain that gravity will NOT be supernaturally suspended next week he is violating all of his own stipulations regarding the unknowability of supernature. So you keep claiming.BTW - You do realise that I personally have never stipulated that a supernatural concept is by definition imperceptible - Yes?You took great pains to ask what I meant by "supernatural" and then seem to have largely ignored my answer.