Where is your god now?
I think that is a fair description. When I say that there is no evidence for the supernatural I mean verifiable, objective, and positive evidence. It is the same type of evidence we would look for in a murder case or for the cause of lightning.
Let’s turn things around a bit. Since you can’t produce any evidence for the supernatural, wouldn’t abductive reasoning conclude that every single phenomena has to be natural in origin?
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What does this even mean? Man is supposed to be taking care of this planet and is not. Upon this we agree.
Are you expecting me to say that God has to save us from our own actions? That there should not be consequences for what we do here?
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No I am not doing so. I am noting that the bullet holes neatly spell out the word “HELLO” and thinking that the connection between them is something more than just holes in paper.
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Where did you do that?
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Hahaha. In my mind. EDIT: Remember, using my definitions I said that there was “evidence” (wherein I mean “indications”) but that there was not “proof” (meaning that one could not conclusively show the fingerprint of God.)
This little rabbit trail is quickly heading off topic, so I will leave you with this fascinating ecological study:
True, it would have been better in one of the other threads.
That is a mighty large if.
Aren’t they? What would be the point of doing research without a plausible hypothesis?
I guess that’s the root of the disagreement. The point of irrationality? Is that what’s happening now? Are you sure?
I don’t think that’s quite right, at least in respect to the way I’ve laid out the discussion. A murder is an event which is inaccessible to direct empirical investigation because the event is past and cannot be directly observed nor is the actual event accessible in any way to experimentation. Homicide cases are completely dependent on inferences from “indirect evidence” according to how I have define it for the purposes of this discussion.
I’m not sure you’ve followed my reasoning completely. The point I’'m making is that I believe there is indirect evidence that can infer a supernatural cause. It’s when indirect evidence is excluded by the claim of “no evidence” that the statement would be correct. But this needs to be made clear and not just implied. Otherwise it’s not a correct statement since evidence in the broader sense includes indirect types of evidence.
I would say positing something from nothing is pretty irrational, at least as far as what can be known from empirically verified reality.
Events in the past can leave evidence that exists in the present. I would call this direct evidence. In fact, I would challenge you to point to any evidence that isn’t from the past. The mere fact that light travels at a certain speed means that all observations are from the past.
From what I have seen, that indirect evidence is simply the lack of evidence for a natural cause.
If you read my op you’ll see that I specifically defined how I was making the distinction between “direct,” and “indirect” evidence. Maybe before we go any further you should reread the op to understand what the actual argument I’m making is. Otherwise we may just end up needlessly going down rabbit trails. 
@Jim Yes, I’m sorry to both of you. It seemed to have stalled, so I jumped in. I should not have done so.
No problem. Staying on topic is not one of my strong points either. Perfectly understandable.
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Your claim was that God is tightly controlling which species appear on earth at which exact time in order to maintain a “healthy ecology”.
So now you are conceding that your initial argument was rubbish, because here we are, God’s extra special species, and we are royally messing up the ecology.
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Then let’s go through it. Here is the first definition:
So let’s look at the question of common ancestry. We can create a hypothesis concerning something like endogenous retroviruses. If two species share a common ancestor then they should share retroviral insertions at the same position in each of their genomes since retroviruses insert randomly into genomes. If they don’t share common ancestry then retroviral insertions should not be at the same position in each genome. That is our hypothesis. We can directly observe the result of retroviral invasion of genomes by finding those insertions in the genomes of living species. We find that they are at the same positions in each genome. At least to me, that is direct evidence for common ancestry.
This doesn’t make much sense to me since it would seem that direct evidence could also be used to support an inductive or abductive argument. Since both types of evidence can be used, what separates the two?
There is also a problem with your definition of supernatural:
I don’t see why natural processes could not exist outside of our observable universe. For example, in M brane theory there are membranes that spontaneously interact to spawn new universes. I wouldn’t consider this to be supernatural. For me, supernatural involves a deity of some kind.
Wrong. Allow me to demonstrate, with grade school level math:
0 = 1 - 4 + 3.
+1 and +3 are not “nothing” (zero). Yet they can come from nothing. In fact, an infinite number of not-nothings can come from nothing.
See how simple this is?
Hahaha. Well, not exactly. I hope that you can see how your impression of what gets said is not what is said, but rather just your impression of it.
I did not say that God was tightly controlling anything, especially that God tightly controls which species appear at which time in order to maintain a healthy ecology. What I was saying was that the fact that a robust ecology has appeared many instances throughout time is an indication that God was involved in the direction. I did not say to what degree, nor did I state that God maintains it. What I was suggesting is that it seems to me that a proper ecology (one that involves many species of plants and animals, from very simple to very complex) may have needed some help in terms of the timing. My reason for believing this is that I see it as quite unlikely that the kinds of flora and fauna would have evolved entirely on their own at just the right times such that these balanced ecologies would exist in the first place. I also said that I don’t believe that there is any tangible evidence for this.
No, I’m not conceding at all that my initial argument is rubbish. We are God’s special creation, we were told to tend the garden, and we have not done so.
Yeah. Easy to do with math. Try getting something from nothing with reality. Let me know when you succeed.
Done: