Thank you. I take it then that you don’t disagree with my statement that we don’t have a single verified supernatural event in all of history.
This being so, I am struggling to find an operational difference between ‘supernatural’ and ‘fantasy’. In what way would they be distinguishable?
Well most of us Christians believe the Ressurection is supernatural and verified.
Please stop assuming that I agree or disagree with meaningless statements. As I said, there is no universally agreed upon standard of verification or definition of supernatural, so the question is moot.
In that case it might be better if we stop talking about the ‘supernatural’ altogether.
It would be more fruitful in the future to discuss first about what an agreeable definition of supernatural would be before jumping ahead to the question of whether there is “verified evidence” for them.
Well, the OP offered this definition:
Supernatural: of or relating to an order of existence outside of ordinary experience that transcends physical reality.
Using this definition, can you offer an example of a verified supernatural event?
Just to clarify, my argument is not making a claim to a verified supernatural event. Simply that there is scientific evidence, i.e., objective and verifiable observations, that can be used to make an abductive case for the existence of the supernatural.
What is a rigorous definition of “physical reality”?
That’s my inclination.
There are things, processes and events that we can demonstrate to have existed or to have happened. And there are things for which this cannot be demonstrated. There is near universal agreement on many, if not most, of these things, not on others. And part of the disagreement results from differing interpretations of the criteria by which existence ought to be accepted.
Be that as it may, I see no reason to develop different criteria for things based on whether they are called “supernatural.” To say the the resurrection really occurred, provided that one assumes Christianity is true is the same as saying it is not true, as far as I am concerned. We don’t say the sun exists, but only if one assumes Hinduism to be true. It just exists, period.
Yes, I got that. I just wanted to highlight that we are talking about a class of phenomena of which we have no verified examples. Basically, the isue then is not if a particular supernatural claim has merit, but rather if the concept of supernatural itself has a basis in reality, or is entirely imaginary.
What strength of evidence would we need to classify an event as either supernatural, or imaginary?
I’m not playing, sorry. If we can’t discuss the supernatural using the OP’s definition we really are better off leaving it well alone.
My concern is that when many people really drill down into what they think defines “physical” versus “non-physical”, it will inevitably get coupled into the notion that the physical is measurable and quantifiable while the non-physical is not. (This is because there are already plenty of things that we can’t access with our regular senses, yet we believe in their existence, such as neutrinos. But we don’t regard neutrinos as supernatural.)
And secondly, if you ask many people what is “verification”, they mean “passing a quantifiable, repeatable experimental test”.
Thus, asking for verified evidence for the supernatural is really asking for measurable evidence for something that is by definition unmeasurable. It is thus no different than asking for evidence that there are married bachelors.
I think you are being a bit too harsh here on the concept of verification.
To take a biblical example, Pontius Pilate being a big shot Roman in 1st century Palestine is pretty much a verified fact. There really is no disagreement about that, afaik, apart from some quibbles about his precise job title. To argue against that one would need to marshall a very convincing body of evidence that seems unlikely now to ever appear. Would you agree that this then is for all intents and purposes a verified fact?
I’m not an expert on 1st century history in Palestine, but sure, assuming what you said is true, I’ll accept that as a “verified fact”.
You seem to be confusing verified with undisputed.
@faded_Glory, the problem here is that in the case of religious claims, both the content and standards of evidence are disputed and controversial in a setting like this. So all talk about “verified religious claims” in such a setting is not very meaningful. In contrast, in a thread like Sons of God and the Daughters of Men: Approval or Disapproval?, where all of the current participants are Christians, I can effectively treat the existence of Yahweh and the authority of Scripture as “established facts”. That’s because we have a more unified epistemic commitment with regards to those matters.
I think we could agree there is no undisputed example of supernatural claims. I’m not sure what that means though. It seems to be just obviously true.
Good point. If you look at the op you’ll see I kind of touched on how in abductive reasoning the inference is to something that isn’t objective and verifiable observation, but rather inferred from such. This is a form of reasoning common to all fields of study.
As far as the difference between the supernatural and the imaginary, I believe that is where metaphysics comes into play. My understanding is that whatever is metaphysically possible has to have some grounding in the reality we experience.
For example, to posit a disembodied mind would have some grounding in reality in that I think we all agree that minds exist. Once it can be shown to be metaphysically possible, it would have to be judged on it’s own merits as to how well it explains whatever it is that is being explained. Of course all of this has to stay within the bounds of logic.
Well, it seems to me that @faded_Glory has coupled “disputed/undisputed status” with verifiability, because as he said:
So for @faded_Glory, the existence of “doubt” nullifies any claim to verification. I’ve been trying to show him that this is an overly naive and incomplete conception, as shown by the example of numerous YECs doubting the evidence for the age of the Earth, or climate skeptics doubting the existence of AGW. But he regards my arguments as “sophistry”.
What do you mean by “look like”? That’s a whole additional level of scientific naivete. Further, what they look like — and in fact they don’t “look like” anything — is irrelevant to the actual question, which is how they behave. You don’t have to see them to know what they do, and you seem to equate seeing with imaging.
The point here, if you remember, is that there are indeed uncaused events in the world. You don’t have to know what an electron “looks like” in order to observe that its energy level transitions are random in timing. You don’t have to know what a uranium atom looks like to know that its decay is random in timing. So much, then, for the cosmological proof.