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Notes -
“Winning” the supernaturalism discussion is one of the philosophically/scientifically unfalsifiable questions on both sides, and to progress beyond strawmen, both sides must grudgingly acknowledge it.
The anti-supernaturalist can point to any time a miracle or magic seems to have occurred, and say it can be attributed to delusion, improbable coincidence, as-yet unexplained natural phenomena, or trickery. Fire, lightning, planetary motion, cellular biology, pulling the Queen of Hearts from a deck of cards on the first try, the hand in His side by Thomas, a narrative vision of the four future world empires beheld by Daniel, and a single yellow rose in a flowerbed comforting a woman who lost her Texan mother in a car accident years ago; nothing is undoubtable. Even being able to reliably summon a visible, tangible demon through ritual could be explained away as completely naturalistic, given a clever enough arguer.
The supernaturalist can look at any miracle of science or coincidence and say how marvelous are His ways, how complex His plans, how infinitely intelligent He must be to set things up so that moment or phenomenon can have occurred just so in order that someone might become more aware of the glory of God, His righteousness, His forgiveness, and so on. The supernaturalist can also always find another example of the unexplained or the absurdly improbable and call it evidence (or, as a bailey, “proof) of the supernatural.
So we find ourselves once more weighing Pascal’s Wager against the Cosmic Ogre, the Pink Unicorn, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and asking not “which is more probable” but “whose explainers do I believe are credible, knowing all that I do about human self-delusion and motivated reasoning”. We will always be able to find evidence for a conclusion we’ve already reached.
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