Re: Roger Ebert comes out of the closet!!

nmp wrote:


OK, seriously from this point. We run into a problem here already. That is, how on Earth would you define "supernatural"? I think concepts like that only have value for people who believe in them. I don't - you were correct on that. So to me it is just an empty word. I suppose I don't will not have to defend an empty concept being absent from my axiomas.

Here is an axioma: if something exists or is real, it is not supernatural. "Nature" already contains all that exists.

I think you are right, "supernatural" as a concept is rather problematic.

personally I'd say it is a "parasitic" or "residual" concept that only makes sense relative to an established theory of the natural.

Strating point would be something like Clarke's third law.
So in a first approximation, one ingredient seems to be that the acceptance of such an event would force us to radically change /revise our existing theories. If I woke up tomorrow and suddenly found tat I can move objects by merely thinking about them, this would in your definition be natural, but it would force us to reconsider almost everything we thought true about the natural world, accepting at least one new basic force, redoing _all_ previous experiments to make sure nobody with the same skill interfered etc. So in a sense, labelling something "supernatural" is a protective mechanism for the development of science, and I'd say that is where it historically comes from - something a fledgling science need not concern itself with (like "measurement error", "equipment failure" or one of the many limiting conditions that allow scientists to ignore something for the purpose of theory formation) As far as I know, the term only came up in the 16th century, which would fit.

The next ingredient would be uniqueness: if suddenly lots of people have this ability, we could easily start to search for scientific explanations, e.g. a mutation. But it is only me, some of our basic scientific assumptions about replicability gets into trouble. if I can only perform this act for some reason on Saturdays, it gets worse. If I can only do it on Saturdays in weeks where on Monday, the Moon was visible all day, on Tuesday, a war broke out where I live, on Wednesdays, a big unscheduled hunt with lots of dogs took place, on Thursday, it thunders and on Friday I fell in love, we are even closer to the limits of what we would consider natural, simply because (again,) the revision to our scientific world-view would be more and more costly.
The closer to uniqueness it gets, and theme it correlates with non-natural concepts like naming conventions, the more the very concept of a law governed nature gets into danger, Simply adding new laws might not work in this case. But uniformity of the laws of nature is one of the features of our modern world view, and something that would point to in Cartwright's terminology, a "dabbled world" might be better explained as "supernatural"

The closer we come to a singular event, the more we would of course doubt that it happened in the first place and look for other explanations (like delusions etc)

Final ingredient seems to be a degree of freedom. It is not a coincidence that we use the word "law" for both the prohibition of murder and the law of gravity. To cite again Clarke: "Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal."
If we found that for some entities, the difference is non existing, we would again have to reconsider what we actually mean by "nature". You coudl get an "onion model" where say gravity is for us non-negotiable, but for some other entities it is just a convention they observe out of nicety, but they are bound by other laws (Loki can change shape, unlike us, but he can't break a chain forged by Weyland)

Larry Lessig's book on regulating cyberspace is in this respect quite interesting. In a virtual online world lie World of Warcraft, walls are "physical" obstacles that your avatar can't simply walk through. But someone with administrative right can of course change the code so that his avatar is not restricted by this. Form the inside perspective of the game, this action can't be accommodated/explained/made sense of. It is "supernatual" relative to the laws that define the game.

So in in a sense you'd be right, everything is natural, but some things, if they happened, woudl change our perception of what is nature so radically, and contravene the basic metaphysical underpinnings of modern science so massively, that labelling them as "supernatural" woudl be much less costly, in terms of knowledge revision.



I'd be the last to suggest they are mistaken for doing so.

Good.

But if they then go on
to argue from a generic perspective on evidence that there's no evidence
for supernatural events of the variously described flavors, they have
fallen prey to a circular proof.

No. Because no matter how one would twist it, the evidence *still* isn't there. Are you saying the supernatural, whatever it is, manifests itself through metaphysical evidence or something? What sort of evidence would that be?

There is either (credible) evidence or there is not.

"Supernatural events of the variously described flavors", can you give some examples of those? I really have no idea what you could mean.

Recognize your axioms. Respect that others may have different axioms.

Sure. I will even respect their axioms so much, I don't even have to know what they are. I will instead just ask that if they do make any statement regarding the nature of reality, or the reality of nature, that they back it up with evidence.

There is a god out there interacting with nature? Show me what it has done. Is it in communication with people, is it making its wishes known? Let me hear it, too. Before any of that happens I will just say people are imagining things. That's why Dawkins calls it "The God delusion".

Well, that's where it gets tricky, at least for me. If I have a toothache, how can I make you "have _my_ toothache too"? What we do have of course is that lots of people have described an experience with similar expressions (like a hot and cold needle pricking me, like someone with a hammer rhythmically). In such cases, we tend not to speak of "toothache delusion" even though we could.

Or my own favourite example, music. religious and aesthetic experiences seem to me to be very similar, if not identical. I'm extremely moved whenever I listening to the third movement of Bach's 2. Brandenburg concerto. Nothing you can say could convince me that I do not have these feelings, they seem to be in that sense infallible. Conversely, I have to accept that nothing I do can force you to have the same feelings. You might simple be unmoved. or you might even lack a sense of musicality that allows most people to identify something as music, even if they don't like it. Neither of us, I'd say, is delusional in this case.

Now, what i also observe is that i'm not alone. Quite a lot of people seem to react to Bach in the same way I do. We now develop a vocabulary that allows us to talk about our experience and in this way make sense of it. (it was, like, my hair was tingling all over my body - or the more sophisticated vocabulary of art critics) Something that could otherwise have been a frightening experience (what is happening with me, and why) gets a very specific meaning for me. For those of us who have made a similar experience, having that vocabulary helps us to communicate amongst us and to "create meaning" of this experience. , for those who do not experience the same feeling, it remains unintelligible. "Delusion" in this sense is merely a question of numbers.

Religion seems to me to work along similar lines: you start with a very strong personal, subjective and internal experience. In trying to make sense of it, I develop tentative terms for this, like "spiritual" (and Dawkins, for this matter, seems to have similar experiences). We then realise that other people use similar language to describe their experience, and from this you conclude that the experience was similar (even amongst self-declared Bach aficionados, I of course do not _know_ that their experience is in any way similar to mine, this is a highly theoretical inference) Theology allows us then as a group to refine this vocabulary more and more. If I were the only person to hear music, as a social convention, we would call me delusional. If I were the only person to have a "spiritual" experience, dito. The mere fact of lots of people sharing an experience means that "delusion" as concept is inappropriate - it is not a scientific concept, it is a social one. The success of religion is in this sense its own warrant.

Now, the issues arise are: can such an amorphous subjective experience allow me to decide which of the competing theologies is right? My own answer as you know is no, they are therefore all equally valid explanatory attempts.

The next problem then of course comes when you reify the vocabulary you uised to make sense of a personal exprience. if I describe mu headache as "like, someone sitting on my head and banging me with a hammer" and start to take this to man that really, something is sitting n my head, i do bad theology. Conversely, if you start to look for the person on my head, using a microscope and , after fining nothing, you conclude I only imagine the headache, you do bad science. "the man on my head with a hammer" exists, but only relative to an explanatory theory that allows me to make sense of my experience and to communicate it.


Look, since believers think this supernatural thing, God, is so important and omnipresent even, it should really be easy to point it out or the traces that it leaves. But they can't. The best they can do after thousands of years is the argument that by the use of formal logic alone indeed we can't rule out that perhaps it is possible that there is a god whose existence unfortunately can't be known or detected.

Oh, and therefore: Jesus.

Well no.


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