How unlikely is the supernatural?

[Mithrae]

I've been intrigued by the opinions a few folk have expressed regarding the supernatural lately. To begin with, here's a few points which I suspect nearly all folk on the forum should more or less agree with:

- Our minds and imaginations can often play tricks on us
- People have been known to lie or deceive regarding supernatural claims
- Much that was previously explained by or considered as supernatural has since been naturally explained
- We routinely dismiss many supernatural claims without any specific investigation (eg. primitive myths)
- No supernatural claim has been proven beyond doubt to the modern world*

(*Note that this doesn't preclude general evidence for the supernatural, which some folk would argue, and we can't claim that no supernatural thing has been conclusively proven to individuals.)



Notachance argues that we should hold the same standard when considering supernatural claims as we do when a person's future (and perhaps their very life) is in question - that of proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Going even further, Furrowed Brow likens the probability of the supernatural to one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent, and says that he'd accept far-fetched conspiracy theories rather than a supernatural claim.

Personally I'd try to weigh the evidence for any given supernatural claim as best I can and judge it on it's own merits. I'd require a higher standard of evidence before 'believing' the claim than I would of naturalistic phenomena, but I don't believe we know enough about the nature of the universe to designate anything as super-natural and intrinsically implausible.



So what about everyone else? How unlikely do you consider the supernatural? How would you approach new supernatural claims? And why?

[Furrowed Brow]

My point is about the semantic rules that constrain how we speak and think meaningfully. If a claim has no conditions on which it can be said to be true and no conditions on which it can be said to be false then clearly it does not make sense to talk about that claim as a matter of possibility or probability. That makes no sense. It is like talking about the possibility of winning the lottery when you don’t have a lottery ticket. Without a lottery ticket thinking you might win is fantasy.

An example of a claim - 'I might win the lottery' - which is false given the conditions (no lottery ticket) is hardly a good example of a claim with no condition on which it is true or false. Confused thinking?

Most similes break down somewhere if pushed hard. If you can see the point being made then you don’t really need the simile elaborated upon to make it even more similar. Anyhow - I think the lottery ticket is apt as far as it goes and the similarity can be made more explicit.

If you have a lottery ticket you might win or you might lose, either is possible. If you don’t have a lottery ticket you obviously can’t win (can’t be true) and to continue to think that it is possible you might win (might be true) would be nonsense. As you point out winning is now impossible and in this respect not buying a ticket is a falsifying condition for winning (being true). That is the indeed the basic point I was trying to get across but the logic is a tad more complicated than that. So let’s elaborate.

If you don’t buy a ticket you have not put down any stake money and you risk nothing. Let’s say there is a cash win paid out to you if your tickets comes up, but if you lose you get an official notification that you have lost your stake money. And money is only paid out after all losing notifications have gone out. You are also never told when the lottery will take place and you will only ever know there has been a lottery if you get the prize or a notification of you loss. So if you don’t have a ticket you are just not included in the lottery.

• Winning – means receiving a cash prize
  Losing – means losing your stake and receiving a notification you have lost your stake.

In this kind of lottery if you have not got a ticket you can’t win (can’t be true) and you can’t lose (can’t be false) because you are not sent a notification you have lost. Now we can only talk about the probabilities of winning or losing based on whether you are in the lottery. To not have a ticket is to not be in the lottery and not part of the game. From that position you can’t win and you can’t lose. Ok we can say there is no way of winning without a ticket, which is also in part my point. The chances of a claim being true that can neither be true nor false are zero. It is the least likely of all options.

Supernatural claims are not in the game of possibilities and probabilities. In this sense a proposition which must either be true or false is like a lottery ticket. Without a proposition it is meaningless to talk about the possibility of some claim being true.

The claim "Jesus walked on water" has a condition which would make it false (he didn't) and a condition which would make it true (he did).

You are right that to form a proposition it has to be the case Jesus did walk on water or the case that he did not. This is indeed what is needed. But in principle and in reality there is no way to test this claim and no way to falsify it. If in principle there is just no way of testing or falsifying the sentence then the assertion there are conditions by which it might be true and conditions by which it might be false is bogus. We can form the words into a sentence but in reality the words fail to provide a condition by which the sentence is ever made true or ever made false. In which case the assertions that it is true if he did and false if he didn’t are empty of meaning and just a word game. I might equally say with just as much meaning that the Jabberwocky walked on water, and this is true if he did and false if he did not. If you are right then claiming the Jabberwocky walked on water is both a meaningful proposition and possible. I’d say that is pretty obviously wrong. Not becuse the Jabbwerwocky is obvioius fiction and Jesus might have been real, but because in principle there is no way to test or falsify either if someone insists they are real possibilities.

You seem to be confusing rules of thought and logic with our capacity for relative certainty or testability of claims.

I hope I’m not. it I think what I am saying is correct.

Testability is a pre-requisite for genuine knowledge, not for genuine possibility (or even probability).

It is accurate to say the possibility of testability is a prequisite for genuine possibility. If there is no way of testing and no way of falsifying a claim then there is no genuine possibility to be discussed.

I can't test the claim that "there's more to the universe than my mind and imagination," but that doesn't change the fact that it's possible (and even probable) that the claim is true.

If there is no way to test that claim and no way to falsify it then the question of whether it is possible or probable are made meaningless and it is one big category mistake and muddle to continue talk that way about such a claim.

[olavisjo]

If there is no way to test that claim and no way to falsify it then the question of whether it is possible or probable are made meaningless and it is one big category mistake and muddle to continue talk that way about such a claim.

It seems to me that your thinking is dominated by two assumptions that are most likely not true.

1. If you can't see it, touch it, taste it, feel it or hear it then it don't exist.

2. If the human mind can't understand it then it is meaningless.

I can appreciate what you are saying, but you are trying to do philosophy with the tools of empirical science and it just does not work.

[Furrowed Brow]

It seems to me that your thinking is dominated by two assumptions that are most likely not true.

1. If you can't see it, touch it, taste it, feel it or hear it then it don't exist.

They go some way. But I’m quite happy to accept the presence of radiation if my Geiger counter starts to crackle. What is required is there be some conditions we can touch, taste, feel, see, hear and by a process of logical deduction we can then say something is true, or false.

Let’s say we are stood by a lake and a fellah walks passed....on the water....and after a thorough investigation we both accept the data is correct and a man really is walking on water in front of us and it is not a trick and we have not taken LSD. You might say “Ah ha! This is evidence of a supernatural cause�. I’d say “ok what would falsify the claim the cause is supernatural� I expect you not to be able to answer that. If you can’t then the supernatural answer remains meaningless. You may demand an explanation from me in return and if I rack my brains and seek out the best advice and I still cannot explain how the fellah is managing not to sink I will just have to say “I don’t know�. And then you point out that if I don’t know why can’t the supernatural be the answer, and my answer would be because then all the supernatural is a word that says nothing and we might just as well just say "not explainable."

2. If the human mind can't understand it then it is meaningless.

If the human mind on principle cannot understand it then it is indeed meaningless to anyone labouring with a human mind. And then it makes no sense to try and make sense of it, and it certainly makes no sense to try and invoke it as a meaningful explanation of anything.

I can appreciate what you are saying, but you are trying to do philosophy with the tools of empirical science and it just does not work.

Yes it does. It works very well thank you though some may be frustrated and dissatisfied by the very concrete and valid limitations it raises. And you are right much that passes for philosophy we have to give up once we become aware of where the limits of language lie.

[fredonly]

So what about everyone else? How unlikely do you consider the supernatural? How would you approach new supernatural claims? And why?

I think the answer will vary depending on the context, and in how you define "supernatural." Since this is the "Christianity and Apologetics" subforum, the relevant context is the historical context, and the relevant definition of "supernatural" is something like "an effect within our observable natural world, induced by forces or entities outside of the natural universe, in violation of the natural order." This definition includes "god did it," and excludes parlour tricks and previously unknown science.

This leads to the historical problem of miracles. History is hypothesis. We don't have direct access to what happened in history. All we have are documents and artifacts from the past. We construct hypotheses by analyzing this data and applying the historical method to them. Competing hypotheses are compared using the principles of the Argument to the Best Explanation.

While there's nothing wrong, per se, with proposing a supernatural explanation for a historical event - it will never win the Argument to the Best Explanation because it will rely on assumptions that are not contained in the set of "accepted truths or beliefs." (see criteria 4,5, and 6 at the link). Miracles aren't in the set, that is unless you happen to already believe in miracles. If miracles could be demonstrated to occur, then we could add them to the set of "accepted truths."

So....the biggest hurdle is the first one: you'd have to provide a convincing argument that miracles occur. Once you have done that, the job gets a bit easier - because then miracles can pass the plausibility criteriea...

...or do they? We still can't assume miracles are as common as VD. How do you tell a real miracle from a false one - EVEN if there are such things as real miracles? Even worse, how would you do so in a historical account? These seem insurmountable. With this in mind, I'm inclined to say the probability is zero of rationally/objectively establishing the occurrence of a a miracle in the past (even if miracles actually occur).

[olavisjo]

If the human mind on principle cannot understand it then it is indeed meaningless to anyone labouring with a human mind. And then it makes no sense to try and make sense of it, and it certainly makes no sense to try and invoke it as a meaningful explanation of anything.

Take a chimp who has learned some sign language and send him to study math and science at MIT. The chimp will find the curriculum meaningless even though it has much meaning to his fellow students and professors, but his mind has not developed to the point that it can understand these ideas.
The human mind is only slightly more advanced than his biological cousins, so why do you think that humans have reached the point of being able to understand all things that are not meaningless?

Look at it this way...

There is a set "A" of all the non meaningless things that humans do understand.
The set A is a subset of set "B" which is the set of all the non meaningless things humans can possibly understand.
The set B is a subset of set "C" which is the set of all the non meaningless things.

You seem to be making the assumption that set C\B is empty or does not exist, and even if it does exist it does not matter since we can never know it and the things in set C can not have any effect on humans.
Shall we cross our fingers and hope that your assumptions are correct? You have certainly not given us any reason to believe your assumptions are correct.

[Furrowed Brow]

If the human mind on principle cannot understand it then it is indeed meaningless to anyone labouring with a human mind. And then it makes no sense to try and make sense of it, and it certainly makes no sense to try and invoke it as a meaningful explanation of anything.

Take a chimp who has learned some sign language and send him to study math and science at MIT. The chimp will find the curriculum meaningless even though it has much meaning to his fellow students and professors, but his mind has not developed to the point that it can understand these ideas.

It ain’t just the chimp who would be lost.

The human mind is only slightly more advanced than his biological cousins, so why do you think that humans have reached the point of being able to understand all things that are not meaningless?

If the human mind is able to evolve or maybe have some computer implants or some such to raise our IQ to I dunno a maximum of 40,000 and furnished with such a mind we can then prove or disprove all supernatural claims, then faced with a supernatural claim in the here and now all we can do is admit incomprehension, and from that position we can’t even begin to quantify probabilities. To then begin to discuss the likelihoods of ghosts or walking on water is nonsense. The conversation becomes as meaningful as the MIT the chimp trying to decide how likely it is an electron tastes like a banana.

Look at it this way...

There is a set "A" of all the non meaningless things that humans do understand.
The set A is a subset of set "B" which is the set of all the non meaningless things humans can possibly understand.
The set B is a subset of set "C" which is the set of all the non meaningless things.

You seem to be making the assumption that set C\B is empty or does not exist, and even if it does exist it does not matter since we can never know it and the things in set C cannot have any effect on humans.

I certainly include B. But every time we try to imagine a difference between B and C we have meaningless thoughts and shall do perpetually. There is no gap between B and C for us to peek through so to speak. It shall be forever true as far as we will ever be able to fathom that B = C. And in this sense C does exists and it is nonsense to think we are ever able to talk meaningfully about B not equalling C.

Shall we cross our fingers and hope that your assumptions are correct? You have certainly not given us any reason to believe your assumptions are correct.

I think you are still seeing this as an ontological problem by which we can somehow step beyond our logical limitations to make some modicum of sense of it. This is a mistake the early Wittgenstein warned against. Bottom line we cannot comprehend what we cannot comprehend. The only things we can ever comprehend are those things we can possibly comprehend and trying to attribute existence or ontology to the perpetually incomprehensible as if there is something meaningful in wait beyond is like trying to levitate by pulling on your shoe laces.

If we just need an IQ of say 40,000 to realize B is not equal to C then we are still like the chimp and it is still meaningless to talk about probabilities because we are at a level where we are unable to quantify all the potentialities.

At the danger of talking nonsense let me try and put it this way: If B does not equal C and there is some incomprehensible transcendent “*�!*)(?� not found within B and this “*�!*)(?� is what allows a man to walk on water, then all we can do is shrug our shoulders and say “dunno what the heck is going on�. What is certain is that as soon as we try to attribute “*�!*)(?� as the underlying cause or force or reason for a man walking on water we immediately begin to talk irretrievable nonsense.

[Mithrae]

Well since you'd consider time travel marginally more probable than the 'supernatural,'

Well the reason for favouring time travel over the “supernatural� is that current advanced science regarding quantum physics and relativity may be wrong and things like time travel or faster and light travel may – though very unlikely turn out to be possible. For the supernatural claim to be true our very basic science has to be badly and widely wrong on a day to day level, stuff like Newtonian mechanics and F = Mass x acceleration. There is just less chance of this. Moreover for the supernatural claim to be true far more mundane answers have to be false. And wild eyed billionaire conspiracies are still more plausible than inventing whole new side of nature. Then there is the point that the bad billionaire is a proposition that stands a chance of being tested and falsified. It is wacky but it still potentially testable.

Actually I'd say that if, in the absense of any better natural explanation, we were resorting to invoking billionaire conspiracies to account for a hypothesised 'supernatural' event, we've already burned the bridge of testability in a worse way than traditional religious claims. A Christian apologist might claim as evidence that "four independent gospels, two of which were written by eyewitnesses, all confirm that Jesus walked on water." This is falsifiable to the extent that we can show that at least three of those gospels do share a dependency on each other and at least one of the eyewitness claims is false, and further falsifiable in showing that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. With relevant information, few but the most determined conservative apologists will claim that there is strong evidence for Jesus walking on water. Our hypothetical billionaire conspiracy theory likewise has no good evidence, and worse is simply an ad-libbed response; it's proposed precisely because there's no evidence on the matter.

As far as supernatural claims/events requiring the suspension of established scientific laws, that's only the case if you're including theories about how an event happened alongside your question of whether it happened. It would be akin to disbelieving someone's claim that a feather fell as fast as a lead ball on the basis of our certainty that lead balls fall faster. Once we know the how - that rates of fall are affected by air resistance, and the feather and ball were in a vacuum - we might be more inclined to believe what someone claims they saw. If someone did that little magic trick a few centuries ago, it seems to me that your position would have us believing that it was a lead feather or that our friend was deluded. My position is that if we have reasonable evidence for something - in this case, if our friend is an observant, level-headed and honest person - we should consider it possible (perhaps even probable, depending on the strength of evidence) that the something did happen, even if we don't know how.

If some of the heat from a layer of water just beneath Lake Galilee's surface were transferred deeper in the lake (maintaining the law of conservation of energy) a sheet of ice would form on which Jesus could walk (or more likely slide ). How could the heat transfer be effected without violating established scientific laws? Not a clue off the top of my head, but I imagine there could be quite a few ways (an alien ship in orbit being one random example), just as there are other ways we could speculate how Jesus might have walked on water.

This example obviously has very weak evidence that the event did occur at all. But my point is that while I can somewhat understand Notachance's initial position of 'proof beyond reasonable doubt,' your position of trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth etc. and preference even for far-fetched conspiracy theories seems fundamentally flawed. As far as I'm concerned the first question is what happened. If on further consideration the 'what' seems beyond or contrary to our best current knowledge, we should rightly expect higher standards of evidence before accepting it as plausible (and much higher still before considering it fact). How it might have happened is almost always the subject of speculation, then theories and often still isn't agreed-upon as fact even in scientific enquiries.

[Mithrae]

The claim "Jesus walked on water" has a condition which would make it false (he didn't) and a condition which would make it true (he did).

You are right that to form a proposition it has to be the case Jesus did walk on water or the case that he did not. This is indeed what is needed. But in principle and in reality there is no way to test this claim and no way to falsify it. If in principle there is just no way of testing or falsifying the sentence then the assertion there are conditions by which it might be true and conditions by which it might be false is bogus. We can form the words into a sentence but in reality the words fail to provide a condition by which the sentence is ever made true or ever made false. In which case the assertions that it is true if he did and false if he didn’t are empty of meaning and just a word game. I might equally say with just as much meaning that the Jabberwocky walked on water, and this is true if he did and false if he did not. If you are right then claiming the Jabberwocky walked on water is both a meaningful proposition and possible. I’d say that is pretty obviously wrong. Not becuse the Jabbwerwocky is obvioius fiction and Jesus might have been real, but because in principle there is no way to test or falsify either if someone insists they are real possibilities.

You seem to be confusing rules of thought and logic with our capacity for relative certainty or testability of claims.

I hope I’m not. it I think what I am saying is correct.

I think I'd have to stand by that comment. You seem to be saying that because there is no way to test or falsify either (JabberW or Jesus walking on water), they are not meaningful propositions or possible.

It would then follow that because there's no way to test or falsify that Plato wrote the Republic (no more so than Jesus walking on water, at least), the claim that he wrote the Republic is neither a meaningful proposition nor possible.

---

So what about everyone else? How unlikely do you consider the supernatural? How would you approach new supernatural claims? And why?

I think the answer will vary depending on the context, and in how you define "supernatural." Since this is the "Christianity and Apologetics" subforum, the relevant context is the historical context, and the relevant definition of "supernatural" is something like "an effect within our observable natural world, induced by forces or entities outside of the natural universe, in violation of the natural order." This definition includes "god did it," and excludes parlour tricks and previously unknown science.

That's a good answer, but it seems to me that for it to be useful we may first need a solid understanding or definition of the 'natural universe' and 'natural order' - one which presumably excludes our hypothetical Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Moreover some phenomena we tend to think of as supernatural but, if they were real, presumably would somehow be part of the natural universe and order; ghosts for example, or zombies depending on your chosen zombological theory.

I wrote a bit more about that general subject in my last post; potential problems in presuming too much about how something happens/ed. My second post in the thread I suggested my own working definition of 'supernatural' -

• But the 'supernatural' essentially means anything sufficiently outside the range of common or explainable human experience. My question could just as easily include things like alien abductions. . . .
  
  Ultimately my question is about the presuppositions, methodology and criteria for reasonable evidence (epistemology) with which we do or should approach extraordinary/supernatural claims. Particularly with regard to claims we haven't yet encountered/investigated; we've all probably got a fairly standard response in store for kids with boogeyman sightings or a Messiah who walks on water.
  
  But perhaps a list of specific supernatural categories will help with my broader enquiry

[Furrowed Brow]

The claim "Jesus walked on water" has a condition which would make it false (he didn't) and a condition which would make it true (he did).

You are right that to form a proposition it has to be the case Jesus did walk on water or the case that he did not. This is indeed what is needed. But in principle and in reality there is no way to test this claim and no way to falsify it. If in principle there is just no way of testing or falsifying the sentence then the assertion there are conditions by which it might be true and conditions by which it might be false is bogus. We can form the words into a sentence but in reality the words fail to provide a condition by which the sentence is ever made true or ever made false. In which case the assertions that it is true if he did and false if he didn’t are empty of meaning and just a word game. I might equally say with just as much meaning that the Jabberwocky walked on water, and this is true if he did and false if he did not. If you are right then claiming the Jabberwocky walked on water is both a meaningful proposition and possible. I’d say that is pretty obviously wrong. Not becuse the Jabbwerwocky is obvioius fiction and Jesus might have been real, but because in principle there is no way to test or falsify either if someone insists they are real possibilities.

You seem to be confusing rules of thought and logic with our capacity for relative certainty or testability of claims.

I hope I’m not. it I think what I am saying is correct.

I think I'd have to stand by that comment. You seem to be saying that because there is no way to test or falsify either (JabberW or Jesus walking on water), they are not meaningful propositions or possible.

Yes. That is it what I am saying. I think this is the correct assessment of the semantics. The qualification is that “meaningful� is here used in the analytical sense drawn from the likes of Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, Ayer and Popper. To denote a state of affairs a proposition has to be be true or false, and if there is no way (in principle) to falsify a sentence it can never be false. On this view the Jabberwocky or Jesus walking on water belong to a class of sentences that fail to form a proposition.

It would then follow that because there's no way to test or falsify that Plato wrote the Republic (no more so than Jesus walking on water, at least), the claim that he wrote the Republic is neither a meaningful proposition nor possible.

But there is a way to falsify whether Plato wrote the republic. Someone just has to dig up a manuscript of the republic dated to around 400 BCE with the name of another author attached. There is no document that can be dug up that would falsify Jesus walking on water. Let's say a Gospel of Mary (or someone else) turned up that said they were there and Jesus did not walk on water but they heard Matthew and Mark agree to make the story up, this is not going to falsify the sentence "Jesus walked on water". If it was that simple and if this was a matter of facts then no one would believe anyone walked on water. For those who don't believe there is already plenty of convincing falsifying evidence that people do not walk on water, so we really do not need someone to confirm this is a lie. For the folk who do believe, they using language in a way that means they have longed stopped talking about facts of the matter.

[Flail]

To Furrowed Brow:
Your posts in this thread as to the supernatural and 'the falsifiability of truth claims' are excellent and deserve their own separate thread for emphasis. I recommend you start one and restate the principles and examples you have outlined here in your OP.

If we could all recognize and understand the category mistake of making truth claims that cannot be tested and that are thus are non-falsifiable, perhaps we could begin to rid ourselves of biblical literal fundamentalism when it comes to 'the supernatural'. Christians, Muslims and strong Atheists all need to understand that truth claims of 'God exists' or 'Allah exists' or 'there is no God' and the attendant 'truth blather' that accompanies them are all equally non-falsifiable and meaningless. Upon what basis could they be anything but meaningless? Without a coherent definition of what a 'God' would consist of, these claims don't mean anything at all.

I will end with your superb summarizing line:
"For those who don't believe, there is already plenty of convincing falsifying evidence that people do not walk on water so we really do not need to confirm that this is a lie. For the folks who do believe, they are using language in a way that means they have long ago stopped talking about the facts of the matter."