Your miracle

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nobspeople
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Your miracle

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Post by nobspeople »

Some say miracles are real, while others say they're not. The naysayers often point out to limbs not growing back, other dead people not raising up and 'living their best life', no one since Mosses has interacted with a talking and burning bush that's not consumed, etc.
Yet believers do point out that Billy Bobchristian was 'healed' from his sin. Or Bobby Billchristian survived his 11th hour surgery that saved his life. And the like.

For discussion:
So, here's your chance, believers, once and for all. What miracle have you experienced that you KNOW was a miracle and that it was from god (if you're willing to have it, potentially, challenged - and why shouldn't you? You have faith it's real that's all that matter to you, right? Why not use this time to witness the power of your god?!?)?
Have a great, potentially godless, day!

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Re: Your miracle

Post #61

Post by Mithrae »

brunumb wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 9:36 am
Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 8:30 am Without demonstrating a feasible alternative under the same criteria demanded of theism, gods/miracles would stand on equal footing with anything else
Outdated criteria for incurable diseases.
Rare instances where totally unexpected remissions occur.
Delayed response to previous medical treatment.
Deceptive and fraudulent claims.
Falsified evidence.
Errors in diagnosis or the investigation of actual cases.
Gullibility and acceptance of dodgy claims.
Etc, etc...
We can go on and on with feasible natural alternatives.

On the other hand, proposing the involvement of gods or supernatural entities that have not been demonstrated to exist in reality is not on any sort of equal footing by a long shot. Once you have established that such things actually exist, you can put them on the table for consideration as a feasible explanation. It is not a matter of simply being dismissive. There is nothing yet there to dismiss.
Large numbers of medical experts (~55% of doctors, in the USA) propose a cause for remarkable medical outcomes they have personally observed, at equal/higher rates of 'miracle' belief/observance than found in the general population, contrary to the rational expectation that if they didn't occur then a highly educated, analytical subset of the population trained to seek out natural causes would be much less prone to report those non-existent phenomena. Rejecting those experts' conclusions as not even credible obviously is dismissive of what in any other case would be regarded as highly plausible or, more likely, as provisionally accepted fact.

I've seen this play out before, of course; there's a request for evidence that miracles occur and, when that strong evidence is provided, it rapidly turns into a demand for proof that miracles are even possible to begin with independently of the evidence that they do occur :? But if that 'logic' doesn't hold true in a scenario where miracles do in fact occur, then it's obviously not logical at all. From a previous discussion:
  • One day a Prophet came to town claiming to represent the true God and a crowd gathered to see him in the town square. One person, a bitter atheist because he'd lost his legs as a youth, asked "can your God heal my legs?" So the Prophet prayed and then *poof* the legs grew back right then and there and he walked away rejoicing. Another person, the mayor jealous of this newcomer's popularity, demanded "can your God destroy my house?" so the Prophet prayed a bit more and *poof* there's a smouldering crater where the mayor's house once stood. Then a third questioner asked "can your so-called God prove that his existence is even possible?" ....


    There seem to be at least four main problems with a 'presumption of impossibility' argument, the first and most obvious being that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in a scenario such as above. If the logic doesn't hold true in such a circumstance (or those in various religious reports) then there's obviously something wrong with the logic. Secondly, it's arbitrary; if the possibility of the existence of God were proven, the fourth questioner could then demand proof that it's possible for God to intervene in the natural order, the fifth could demand proof that it's possible for God to hear and answer prayers so rapidly etc.; there'll always be some part of a theory or proposed sequence of events where one so inclined can arbitrarily say "But is that even proven to be possible?" Hence the third problem, that such an approach rules out all explanations equally. How would you go about demonstrating that it is "empirically possible" for all the stuff in existence to be governed by the same 'laws,' for example? How can it be proven that one bit of stuff which is not identical to another bit of stuff (eg. a hydrogen atom separated by centimeters or seconds from another hydrogen atom) is nevertheless capable of having perpetually identical behaviour and interactions with all other stuff? The fleeting patterns which we observe in an infinitesimally small fraction of space and time obviously don't prove any such thing; as far as I'm aware it cannot be proven, so your argument would necessarily throw the science out with the holy water. And that's closely related to the fourth problem, that proving something to be 'possible' in the face of a contrary presumption itself seems impossible; observational data about the age of the universe might be interpreted very differently, for example, if we first had to prove independently of that data that it is even 'possible' for a universe to be more than 6,000 years old! Exactly how would you go about proving that God or miracles are "empirically possible" in the first place, if the apparent occurrence of miracles were ruled out as evidence for their possibility?

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Re: Your miracle

Post #62

Post by Mithrae »

TRANSPONDER wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 9:15 am
brunumb wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 7:13 am
Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 6:45 am Inventing 'laws of physics' or 'nature' is not a valid approach to explaining phenomena when there is no evidence for them. That is precisely what is happening. 'Laws of nature' can be used to explain anything and everything without there being any sign that they are involved at all. They really explain nothing.
What on earth are you on about? Who is inventing 'laws of physics' or 'nature' to explain anything? We have no evidence for anything supernatural. If you can demonstrate that those alleged miracles were performed by some supernatural agency, please do so. Even demonstrating that such a thing is possible would be a good start.
:) I know what out Mithraic friend means. I believe that he is not denying the natural/physicas explanations for what we know, but is arguing that what we can't explain might not be physics.

That is of course an unsound argument, and he should know it by now. Since so much that was once unknown and unexplained is now known to have natural causes, the default hypothesis for the unexplained is natural/physical, not God (name your own, anyway). It only is ever proffered as an argument for God because they believe in their god a priori. and they think (illogically) that 'God' is the default hypothesis where there is any unknown, doubt or question, or gap for God.

That is how the Theist mindset works and why it is always logically wrong.
You seemingly didn't know what I mean, because you've done exactly what I highlighted and what Brunumb has tried to avoid; claimed a broad 'natural' hypothesis of reality as the [better] alternative to theism, without justifying that alternative independently of the observations which suggest its veracity (as is being demanded of theism).

I've never suggested that theism is any kind of default hypothesis, and professing to analyze "the theist mindset" is obviously fallacious ad hominem. Where I begin from, as a starting point, is the logical/epistemic principle of indifference which "states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration." Logical possibilities for causation at a fundamental/universal level can be divided into agent-driven, which can be loosely viewed as theistic, and non-agent-driven; two mutually exclusive (at least in any specific instance), logically exhaustive and interchangeable options which therefore, pending some evidence validating one or the other, must be viewed as having equal 50/50 epistemic plausibilities. What we frequently see in discussions such as these, including explicitly from your post above, are attempts to sneak in a metaphysics or broad hypothesis of non-agent causation as a default against which agent causation/theism must be proven in a way that non-agent causation never has been (ie, independently of the observations which suggest its veracity).


TRANSPONDER wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 10:29 am That's it indeed. Even without that materialist default (and the Believers hate that almost as much as they hate the burden of proof :P ) equal argument means that the god (whichever) claim has no more force than the possibility that it's natural. It means 'don't know' is the logical and evidence based answer - not God.
Yes, "don't know" is the logical starting point - a genuine, 50/50 "don't know," not the 'don't know' created as a pretext for debate which pretends that one of two epistemically equivalent positions can be dismissed and ridiculed pending its proof by standards never applied to the one quietly accepted as a default.

Brunumb asks for proof that a god is even possible, that causation of observed events at some fundamental agent-driven level can be even considered as an explanatory theory: Clearly it's not merely 'possible' but (pending some contrary evidence) it's at least as plausible as the absence of any such causative agent... and the observation of remarkable events apparently best explained by the relevant experts with reference to such a causative agent makes its existence more plausible still.

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Re: Your miracle

Post #63

Post by Mithrae »

Eloi wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 11:09 am
Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 8:30 am (...) what some folk are proposing in this thread, that sunrises and babies and abiogenesis are 'miracles,' and I'm guessing that you would agree that those are borderline absurd suggestions, that there is an important, substantive difference between a sunrise and a healed amputation. Wouldn't you? But such a perspective can only exist under the presumption of a meaningful framework by which the sunrise is explained and a healed amputation is, for now, not explained - the most common such framework being philosophical extrapolations from scientific naturalism.

Mmmh, interesting. Can you "verbalize" those differences? Maybe we can arrive to the definition of "miracle".
Cambridge dictionary has "an unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not follow the usual laws of nature"; that seems like a solid definition. I gather that "A distinction is usually made between "general providence", which refers to God's continuous upholding of the existence and natural order of the Universe, and "special providence", which refers to God's extraordinary intervention in the life of people" and miracles (either as a subset of 'special providence' or just a distinct term). Whether caused by a deity or not, sunrises etc. are fairly normal things and at best would be described as 'general providence'; things which could be readily understood as coincidence such as finding some lost keys or surviving a crash might be described by a believer as 'special providence'; but miracles (like most of those described as such in the bible etc.) are generally regarded as being signs or strong evidence of something (the existence of god, authenticity of a prophet etc.) and as highlighted by the Cambridge definition must be characterized by a reversal or remarkable departure from the normal course of events. I'd also add that some kind of perceived significance or relevance, especially in terms of a prior prayer or request for help, is an important criterion; water being turned into wine at a wedding when they're running low would be a miracle, whereas some granite turning into quartz on a remote mountainside would seem to be just a weird anomaly.

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Re: Your miracle

Post #64

Post by brunumb »

[Replying to Mithrae in post #61]

The agencies and mechanisms for all the natural explanations for alleged miraculous cures demonstrably exist. That is not the case for supernatural agencies. Eliminate all the natural explanations and then one might have cause to consider things not known to exist.
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Re: Your miracle

Post #65

Post by Mithrae »

brunumb wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 7:34 pm [Replying to Mithrae in post #61]

The agencies and mechanisms for all the natural explanations for alleged miraculous cures demonstrably exist. That is not the case for supernatural agencies. Eliminate all the natural explanations and then one might have cause to consider things not known to exist.
Refusal to consider the possibility of things which are not already 'known' is a mindset probably best described as fundamentalism. As I noted, demanding that the reality or even possibility of an explanation first be established independently of the observations which suggest its veracity is special pleading which is not applied in any other circumstance: For example you only believe that fraudulent miracles constitute a viable explanation because of observed fraudulent miracles, but if you were consistent in your reasoning you would in each and every case be first demanding that 'fraud' be demonstrated to exist independently of observations of fraud. How would you go about doing that, I wonder?

Theism as an explanatory framework is actually on much better standing there, because as I explained to Transponder it has a roughly ~50% plausibility of being true by default pending some further reasons to favour either theism or non-theism over the other, independently of all the reported observations which further suggest its veracity.

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Re: Your miracle

Post #66

Post by brunumb »

Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 10:42 pm Theism as an explanatory framework is actually on much better standing there, because as I explained to Transponder it has a roughly ~50% plausibility of being true by default pending some further reasons to favour either theism or non-theism over the other, independently of all the reported observations which further suggest its veracity.
Theism is as much an explanatory framework as belief that invisible aliens are randomly firing healing rays at the earth from the moon. There is no explanatory power in the imaginary. People predisposed to believe in gods are also far more likely to be predisposed to believe in miracles. One belief cannot be used to prop up the other.
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Re: Your miracle

Post #67

Post by Mithrae »

brunumb wrote: Sun May 15, 2022 12:22 am
Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 10:42 pm Theism as an explanatory framework is actually on much better standing there, because as I explained to Transponder it has a roughly ~50% plausibility of being true by default pending some further reasons to favour either theism or non-theism over the other, independently of all the reported observations which further suggest its veracity.
Theism is as much an explanatory framework as belief that invisible aliens are randomly firing healing rays at the earth from the moon. There is no explanatory power in the imaginary. People predisposed to believe in gods are also far more likely to be predisposed to believe in miracles. One belief cannot be used to prop up the other.
You're certainly welcome to explain your reasons for believing that there's a ~50% plausibility to the proposition that invisible moon aliens exist; or your reasons for believing that there is ~0% plausibility to the proposition that some god/s exist; or your reasons for believing that the principle of indifference is somehow invalid in this case. Merely asserting that two very different things are equivalent is not a rational argument, obviously. There's been a lot of that going around, which is quite telling.

What do you think is meant by 'explanatory power' anyway? I asked this back in post #52 but you haven't answered. As I said then, explaining an observed phenomenon means situating it within a broader, coherent theory with better parsimony, breadth/scope and depth/specificity than competing alternatives. By those criteria it is wildly obvious that invisible aliens with healing rays has very little parsimony (in introduces many new entities), zero scope for explaining anything besides some healings, and virtually no specificity. Similarly ad hoc speculation about 'the body's unexplained natural healing powers' or somesuch is better but still pretty poor in terms of parsimony, about the same in terms of scope and about the same in terms of specificity: If you want to compare the explanatory value of invisible aliens to anything, it'd be a fairly close match for the kind of ad hoc speculation we often see in these cases! By contrast when such healing is an apparent answer to prayer, the existence and intervention of a deity is more or less the most parsimonious explanation there could be, it has vast potential explanatory scope for not only various miracle healings but also things like the existence of consciousness and causation... and while its specificity is rather limited, it's still about on par with the other two even in that regard. Of the three, divine intervention would pretty clearly be the best available explanation for rapid, unexplained cures of serious physical ailments... just as the medical experts involved seem to frequently conclude.

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Re: Your miracle

Post #68

Post by Difflugia »

Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 4:14 pmWhere I begin from, as a starting point, is the logical/epistemic principle of indifference which "states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration." Logical possibilities for causation at a fundamental/universal level can be divided into agent-driven, which can be loosely viewed as theistic, and non-agent-driven; two mutually exclusive (at least in any specific instance), logically exhaustive and interchangeable options which therefore, pending some evidence validating one or the other, must be viewed as having equal 50/50 epistemic plausibilities.
How are you imagining the separation of these categories? That's important because we do have relevant evidence. No causal agent that would qualify as theistic has either identified itself or been identified. Are "agents that would be identifiable" and "agents that would identify themselves" separate categories of overall explanation sharing equal space with other epistemic plausibilities or are they classes of theism that have to share the 50%? We have amassed enough no evidence that whatever space these two broad categories inhabit must be assigned a pretty low probability of being real and the only theisms that are plausible are those involving a non-identifiable theism. If those are equal subcategories of theism, does that mean that the theisms that are left only account for 16⅔% of the total space?

That's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it points out the huge flaw in your argument, namely that there is lots of evidence of no gods. Every event that is witnessed to occur without apparently requiring divine intervention is evidence against the existence of gods. It's the equivalent of searching a tiny patch of ground for tigers or unicorns. The lack of a tiger or tiger scat in a tiny area is far from proof that tigers don't exist anywhere, but it is evidence. It's admittedly a tiny bit of evidence compared to the vast number of tiny patches of ground and in some contexts could be simplified (rounded down) to "no" evidence. If lots of tiny patches of ground have been searched, though, then the simplification is no longer valid. In reality, enough patches of ground have been searched that we can make confident declarations like, "all North American tigers are in zoos," and, "there are no unicorns on Earth." We haven't proven those things, but we're absurdly well beyond "there are wild tigers in North America" being given a 50% probability, even provisionally.

In the same vein, there's certainly some evidence for gods, but it's the equivalent of an unidentified hair that might have come from an American tiger. It might have also come from an American zebra or an American wildebeest. It's also possible that it came from the neighbor's Pomeranian, though, and I have made a positive ID on some nearby Pomeranian scat.

If we make a list of all of the events that appear not to require a god, what weight should we give that? It's certainly not zero and I'd argue that the evidence of gods is similar to the evidence of wild North American tigers: there is philosophical space for the "possible," but the only plausible American tigers or gods are those that are invisible and don't leave scat and we know of no examples of either.
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Re: Your miracle

Post #69

Post by Mithrae »

Difflugia wrote: Sun May 15, 2022 2:36 am
Mithrae wrote: Sat May 14, 2022 4:14 pmWhere I begin from, as a starting point, is the logical/epistemic principle of indifference which "states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration." Logical possibilities for causation at a fundamental/universal level can be divided into agent-driven, which can be loosely viewed as theistic, and non-agent-driven; two mutually exclusive (at least in any specific instance), logically exhaustive and interchangeable options which therefore, pending some evidence validating one or the other, must be viewed as having equal 50/50 epistemic plausibilities.
How are you imagining the separation of these categories? That's important because we do have relevant evidence. No causal agent that would qualify as theistic has either identified itself or been identified. Are "agents that would be identifiable" and "agents that would identify themselves" separate categories of overall explanation sharing equal space with other epistemic plausibilities or are they classes of theism that have to share the 50%? We have amassed enough no evidence that whatever space these two broad categories inhabit must be assigned a pretty low probability of being real and the only theisms that are plausible are those involving a non-identifiable theism. If those are equal subcategories of theism, does that mean that the theisms that are left only account for 16⅔% of the total space?

That's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it points out the huge flaw in your argument, namely that there is lots of evidence of no gods. Every event that is witnessed to occur without apparently requiring divine intervention is evidence against the existence of gods. It's the equivalent of searching a tiny patch of ground for tigers or unicorns. The lack of a tiger or tiger scat in a tiny area is far from proof that tigers don't exist anywhere, but it is evidence. It's admittedly a tiny bit of evidence compared to the vast number of tiny patches of ground and in some contexts could be simplified (rounded down) to "no" evidence. If lots of tiny patches of ground have been searched, though, then the simplification is no longer valid. In reality, enough patches of ground have been searched that we can make confident declarations like, "all North American tigers are in zoos," and, "there are no unicorns on Earth." We haven't proven those things, but we're absurdly well beyond "there are wild tigers in North America" being given a 50% probability, even provisionally.

In the same vein, there's certainly some evidence for gods, but it's the equivalent of an unidentified hair that might have come from an American tiger. It might have also come from an American zebra or an American wildebeest. It's also possible that it came from the neighbor's Pomeranian, though, and I have made a positive ID on some nearby Pomeranian scat.

If we make a list of all of the events that appear not to require a god, what weight should we give that? It's certainly not zero and I'd argue that the evidence of gods is similar to the evidence of wild North American tigers: there is philosophical space for the "possible," but the only plausible American tigers or gods are those that are invisible and don't leave scat and we know of no examples of either.
There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll give it a go and feel free to let me know if I've overlooked or misunderstood anything. Firstly, the "evidence of no gods." We can roughly quantify, probably within an order of magnitude, how many 'patches of ground' we have looked at for gods in a reliable/scientific manner: Occasional remote expeditions and deep space probes notwithstanding, for the most part our reliable observations cover roughly 0.03% of the land surface area (~0.01% of the total surface area) of a single planet orbiting one star among millions within one galaxy among billions... mostly within 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum... for approximately 0.0000045% of the time that planet has existed... It's truly breathtaking how much we have managed to infer about our universe from the snatches and snippets of data that have flashed through our field of vision within that scope, but comparing our search of the universe to a search of North American land areas is staggeringly inadequate. Furthermore, as you seem to acknowledge, within that scope there have indeed been many reports of divine interaction, so even within that incomprehensibly narrow field of vision available to us our assessment of what we've learned would be more like "No evidence of gods, except for all those reports." What we really mean is something more along the lines of "No evidence according to scientific standards," which of course is hardly surprising considering that science limits itself to phenomena subject to repeatable observation or experimentation, almost excluding scrutiny of superhuman agency by definition. As far as I know the most that we could conclude with any kind of confidence is that god/s, if there are any, either don't want to be unequivocally found or don't much care either way, and while that's an important conclusion in terms of invalidating many forms of Christian and doubtless Muslim theology, it doesn't do a whole lot for discussing the subject of small-scale interventions/miracles.

Furthermore, contrary to your suggestion, even this incomprehensibly narrow band of things which we have observed under reliable or scientific standards are not really explained without reference to gods, or certainly not to the exclusion of gods. Science is descriptive and predictive, not prescriptive. We've observed consistent patterns of behaviour and systematized what we've learned into a set of abstract theories and laws, but those abstractions don't explain the observed patterns in a metaphysical or causative sense, only in the sense which I have outlined to Brunumb; that is, by situating them within broader, coherent theories with better parsimony, breadth/scope and depth/specificity than competing alternatives. Supposing that these explanations are narrowing the 'gaps' in which god can exist - that they are in any way "evidence of no gods" - would require making the big leap over to philosophical naturalism, which to my knowledge has never been rationally justified (and indeed in my experience, is a topic avoided like the plague whenever those implicit assumptions are pointed out).

As to the principle of indifference, you're correct in pointing out that applying it in a logically valid way can be tricky: The various options in play must be mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive and interchangeable (or symmetrical). Any pair of A and not-A will be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive of course, but obviously there is no symmetry between, say, a country with a sasquatch and one without - the variable which changes is infinitessimally small compared to those which remain the same between the two. Hence you're right that any particular conception of a deity couldn't be inferred to have a provisionally 50/50 likelihood based on the principle of indifference. Two binaries which would be symmetrical would be the presence/absence of agency or choice as a fundamental aspect of reality, and the presence/absence of consciousness or thought as a fundamental aspect of reality. Obviously neither of those necessarily imply, say, Christianity or even monotheism; strictly speaking, they might not necessarily imply 'theism' at all, at least in the case of consciousness as the binary variable (cf. panpsychism), although that may be entering the realm of semantic games rather than meaningful distinctions. But again in terms of discussing the reality of miracles, Christianity or monotheism or arguably even strictly-defined theism are not specifically necessary as the causative agents. I suppose in the case of panpsychism the term 'magic' might be a better one than 'miracles,' but the key point - that it still obviously invalidates the already-absurd 'presumption of impossibility' argument which Brunumb etc. have tried to run with - remains in all cases as far as I'm aware.

Of course, following on from that provisional starting point, the apparent occurrence of miracles is one (of several) factors which imply a higher than 50/50 probability of thought and choice being fundamental to reality. Some folk no doubt would counter that there are other factors implying it to be lower; but I don't think you have really offered anything in that vein in this post, unless you wanted to further discuss the leap from scientific to philosophical naturalism?

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Re: Your miracle

Post #70

Post by brunumb »

[Replying to Mithrae in post #67]

As I understand it, miracles are rare or very unlikely events that should not occur if the natural order of things is operating. A specific person winning a lottery with minuscule odds is an unlikely event, but hardly a miracle and not in conflict with nature. So, at what point on the continuum of unlikely events does an event become a miracle?

What criteria are used to establish that a miracle has occurred rather than simply a rare/unlikely event through natural processes? For an event to be deemed a miracle one would surely have to know that the natural order of things wasn't operating. How would you demonstrate that? Do we even have a complete knowledge and understanding of the natural order of things? We have some knowledge, but is it enough to declare that unexpected events must be miraculous with supernatural assistance? We know absolutely nothing about the workings of the supernatural. We don't even know if it exists.
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