Investigating the claims made by supernaturalism, part II

Back to Supernaturalism I, part 1 of the series

Investigating the claims made by miracle-believers:

Claims made by supernaturalism about miracles

Miracle-believers make two claims:

1. The laws of nature prove the existence of our specific God.
2. A miracle, the violation of the laws of nature, proves the existence of our specific God.

Laws of nature

Long you lose, short I win. If people are not aware of this trick, they will fall for it. Two contradictory facts cannot establish the same conclusion.

Plus, there is a common misunderstanding of the term laws of nature. These are not laws at all; they are descriptions of how things behave when we do not manipulate or influence them, they are independent of the position of an observer in spacetime. Any so-called law of nature is a scientific model that describes the way material objects interact with each other based on current data (observations and measurements). For the purpose of this understanding, you can set matter and energy as equivalent. Whenever I write matter, you can replace it with energy, and vice versa.

You can look at it with this analogy:

Natural laws are descriptive and not prescriptive

There is a picture called Mona Lisa. You can’t see the picture directly, but you have a description of it made by some people. The picture is nature; the description of this picture is the set of natural laws. Now you notice something strange: a part of this description does not fit the picture. Would you say that the picture somehow violates the description? That does not make any sense; all you can say is that the description is inaccurate and must be fixed. Laws of nature cannot be violated because they are descriptive and not prescriptive.

So any claim that a miracle violates the laws of nature is not only wrong, but it is much worse: it does not make any sense. This claim exploits a false understanding of the terms.

Embedded in this error in thinking are two further claims:

1. We know all the laws of nature perfectly.
2. There are no unknown laws, which means we know what we can’t know about the laws of nature.

Both claims are false. We certainly do not know all laws of nature, and it is logically impossible to know all that we do not know about the laws of nature. But without presupposing either false claim, the idea that miracles violate the known laws of nature falls apart.

Miracles

What really is a miracle? It is either something we cannot understand or cannot explain in the framework of our current understanding of nature. All other definitions do not make any sense.

Here is another understanding of the term miracle:

A miracle is an event that is caused by something supernatural (a supernatural cause or an agent like any god, angel, demon, etc.), and the cause cannot be detected by science.

This definition fails on multiple levels. It presupposes that you know all the things science will detect in the future. If that were the case, science would be superfluous. It still claims that you can know things you can’t know, like every future detection that science will make and can make. It is still based on the logical contradiction We don’t know the cause, and at the same time, we know the cause - it is supernatural.

Are all witnesses perfect observers?

Here lies a big problem. All miracle claims presuppose that all the eyewitnesses have perfect eyesight, that there are no optical illusions in play, and that the witnesses could not have been fooled by anything. The idea that people do not fall for  illusions can be easily shattered; just watch a magic show. Even experts on the subject of deceiving can be fooled, and most eyewitnesses to miracles are certainly not experts in the art of deception or perception. That is the reason you will often find that miracles are witnessed and that a present expert on the kind of observation, like a scientist, does not see a miracle happening.

The presupposition is therefore definitely false.

My definition is much better:

People will get fooled very easily

Even highly intelligent people can be fooled. In the magic community there is a trick known under the title The Trick That Fooled Einstein. It is based on a simple mathematical principle and fooled Albert Einstein badly.

In addition to that, you did not witness most of the miracles. You have a miracle report, which is not a miracle. It is often the result of a telephone game. So you don't know if something has been added or was removed, or the order of events could have been changed. We have plenty of scientific experiments that show how the memory of people gets changed after the event by statements made by others.

And there is another layer that adds to this, namely, people tend to fabricate and embellish stories all the time.

It is therefore impossible to know what really happened when you hear or read a miracle report. There are too many possibilities that could change the story, even if no one fabricates the whole thing altogether. But even if nobody embellished, changed, or invented the story or parts of it, you still do not know what was going on.

We have found yet another case of We don't know, therefore … Miracle reports do not prove anything but that people can be fooled easily.

Continue with part III about supernaturalism