Back to Supernaturalism V, part 5 of the series
Magical thinking
Scientific causality is quite different from the understanding of causality by supernaturalists. The common understanding goes like this:
(A) → POOF! MAGIC! → (B)
(A) and (B) can be anything, and you cannot explain why (B) happened. Because any argument is circular or leads to an infinite regression: why did (B) happen? Because (A) happened. (B) is the reason we assume that (A) happened. And so on, and that explains nothing. Everything is possible, but we use causality to determine what could possibly have caused (B). Because any (A) could have caused (B), we cannot rule out any possibility, and we cannot logically conclude or backtrack what caused (B). If anything is possible, nothing is probable. If we cannot backtrack causes, we only know that we don't know what caused (B). And again, claiming that a cause is supernatural is identical to the claim that we don't know.
Supernatural causes misuse the concept of causality
Because of this common misconception of causation, we see that supernaturalism is based on magical thinking. There is no way in supernaturalism to find out what a supernatural cause is. Or, supernaturalism just declares unknown causes arbitrarily as supernatural magic causes. Because we know for certain that there are unknown natural causes. On a linguistic as well as on a logical level, all unknown causes are the same, so that an unknown supernatural cause is the same as an unknown natural cause. Unknown
in the natural sense and unknown
in the supernatural sense are indistinguishable from one another. We use the same term for what we cannot distinguish. Supernaturalists claim to have knowledge in the realm of the unknown by arbitrarily declaring some causes as supernatural. The reason for this is a magical understanding of causality, which explains nothing.
I claimed that if everything is possible, nothing is probable. Allow me to explain.
If we cannot estimate probability, like in any supernaturalistic framework, the ad hoc probability is one divided by the number of possibilities. In supernaturalism, there is no way to rule out any possibility. So the probability for any claim to be true is one against infinity, which amounts to zero.
The same is true for God. The probability that your specific god exists is one divided by the number of logically possible gods. The number of logically possible gods is infinite, so the ad hoc probability is zero. You can worsen the case by including non-rational and not logically possible gods. But from a probabilistic standpoint, this does not make any difference.
Additionally, even if you assume that there is a creator of matter, a god, this does not tell you anything about the existence of the God of any specific monotheistic religion or religious belief. This cause of existence in a magical framework can be an agent or a supernatural cause devoid of any agency. No amount of words can close the gap between a supernatural cause for existence and the god of any religion.
This reason alone turns atheism into a viable choice. You tell me that I can't know anything about God. I say this is true, so I don't know which God to choose, because the possibilities are endless. This is true even if we presuppose supernaturalism, so atheism is not dependent on naturalism, even if it is true that most western atheists are naturalists. It is not true for Buddhist atheists or Jain (from Jainism), or some other eastern traditions predating Christianity.
I know that supernaturalists have their criteria to think they could choose the right god. I have yet to find any valid or sound argument for any specific god of any religion. Most of them think that if they have established a God that might have created the universe, their work is done. But that's actually the point where the fun starts.
Homer Simpson said it nicely:
What's the big deal about going to some building every Sunday?… And what if we've picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder.