alt Hacker News> We know the Exodus didn't happen because the supernatural elements described cannot have happened, ...
Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
- matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview)
- the universe is strictly a physics simulation
- there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)
Replies
>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.
If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.
Yeah.
> witness something that defies all natural explanation
> write about it
> people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element
You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."
Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.
I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.