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Brendinoooyesterday at 7:43 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


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AnimalMuppetyesterday at 8:43 PM

I think that this arises from one of two presuppositions: Either 1) the physical universe is all that exists, or 2) science is the only way to learn truth. (These two presuppositions are not strictly independent of each other.)

These are presuppositions. They are assumptions that you make at the start of the game, that you build your interpretation of the world on. They are not empirically proven in any way. (For #2, show me the scientific experiment that proved it.)

But people have built these presuppositions so deeply into their thinking that they don't even realize that they're making them. Within the silo of those presuppositions, of course miracles don't ever happen!

But, if that's you (not Brindinooo, but you the reader), try to step outside that for a moment, just as a thought experiment. For this experiment, let us hypothesize that God actually exists - not just the word or the idea, but that someone is actually there. And let us hypothesize that he can actually do things, things that change physical reality. (You could think of it as breakpointing a running program with a debugger, and changing the value of a variable, and then resuming. The value actually changes, with no antecedent that the program can see.) And let us hypothesize that God actually does this - he actually changes something.

(Digression: A typical way of thinking about the scientific method is four steps: Systematic observation, search for regularity among the observations, forming a hypothesis to explain the regularity, and testing the hypothesis.)

For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.

But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!

And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.

So there is no direct scientific evidence that God exists, because science is not a tool that is capable of investigating that question.

But if God exists, and if he actually does something, even if we don't see it with science, we might see it with history. Somebody might have observed it and recorded it.

And when you read such a thing, how do you react? Do you say "That's impossible?" You're right; it is. But what is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? If that's your response, it indicates that you're in the silo of the material-universe-is-all-that-exists presupposition, and can't or won't think outside of it. Instead, I think you're reaction should be "That's impossible, but did it happen?" Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we would expect if God exists and actually did something.

So the fundamental question is not whether these events have a supernatural element or not. The fundamental question is whether they happened.

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