What would it take to make you believe in a supernatural entity?

Tremelo wrote: »

As per the thread title, what would it take to make you believe in, or acknowledge, the existence of - for want of a better term - a god, demon, or supernatural intelligence?

Tightly define these things in testable terms and we can answer, otherwise it's a completely pointless question.

Tremelo wrote: »

...he says dismissively in post #65.

He does. You're still talking about a broad "supernatural entity" (as of post #37) and pretty much everyone who has posted so far has talked about a different variety of magic being. If we're going to be that broad, then the answer is that we as skeptics will be convinced of that which is verifiable and then verified by our senses. We will doubt everything else. I guess you already know that, so the question isn't very productive.

Also, the concept of a supernatural entity is problematic. Since we only accept the observable and since we consider nature to be that which is observable, then observing something that we might have called supernatural, even if it "runs contrary to well establish understanding of natural laws" as zombrex puts it, means that we change our theories of nature to fit what we've observed. If we observe demons, demons are thereafter natural. Even if we find something utterly inexplicable, our response has always been to model it as best we can, if only stochastically (I'm thinking radioactive decay as an example).

Michael Nugent wrote: »

No, it might be an omniscient saddleback caterpillar, or an omniscient toasted tomato sandwich, both of which are omniscient but do not have any of the other powers typically attributed to gods.

If you are omniscient, then you would have the knowledge to do anything, thus making you omnipowerful too, no?

Michael Nugent wrote: »

He is specifically an omniscient non-omnipotent saddleback caterpillar who is semi-benevolent based on the performance of his favourite football team.

A bit less capricious than your average god-esque being so. At least we know what ticks this one off and can plan accordingly.

Sorry Im not sure how to make this picture appear without having to click the link i can only do as attachment.

Interesting none the less

As soon as it can be shown that a "supernatural" phenomenon really happened, doesn't it just start to be considered natural?

Tremelo wrote: »

I do hope you're not a teacher. The most interesting discussions often stem from a vaguely defined question. I'm very pleased with how this thread has developed, and the refinement that has occurred. Such refinement is very valuable, as various elements are considered in the process, as evidenced by numerous earlier posts.

That's a very valid point, the responses have been diverse and interesting. My apologies for being so abrupt before.

There are some interesting po8ints there, Peregrinus, and I will reply to them later as I am at meetings most of today. But as a quick overview, I am not suggesting that the idea of a supernatural realm is impossible to prove, but rather that the idea itself is incoherent. As I said, I'll elaborate later.

Thank you for your response, Michael.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

Strictly speaking, I am not sure that choice exists. The latest neuroscience seems to suggest that what we interpret as us making choices may be our consciousness noticing choices that our brains have already made. But let’s park that for the moment, and use choice in its ordinary day-to-day language usage.

Yes, I think we must park that. Atheist criticisms of belief, and theist criticisms of unbelief, as well as defences of both positions, are meaningless if belief and unbelief are neurologically determined.
No doubt there is an interesting discussion to be had about whether we can, in fact, make up our minds on religious questions (or indeed on any questions). But that discussion belongs in another thread. In this forum, one piece of common ground between theists and atheists has to be that we can, indeed, make up our minds.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

Even there, we have a question as to whether we can choose to believe something or whether we just believe something based on our experiences and then rationalize to ourselves why we believe it, but let’s also park that for the moment.

Yes, let’s park that too, but not without noting that its quite a significant thing to park. The belief that I can make up my mind leads on to speculation about how I do make up my mind, and that’s an issue that very often is raised in theist/atheist discussion - and legitimately raised, I think. And the discussion we’re now having may ultimately lead to a point where we have to open this question, if we’re to make progress.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

With the above provisos, I think there is a difference between (a) choosing to believe something that is consistent with the evidence of our experience (.e. believing that you are reading this on a computer) and (b) choosing to believe something that we have no evidence for (i.e. that George Bush is an alien space lizard).

Option (a) is closer to the default position that our brains present us with by interpreting the experience of our senses, and option (b) is closer to an active choice to move away from that default position, for whatever reason. I think believing in a supernatural realm is closer to option (b) because there is no evidence that it exists, and so it is false to equate believing in either option as being equivalent.

Look, I think your George Bush example is a poor one.

It’s not just that we have no evidence that George Bush is an alien space lizard; we actually have evidence that he is something else - a terrestrial human being. Plus, even if he were an alien space lizard, an alien space lizard would be a natural phenomenon, and we would be entitled to look for the kind of evidence that should be associated with a natural phenomenon. We would expect an alien space lizard to be green, scaly and reptilian, and - to my lasting regret - George Bush is none of these things. Hence, we actually have evidence that George Bush is not an alien space lizard.

(Now, if your speculation had been that George Bush was a monkey who had been dressed in a suit and strategically shaved, I might have more difficulty in assembling evidence to refute it. But, still, the possibility of doing so would be there.)

This is why I mentioned “category error” in my earlier post. The proposition “God exists” is a fundamentally different proposition from the proposition “George Bush is a lizard”.

Suppose I postulate that there is a God who is the fundamental ground for the existence of all things that exist, other than God. Suppose also that the postulate is true. What evidence would we find? The only evidence - at any rate, the only objective, measurable, demonstrable, verifiable evidence - would be that things other than God exist. And, lo, observation leads to the conclusion that things other than God do, indeed, exist.

In short, we have all the evidence we can possibly have that the proposition is true. And yet, I freely concede, the proposition is not proven. What we have here is a proposition which cannot be proven (or disproven) from the evidence.

Or, in other words, what we have here is not a scientific proposition.

At this point, we have to make a choice. We can reject the proposition on the basis that a proposition which is not a scientific proposition cannot be true. But few people would take that stance, if only because that would be to accept a proposition which is not a scientific proposition. (I.e. the proposition that only scientific propositions are true is itself not a scientific proposition.)

A more common response might be to dismiss the proposition that “God exists” on the basis that a non-scientific proposition cannot be relevant, or useful (or cannot have some other quality which would make it interesting to us). But “relevant” and “useful” are fairly subjective terms. The obvious response is to say that non-scientific propositions may not interest you, but that is no reason why they should not interest me. (The other obvious response is that most people really do interest themselves in non-scientific propositions, e.g. ethical propositions, and consequently they need to have some basis on which they discount some non-scientific propositions while entertaining others, and it is worth exploring what that basis is.)

Yet another response is to say that, since this question cannot be definitively answered, there is no point in considering it or in forming opinions about it. But, again, this ignores the fact that we generally do consider, and form opinions about, a wide range of questions that cannot be definitively answered (e.g., again, ethical questions) so there is some other unrecognized rule dictating which propositions we entertain and which we dismiss.

And of course yet another response is not to dismiss the proposition at all, but to entertain it, to look for some basis, other than evidence, on which to evaluate it.

There’s a range of choices there, and there is (and can be) absolutely no evidence guiding us to pick any of the range over any other of the range. Yet choose we must.

And this is why, I suspect, we cannot park for ever a consideration of how we exercise our choice to believe or not belief. We may not be able to account honestly for our beliefs (or for our unbelief) without doing so at some point.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

With regard to the idea of a supernatural realm, I believe that it is an incoherent idea. Putting aside the labels natural and supernatural, reality is what actually exists. Some of it we are already aware of, some of it we are as yet unaware of, and some it we will probably never be aware of.

But there is no reason to divide the parts of reality that are we are currently unaware of into ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. It doesn’t add anything to our search for knowledge about reality, and indeed it distracts from the integrity of that search by positing imaginary scenarios that are untestable, and giving them the same weight as those parts of reality that we do know and understand, and the same weight as testable theories about those parts of reality that we do not yet understand.

With respect, I think you may be begging the question to some extent.

I take your point that “natural” and “supernatural” are categories that we have made up, and we can dispense with, and that all there truly is is a diverse but undivided “reality”.

But when you go on to say that “it distracts from the integrity of that search [for knowledge about reality] by positing imaginary scenarios that are untestable”, my response is “why?”. If reality includes, or could include, untestable things, then if our search is to have integrity we must pursue knowledge or understanding of them somehow, and that cannot be by demanding “natural” evidence (or evidence that we would categorise as natural if we accepted the categorization). How we can do this is another question, but it seems to me that we must do it, or drop the pretence that we are searching for knowledge about reality.

I think your objection really only has traction with somebody who already believes or assumes, explicitly or implicitly, that reality only includes testable things. Which is why I say I think it’s begging the question.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

The George Bush example may seem to be a category error, but in context I suggest that it is not. I used it as shorthand for strange religious theories that are based on imagination rather than evidence.

David Icke promotes the idea (and many people believe it) that George Bush is a shape-shifting alien space lizard from the constellation Draco, and that these lizards (who also include Queen Elizabeth, Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie) are actually the race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth. He also suggests that they have crossbred with humans because they are also the fallen angels who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha, and that they engage in Satanic rituals to maintain the illusion of human form.

Now this is clearly delusional, but if you look at it objectively, it is no sillier than most mainstream religious beliefs about other gods. And in this context, the proposition “George Bush is an alien space lizard” as shorthand for “Shapeshifting alien space lizard gods exist” is pretty similar to the proposition “God exists” and is deserving of the same type of analysis.

I disagree. If Icke suggests that the Anunnaki are, in reality, alien space lizards from Draco, then he is suggesting that they are a natural phenomenon, just one hitherto not properly observed or understood by us. We - or, rather, the Babylonians - identified them as “gods” because we couldn’t understand or explain them. But our inability to do this reflects on us, not on them. His propositions can - at least in principal - be tested; we can go to Draco and see if we find the lizards there. Or we can observe the Satanic rituals. Or we can look for DNA/genetic evidence to confirm or refute the “mating with fallen angels” theory.

The proposition “God is the fundamental ground for all existence” is of an entirely different order. It looks to me a lot more like a philosophical proposition than anything which could be bracketed as part of the natural sciences. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true; it just means that the techniques of natural science are not going to be much help in evaluating it. No amount of trips to Draco or DNA tests or others test of the kind are going to be any help to us, not because we lack the ability or understanding to conduct the appropriate tests but because there are no such tests. This shows that the proposition is, indeed, a proposition of a radically different kind from the proposition that George Bush is a lizard.

Michael Nugent wrote: »

In this context, I assume you’re using as shorthand that ‘natural’ and ‘testable’ are interchangeable?

Good question. Let me think about that.

When I say “testable”, I think first of all of the kind of testing employed in the natural sciences - empirical observation, measurement, demonstrable, verifiable, etc. So if we mean “natural” in the sense of the “natural sciences” then, yes, what is natural is testable.

But is that true for other senses of “testable”? And is the converse, i.e, that what is testable is natural, also true? (As it has to be, if the terms are to be interchangeable.)

Suppose I postulate a philosophical proposition - say, that in a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. I’m talking here about the platonic ideal of a right-angled triangle, so no such right-angled triangle actually exists in material form. We can evaluate this proposition in two ways.

First, we can look at material things which are close enough to the platonic ideal, and we can empirically test whether, for them, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This can’t conclusively prove or disprove the theorem, but it can give us some pretty strong pointers. Were we to find a more-or-less right-angled triangle where the square of the hypotenuse was not remotely close to the sum of the other two squares, this would point strongly to the theorem being false in at least some instances.

Secondly, we can prove the theorem by considering the platonic ideal, starting from some equally ideal axioms and reasoning from them to establish that, given the axioms, the theorem is true. (And this of course is in fact what we do in Junior Cert. Maths.)

That second process, it seems to me, is also a form of testing. We test our theorem by seeing whether it is consistent with, or an inevitable deduction from, a number of axioms whose truth is assumed. That’s not an internally complete test; the truth of the axioms is assumed but not proven. Nevertheless it’s a significantly useful test and, importantly, we accept that it’s actually a more persuasive test than going out and measuring lots of material objects that approximate to the platonic ideal.

Now, you can argue about whether the right-angled triangle, since it’s an ideal, is a “natural” phenomenon or an imaginary one. If we equate “natural” and “material”, then clearly it’s not natural. If by “imaginary” we mean something that exists only because we imagine it, then it’s imaginary. So here we have something imaginary, and arguably not natural, which can in a meaningful way be tested, albeit that the most informative tests do not employ the techniques of natural science.

So, no, I don’t think “natural” and “testable” are interchangeable, except perhaps for some carefully-defined values of “natural” and/or “testable”.

And this comes back to a point I made in post #85, where I was discussing the ways in which we might respond to a non-scientific proposition. One of the options I suggested was to look for some basis, other than [natural] evidence, on which to evaluate the proposition. I think testing a geometric theorem against stated axioms is such an evaluation - or a testing, if you will.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Suppose I postulate that there is a God who is the fundamental ground for the existence of all things that exist, other than God. Suppose also that the postulate is true. What evidence would we find? The only evidence - at any rate, the only objective, measurable, demonstrable, verifiable evidence - would be that things other than God exist. And, lo, observation leads to the conclusion that things other than God do, indeed, exist.

In short, we have all the evidence we can possibly have that the proposition is true. And yet, I freely concede, the proposition is not proven. What we have here is a proposition which cannot be proven (or disproven) from the evidence.

Or, in other words, what we have here is not a scientific proposition.

What we have here is something that isn't even a philosophical statement, as you could replace "god" in your postulation, assume it true and it would always fit:
Propostion: "Mark Hamill created the universe"
If it where true, you would expect the existence of a universe.
Oh look, the universe exists, therefore I created the universe.

Peregrinus wrote: »

At this point, we have to make a choice. We can reject the proposition on the basis that a proposition which is not a scientific proposition cannot be true. But few people would take that stance, if only because that would be to accept a proposition which is not a scientific proposition. (I.e. the proposition that only scientific propositions are true is itself not a scientific proposition.)

Except thats not the proposition being made if sommeone reject your proposition. Even if you ignore the fact that your proposition is so illogical as to be completely moot (a perfect reason in of itself to reject it), by being untestable the possibility of it being true is completely unmeasurable. With absolutely no possible way to tell if its true or not, it is a useless truth to hold to. And it is useless, as nothing can ever be reliably attributed to it, no reliable predictions can be made and nothing can be gained from it.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Yet another response is to say that, since this question cannot be definitively answered, there is no point in considering it or in forming opinions about it. But, again, this ignores the fact that we generally do consider, and form opinions about, a wide range of questions that cannot be definitively answered (e.g., again, ethical questions) so there is some other unrecognized rule dictating which propositions we entertain and which we dismiss.

There is a universe-sized gap between an ethical question with no definite answer (because they are subject to variables), and a question which can never be answered at all. We can have a measure, of sorts, of how right an ethical answer is, there is no way at all to measure you proposition.