Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
If something can “transcend” the laws of nature, then the ability to do that is part of the laws of nature, and thus it transcends nothing. We just didn’t know all of the rules.
If ghosts are real, then they aren’t breaking the rules of nature because clearly the rules of nature allow for ghosts, we just don’t understand how yet, but then ghosts are natural.
By definition, anything real is natural, and anything supernatural is not.
That’s just a weak reformulation of the “God of the gaps” fallacy.
The difference is that science is observable and testable, god is not. This key difference, changes it from being a fallacy.
So, in the god of the gaps fallacy it goes like this:
Science isn’t anti-god either. It’s just pro-knowledge. Observable, testable, verifiable knowledge.
This part. If ghosts are observable, testable, and verifiable, then we would have a way of measuring things. Maybe ghosts are 4th dimensional entities. It’s very possible they are real and it’s purely something we haven’t been able to measure thus far.
Science gets stuff wrong all the time. The point of science is to be adapting and learning. And part of that involves verifying credibility of a new source of information.
Unfortunately, almost all of the sources of “proof” of things like ghosts are heavily biased in favor of proving things over disproving, and there are a lot of people throwing clear scams into the mix. Science needs to go in with an open mind. “I want ghosts to be real, and the wind moved this door, therefore it was a ghost” is not valid proof of ghosts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohbNt18wNs Things like this. A pastor that can walk on air, which is clearly fake. If the pastor believed he could walk on air, why would he fake it. This is not proof that people CAN’T walk on air, but it’s a great example of why when someone claims they can, you should figure out why lying about it benefits them (this guy clearly wants more people to tithe to his church).
GotG benefits from the default being “GOD!” for all things, because it leaves them in power. Science has no benefit from anything except the truth. Sure there will be liars in science as well and a lot of people will optimistically want to believe the lies if they sound nice, but looking at things like LK-99, it winds up disproven when it’s a lie. Capitalism and industry don’t care about your fake superconductor. That doesn’t benefit them, they only care about real superconductors.
Saying that I’m making a god of the gaps argument would also mean that you are making a science of the gaps argument.
Except, when you fill the gaps with science, you have evidence and proof. Not superstition and ancient myth.
But you’re still leading yourself into a fallacious argument. It’s not any better.
It’s only a fallacious argument if you don’t say “we can’t answer that yet” and maybe add, “but here are some theories…”
“I don’t know” does not mean “therefore the supernatural is real.”
My goal really is to convince people to sit on the fence about it.
Convince people that the supernatural is real? Because that is exactly what you’re not doing with this line of argument.
But we still need the word “supernatural” to describe such things. Otherwise, what do we call the phenomena?
Fictional