If man cannot rule out alternatives with 100% certainty, then it is possible those alternatives are true. Our lack of complete knowledge about everything renders alternatives possible.
Scientists cannot claim with 100% certainty that at no time in 1650 or 1950 did anything which exceeded the speed of light. As a result of being incapable of ruling this out with 100% certainty, and this incapability in part being the result of a lack of complete knowledge about everything, then it is possible something existed which exceeded the speed of light in 1650 or 1950.
I would be most interested to know how exactly you deduce it was not possible, i.e. impossible, for anything to exceed the speed of light in 1650 and 1950?
It is more probable that there will be a murderer hiding in your closet when you wake up tomorrow morning then there is for any supernatural event to exist. How much time do you plan to spend thinking about the (possible) murderer in your closet tonight?
You are right, we do "go about our lives,"so what is your point? I never said anything to suggest we cannot “go about our lives” although we lack complete knowledge.
The distinction is of the utmost importance to anyone who believes in God!
I suspect the OP’s Mr. Johnson had exactly that- God- in mind when he took
umbrage at his addressee’s naturalistic view of reality.
There is nothing vague about it.
Limiting the case to the omnipotent Abrahamic God, He created the scientific
Laws of Nature, but is not restricted by them. For example, although mice and
men cannot, as a matter of scientific law, exceed the Speed of Light, God can:
He may take physical presence anywhere from one end of the Universe to the
other instantaneously and simultaneously, and He knows everything everywhere
taking place regardless of what form He chooses to assume for Himself, and where
He chooses to assume it.
The Abraham god is considered omnipotent by almost all Abrahamic sects,
isn’t He? nd omnipotence conveys the ability to transcend the Laws of Nature,
doesn’t it?
No, it means the ability to transcend them, as depicted by numerous miraculous
scriptural episodes, going back to such things as the Burning Bush and beyond.
God is NOT the creature of the Laws of Nature; they are His creatures.
What I see, in you, is someone who has somehow missed a foundation tenet
of the world’s two largest religions. What I have related is not a collection of
“stories”, it is what anyone with a mere passing knowledge of intellectual history
should know.
Since you will not be happy without your “cite”, here:
My motivation for entering this thread was only to affirm the importance
of supernatural characters and events in the perception of vast numbers
of people. I myself seriously doubt the existence of anything supernatural.
Furthermore, I do not think an omnipotent god could also be benevolent,
on the evidence of the impact upon us of the crueller forces of Nature.
So much misery has afflicted us, so easily preventable by One of infinite power.
And finally, if God is our Father then it is incumbent upon Him to protect
us even from ourselves, as it would be incumbent for any human father
to intervene if his children set upon each other in violence.
If He exists *He *has sinned against us. Better pray He does not exist, for we
would be at his Unholy mercy.
I agree.
I tend to think Moses was probably historical, although the Biblical details
are certainly almost all myth.
Based on what evidence? The Exodus clearly never happened, so where does Moses even fit in? David, Solomon, these I can see a case for. Moses, not at all.
Well, “Based on a real person” covers a lot of territory.
For instance, the fictional character of Santa Claus was based on a real person. This real person, however, did not wear a red suit, did not live at the north pole, did not have a toyshop full of elves, did not drive a sleigh with 8 tiny reindeer, and was not named Santa Claus. According to legend the real person is supposed to have given people secret gifts, but we have no way of knowing if that legend is true, or if it’s the same sort of thing as George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.
So if there is a “real Santa Claus”, but the real Santa Claus is an accountant who lives in Miami, has no beard, hates children, and never gives presents, what does it even mean when I claim that this person is the real Santa Claus?
He certainly can’t if the manner of his existence is that he is believed in, but has no existence outside the mind of the believers.
The problem of vagueness that I refer to is that God gets to be all sorts of things depending on who you ask - responsible for the saving of 3 people from a plane crash, but not the deaths of the 220 other people on the flight; responsible for a star runningback’s success, but completely unconcerned with the individual affairs of the universe to a deist; a power that wants a personal relationship with each human, but refuses to talk directly to them; an entity kills everyone and everything on Earth except those occupying a boat, and a font of infinite forgiveness.
Even limited to popular interpretations of the Bible, God is not a well-defined entity. Therefore, vague. Other supernatural entities - ghosts, pixies, demons - are also vaguely defined.
This gets to the heart of the issue I think. When creationists claim that science is closed-minded because it refuses to consider supernatural explanations, the creationists and the scientists are using two different ideas of what they mean by “supernatural.”
To the scientists who claim that we can’t study the supernatural, what they’re saying is that something that has no effects on the natural world can’t be studied. However the creationists see their supernatural God as having real effects in the physical world. I think that generally scientists would say that if anything has effects in the natural world, it’s open to being examined by science.
Again, you are confusing our knowledge of whether something is possible with whether it actually is possible. If our physics is even remotely accurate, we know nothing exceeded c in 1650 or even 1650,000 BCE. (If we are wrong about this, then it could happen.) But if the true laws of physics make exceeding c impossible, it matters little what we think about it.
Because the laws of physics are invariant over time, which we can demonstrate by observing stars and galaxies the light from which left long before 1650.
I’m not saying that we can be absolutely 100% certain that the laws of physics are true. We can’t be 100% certain that there was a world in 1650. But that is a different matter from actual laws.
Interesting. Luckily, we don’t live in a deterministic universe. Even if we did, we would never know what is possible by your definition or not because the time and information needed to determine what is possible (that is what will be the result of current conditions) is greater than the time for the next thing to actually happen.
If supernatural events can’t affect the natural world, then they effectively don’t exist. I don’t see anything in any reasonable definition of the supernatural that would imply that they can’t be examined by science. They just can’t be explained by science. The problem isn’t that science can’t examine these things - it is that every supposed effect of a supernatural phenomenon has turned out to be explicable by natural causes. Fakery is a natural cause.
Except when chariots of iron are involved, apparently.
Omnipotence has been inferred for God, mostly from the Christian definition of God, but there is precious little in the Bible, especially the older parts, that support it.