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krappyesterday at 10:47 PM1 replyview on HN

>Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?

Possibly, but I fully believe science is capable of explaining these mechanisms, because thus far science has been able to explain everything that theists claimed was supernatural in nature, while no evidence has been found to justify belief in the supernatural.

So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.

>I don't think that's what happened there.

Their claim was that science cannot prove the supernatural, but the only possible evidence would be personal testimonials - and we're in a subthread litigating the supernatural claims surrounding the Exodus story - which only exist in the Bible. So I respectfully disagree. They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.

Also, science should be able to prove the supernatural, as every claim about the supernatural is that it manifests in some physical, tangible form in our universe, which means it must leave some kind of evidence.

>No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.

It is, though. Claims alone don't prove anything. We prove that things happened in the past by discovering evidence of it, through artifacts or documents, and finding corroborating evidence, which is science.

>How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?

First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.


Replies

AnimalMuppettoday at 12:03 AM

> They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.

If you're referring to my post, that is not what I argued. I argued that a claim of supernatural events could not be dismissed as "cannot have happened", but must be evaluated on the quality of the evidence for that event.

I did not apply that to events in the Bible, but that is how claims of supernatural events in the Bible must be evaluated. Sure, they're eyewitness claims. All history from that era is eyewitness or derived from it, or archaeology or derived from it. The point is to not say "can't have happened", but rather to actually evaluate how good the evidence is for any claim.