I thought that it didn’t quite make sense to speak of non-naturalistic events at all. What would a non-naturalistic event look like?
It’s not so much that we take it “on faith.” It’s that, in a certain type of thinking (the kind of thinking where sentences represent claims about the world, claims must be backed by evidence, inferences must follow from premises) the very notion of a miracle is incoherent.
I was trying to help a friend write a role-playing game—yes, I’m a geek—and build in some kind of rigorous quantitative model of magic. It’s surprisingly frustrating. I invite anyone to try the exercise. You wind up with all kinds of tricky internal contradictions as soon as you start letting players break the laws of physics. I appreciate physics much more, having seen how incredibly irritating it is to try to give the appearance of structure and sense where there is none.
Of course, in a different mode of thinking—poetic thinking, or transcendent thinking -- you can talk about miracles. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” is good strong poetry and (to me) has a ring of truth. But it isn’t a proposition at all!
I think if non-naturalistic means anything, it can be clarified as follows.
Assume we are running as a simulation on someone’s computer (Nick Bostrom has argued that we probably are). Our sim defines the boundaries of the world we can directly interact with, even in principle. Call that “realm” the natural.
A non-naturalistic event is an event in which the programmers interfere with the sim while it is in progress. Maybe after 9 gigayears they insert the first replicator, brute-force.
We can suspect it’s non-naturalistic because it (a) had no apparent physical causes or (b) was so unlikely as to be ridiculous (although anthropic arguments muddy that last consideration when we discuss the origin of life).
Other senses of “supernatural” I find to be incoherent.
I thought that it didn’t quite make sense to speak of non-naturalistic events at all. What would a non-naturalistic event look like?
It’s not so much that we take it “on faith.” It’s that, in a certain type of thinking (the kind of thinking where sentences represent claims about the world, claims must be backed by evidence, inferences must follow from premises) the very notion of a miracle is incoherent.
I was trying to help a friend write a role-playing game—yes, I’m a geek—and build in some kind of rigorous quantitative model of magic. It’s surprisingly frustrating. I invite anyone to try the exercise. You wind up with all kinds of tricky internal contradictions as soon as you start letting players break the laws of physics. I appreciate physics much more, having seen how incredibly irritating it is to try to give the appearance of structure and sense where there is none.
Of course, in a different mode of thinking—poetic thinking, or transcendent thinking -- you can talk about miracles. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” is good strong poetry and (to me) has a ring of truth. But it isn’t a proposition at all!
I think if non-naturalistic means anything, it can be clarified as follows.
Assume we are running as a simulation on someone’s computer (Nick Bostrom has argued that we probably are). Our sim defines the boundaries of the world we can directly interact with, even in principle. Call that “realm” the natural.
A non-naturalistic event is an event in which the programmers interfere with the sim while it is in progress. Maybe after 9 gigayears they insert the first replicator, brute-force.
We can suspect it’s non-naturalistic because it (a) had no apparent physical causes or (b) was so unlikely as to be ridiculous (although anthropic arguments muddy that last consideration when we discuss the origin of life).
Other senses of “supernatural” I find to be incoherent.