I wish people were more honest about the inherent contradiction in that assertion. Isn’t the point of “supernatural” that it will exist outside of empiricism (depending on how you define that)?
In this case most people use the word "supernatural" as some vague stand in for ideas found outside of the scientific consensus [1]. Meanwhile, scientists and philosophers use it as a precise category that lets them wash their hands of the topic completely.
[1] Or whatever the speaker believes the consensus to be, which is its own messy topic
Um, no? "Supernatural" just implies that there's something outside the "natural". To the NPCs in World of Warcraft, you are supernatural, since you exist outside the rules of their system.
There are certainly some Christians who say that faith requires the absence of evidence; "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed." But if you actually read the New Testament, that's not what the early Christians taught; on the contrary, they were all about evidence. None of the original disciples had the blessedness of believing without seeing, so it clearly cannot be a requirement for a genuine faith.
"This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will." (Hebrews 2:3b-4)
Here he presents three types of evidence which are meant to corroborate Jesus' words:
1. The eyewitness testimony of the original disciples
2. Testimony from God, in the form of signs, wonders, and various miracles
3. Evidence of the Holy Spirit in the early Christians.
I don't personally see that the world is round; or that microbes and viruses exist and make me sick; or any number of other things which modern science tells us. Yet I have assurance that they are true. That's the kind of faith the authors of the New Testament are recommending (including the author which you quote).
[EDIT] Christianity is certainly about belief in the unseen. My claim was simply that it was belief in the unseen based on sufficient evidence, as opposed to belief in the unseen specifically without evidence.
I wouldn't expect a self-aware NPC from within World of Warcraft to be able to prove the existence of humans by doing repeated tests; by definition whatever tests he does will be mostly following the rules of the system that he's in. Such an NPC could ask for specific things to be done by an "alleged" human, which would provide evidence. Whether that sort of non-repeatable evidence counts as "empirical" in the philosophy of science, I don't know.
Either observation can include stuff that was observed and recorded a long time ago, and we therefore have evidence of the supernatural, or it’s meaning something more like observation in a more “scientific method” sense, which automatically excludes certain categories of potential reality.
> Um, no? "Supernatural" just implies that there's something outside the "natural". To the NPCs in World of Warcraft, you are supernatural, since you exist outside the rules of their system.
I suppose so, but I don’t think that’s how most people define supernatural. Regardless, this is a great illustration! I don’t think the WoW characters know anything about C++, yet it is the basis of their reality…
Consider the story of Gideon. He has a spiritual experience, where he's told to go do something very dangerous. So he prays, "I'm going to put this wool out overnight; if that was really you talking to me, make the wool wet and the ground dry." Next morning, the wool is wet and the ground is dry. So he prays, "I'm going to put this wool out; if that was really you talking to me, make the ground wet and the wool dry." Next morning, the ground is wet and the wool is dry. So, he goes ahead and does the dangerous thing.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Gideon's experience was as described, does that count as empirical evidence (from Gideon's perspective anyway)?
I mean yeah, it's not something you can replicate 100 times, and then someone else can independently replicate, for the same reason "Will my brother pass me the salt when I ask him" isn't something you can replicate 100 times: people can choose to behave differently, and typically do when you start to treat them like a law of nature rather than a person. (Which, as you say, excludes this potential reality from that kind of empirical verification.)
Of course, if the priests of Baal had the equivalent of a modern Christian apologist in their ranks, things might have been a little different: http://apastasea.blogspot.com/2014/10/elijah-and-apologist-o...
Unfortunately that leaves quite a bit of reality up in the air that isn't subject to being empirically tested...
I define "the scientific method" as a process with four steps. 1: Systematic observation. 2: Looking for regularities in the observations. 3: Forming hypotheses to explain the regularities. 4: Experimentally testing the hypotheses.
(This isn't just me. Wikipedia describes the scientific method very similarly. This isn't me trying to cook the definition to make a point.)
Now assume, for purposes of argument, that God exists. And since lots of people use the word "God" to mean lots of different things, I'm going to define what I mean. By "God" I mean a being with personality - someone, not just something. Someone who existed before the physical universe, and exists independently of it - "outside" it in some sense, though I don't mean in a geometric way. Someone who created the physical universe, and who can, at his sole discretion, reach into the physical universe and change things. (You can think of this kind of like using a debugger - you can stop the program and change the value of a variable, with no antecedent in the flow of execution of the program.) And if and when he does, things actually change - it's not just a change in our perception; things actually physically change.
All this I ask you to assume for the sake of this argument. You don't have to believe it, but it's there for the argument to make sense.
And one more assumption: Assume that this God actually does change something, and that science observes it at step 1. The question is, what's science going to do with it?
They're going to throw it out at step 2, because there is no regularity. There's no pattern, unless God does this a lot.
But if they don't throw it out at step 2, the next problem comes at step 3 - forming a hypothesis. The way science currently is, "God" is very much out of favor as a hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God actually is the explanation. Science is never going to propose the correct explanation for such an event.
But even if science proposes God as the hypothesis at step 3, the next problem comes at step 4: how are you going to test it? "Um, God, could you do that again? And, um, sign it this time?" You can't run the experiment. I don't see how you could run the experiment even in principle.
So in that sense, the supernatural exists outside of empiricism. This doesn't tell us anything about the supernatural; it only tells us that science is the wrong tool for investigating that.
But if God actually did reach in from outside and change things, even if we can't see it with science, we might see it with history. We might find historical record of God doing something. And when I mention that, one of the things that should come to mind is the resurrection of Jesus. It's like a giant flashing neon sign that says "Look over here. God did something."
You may say that the resurrection is impossible, and you'd be right. But therefore... what? What is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? I think that's the wrong position. It's impossible, but did it happen? Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we'd be looking for, if God actually did something.
And I think that, once you stop saying "impossible, therefore it didn't happen" and start actually, objectively looking at the data, the evidence is quite good. Not bulletproof, but quite good.
So in that sense, I think you can say that there is empirical evidence.
Then you should check your Bible ;-) because 1 Kings 18 describes just such an experiment. There's always a Less Wrong article, and this one's is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s...
There have also been things like experiments on the efficacy of healing prayers whose negative results lend credence to the idea that a god who answers prayers does not exist. https://www.noctua.org.uk/blog/2010/07/08/healing-prayer-exp... discusses that (the links to the Premier Radio forums are dead, alas).
> even if we can't see it with science, we might see it with history. We might find historical record of God doing something.
"It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages."