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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> Isn’t the point of “supernatural” that it will exist outside of empiricism (depending on how you define that)?

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.

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How do you define empirical evidence? I’m seeing it as “information acquired by observation or experimentation”.

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…

> How do you define empirical evidence? I’m seeing it as “information acquired by observation or experimentation”.

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.)

Or consider Elijah and the priests of Baal in 1 Kings 18. Pretty good empirical demonstration there.

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...

What? "Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."

And yet earlier in the very same work, that author says:

"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).

Just to make sure: are you really saying that the original Christians were kind of empiricists? And that mainstream Christianity isn't about "belief in the unseen"?

So I misunderstood the person I was replying to. I thought he was saying that supernatural was outside of evidence; but he meant more specifically empiricism; which literally means sensory data, but probably he means to extend to the sorts of repeatable physical tests.

[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.

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