When is the YEC God no longer the YEC God? That question came up in my recent thread on methodological naturalism and accommodationism. In that thread I argued that science falsifies the YEC God, because it shows definitively that the earth is about a million times older than the YECs believe. If the earth is old, then the YEC God doesn’t exist. There might still be a God, but not the YEC God, because the YEC God necessarily created the earth a short time ago. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be “the YEC God” at all!
Robin and Petrushka objected because they didn’t see “the YEC God” as being essentially YEC. In other words, they saw “the YEC God” as referring to a God who would still be the same God even if it turned out that he hadn’t created the universe several thousand years ago.
In short, I saw “the YEC God” as equivalent to “a God having YEC characteristics”, and they saw it as equivalent to “the God of the YECs, who might or might not have YEC characteristics”.
Of course, neither interpretation is correct in an absolute sense. Language is a convention, and “the YEC God” can plausibly be interpreted either way. However, I argued that in the context of the thread, it was clear how “the YEC God” was being used:
…I thought that readers would notice that I used the unusual phrase “the YEC God” instead of “God” or “the Christian God” or “Yahweh”. Since I took the trouble of adding the qualifier “YEC”, they would infer that there must be some significance to it. There was; I added it to indicate that my argument was confined to YEC Gods. What is the characteristic of a YEC God that distinguishes him from an OEC God or other Gods? The clue is in the qualifier “YEC”. He must have created the earth a (relatively) short time ago.
This leads to a counterintuitive realization: the entity we refer to as “the YEC God” is not necessarily the same as the entity that YECs refer to as “God”!
How can we resolve this apparent paradox? I think the key is to recognize that within our minds, “the YEC God” doesn’t really refer to a single possible entity. It refers to an entire set of possible entities, any of which would qualify as “the YEC God”. Likewise with “God”.
The set of possible entities encompassed by the word “God”, when spoken by a YEC, is larger than the set encompassed by the phrase “the YEC God” as used in the other thread. The latter is a subset of the former. Since they are not coextensive, they don’t mean the same thing.
There’s much more to be said about this, particularly about how God’s status as a fictional (or at best unknown) entity affects all of this, but I’ll leave that to the comments.
I tend to agree that “supernatural” is a redundant category. For me, naturalism is the study of the natures of things, nature being those observable properties or attributes which make a thing itself and not something else. By this definition, ghosts, ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, if they exist and can be observed – even if only in principle – are natural phenomena. The same goes for gods .
I can say “I have some gold coins in my pocket” and make perfect sense. I can state the negation as “I have some not-gold coins in my pocket” and, while it is clumsier usage, still make sense. The coins might be silver or brass, for example. However, the original sentence could be re-phrased as “There exist some gold coins in my pocket”. One form of negation could be “There are no gold coins in my pocket” but another could be “There are non-existent gold coins in my pocket” . The latter is grammatically correct but absurd because it states a contradiction. It both asserts and denies the existence of the coins.
The problem is whether existence can be considered a property of a coin like being made of gold or silver. I would say not. A coin can be either gold or silver but it cannot both exist and not exist and still be a coin in both cases. I would argue the same is true when we talk about the natures of things. If a thing exists it has a nature which defines what it is and demarcates it from other things. That which has no nature does not exist. On this understanding, to talk about studying the supernatural is equivalent to talk about studying the non-existent. It is may be a logical category or class but it is empty. There is nothing to study.
The reason I defined “supernatural” as synonymous with “imaginary” is because they both reify non-existence.
Let me suggest you give your definition of “supernatural”.
Sorry have to go – frying a duck breast.
I don’t see how we can define “supernatural” non-vacuously and non-trivially without understanding “natural” in terms that do not merely contrast it with “supernatural”.
However that issue gets resolved, though, it would be a serious error to conflate that with the methodological (not ontological!) distinction between observable entities and posited entities.
But it might not be an error to take the epistemological criteria for distinguishing between good posits and bad posits as the basis for the distinction between the natural (but unobserved) and the supernatural (but unobserved), where a good posit is part of a model that specifies the causal relations that obtain between the posits and the observables in order to subject the model to empirical testing, and a bad posit isn’t.
ROFL. That was queried by a self-proclaimed, but hesitant ‘naturalist.’ I wouldn’t trust my children in a ‘philosophist’ course with his ex-religious myopia, no matter what ‘college’ he teaches (what he pretends to call ‘philosophy’) at.
I’ve said the same thing as that quote above many times at TSZ (and at UD), while people in both ‘camps’ refuse to elevate their thoughts above ‘natural scientism’ or ‘methodological naturalism.’ They seem to want ‘enemies’ to argue with instead of solutions or improvements, as ‘enlightening’ or ‘inspiring’ as they may be.
Categories. (Breathe loudly and repeat to ‘self’ in a quiet room, pondering as non-stupid people do.) Think about what is ‘non-natural’ and attribute ‘real’ meanings (as not only ‘super-thinking’ people do). Come up with a list of NON-NATURAL things. Finished yet?
Post list at TSZ…
…or just continue to put your head (and more importantly, your heart) in the sand, close your ears and consider yourselves ‘sceptic’ or ‘atheist’.
Whatever you do, don’t stop to wonder (and shudder in silent times) why you are admittedly (and usually willingly) disenchanted, doubtful, uncurious, faithless, surface-oriented, depressing, decadent. The answer is simply too obvious to miss outside of the little box of the natural means only vs. (opposite) supernatural approach.
Carry on then with this silliest of threads by a cranky anti-theist, mocking what you refuse to understand and reveling in that refusal to learn.
Gregory,
The site rules — “assume that others are arguing in good faith” — prevent me from engaging with you in conversation. At this point, I don’t regard as having any more sincere interest in being taken seriously than I do William. It’s too bad, really. I tried to respect you. I really did. But whatever respect I once had for you has been steadily eroded by your constant sneers, dismissals, ad hominem attacks, and pettiness.
Gregory,
Could you surprise us one of these days and actually present a coherent, well-articulated argument on the subject of a thread?
SeverskyP35,
That’s an idiosyncratic definition of naturalism that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. Most people (including me) use ‘naturalism’ in the way that Wikipedia defines it:
SeverskyP35:
I can’t see how redefining naturalism in this way helps. It seems to me that it can only lead to confusion. Nearly everyone regards “gods, ghosts and ghoulies” as supernatural entities. Saying, as you seem to, that they are natural if they exist, and supernatural if they don’t, runs counter to the way people use those terms.
It also leads to absurdities. I don’t have a carbuncle. Does that mean that “keiths’s carbuncle” is a supernatural entity? If you answer no, as most people would, then you are acknowledging that “real vs. imaginary” is a separate question from “natural vs. supernatural”. The latter is not redundant.
Agreed.
Sure, but this problem is easily avoided by rephrasing it as “The gold coins that are supposedly in my pocket don’t actually exist.” Stated that way, it seems no more problematic than saying “Unicorns don’t exist.”
Right, so as in Alan’s case, I would suggest that you need to find a better definition.
Scientists were able to study, and falsify, the phlogiston hypothesis, but that surely doesn’t make phlogiston a supernatural entity, does it?
Obviously there can be NOTHING that is ‘non-natural’ that is not called ‘supernatural’ according to the ‘logic’ of a ‘naturalist.’ 😉 For them, everything that is ‘non-natural’ MUST be ‘supernatural,’ right? There simply are no other NAMES possible. (Stop thinking; look for the sand to dive your head and heart, your LANGUAGE into.)
Or maybe there are in fact other CATEGORIES.
The kind of ‘philosophism’ that KN teaches is plainly myopic ‘naturalism’. That’s an argument that sceptics and anti-theists don’t wish to face reflexively and openly admit on TSZ. They just prefer to force it (or in KN’s case, to prop disenchanted rhetoric) on others and blame ‘philosophy’ for it.
Alan,
But they aren’t synonymous, as my carbuncle and phlogiston examples show.
Wikipedia’s definition is pretty good:
I would qualify it a bit to exclude things like numbers, which are not subject to the laws of physics but don’t merit the designation “supernatural”.
I know how it goes. I made chocolate chip cookies yesterday, and they refused to stop baking when I needed to finish a blog comment.
Gregory,
There are ambiguities in the meaning of ‘natural’ that allow for other CATEGORIES besides ‘supernatural’. For example, ‘artificial’ is a CATEGORY that is distinct from both ‘natural’ (understood in a particular way) and ‘supernatural’.
What other CATEGORIES did you have in mind, Gregory?
Do you have a coherent ARGUMENT to present?
Let me be as explicit as I can. Everything we know comes to us via our senses. For us to know something about the world other than what is in our heads, that knowledge has to be in some form that we can detect, measure, infer – however indirectly. There has to be some evidence for the existence of an entity before we can consider it to be real.
That does not stop us imagining whatever else we wish. I love fiction. But I think the trap of reification is an easy one to fall into. I happen to think “supernatural” is a completely redundant and misleading word and concept. To talk of gods, ghosts ghoulies (for which there is not one shred of evidence that such exist – or might just as well not exist because they do not impinge on reality (I’ll happily allow either possibility) – is as meaningful as discussing Russell’s teapot.
I say the burden is on you, Gregory, to explain how you know of something supernatural or non-natural if you want me to begin to consider such ideas as other than human imagination.
Hmm.
Pomegranates?
Someone places an object in front of me and tells me this is a pomegranate. I can establish whether it is a real fruit or a copy in wax or porcelain. I can (less easily) check that its DNA matches one of the several hundred known cultivars. I can then say, yes, this is a real pomegranate. I doubt I’d say it was a natural pomegranate unless I was concerned whether it was cultivated organically.
The Loch Ness monster?
No evidence that indicates any such large creature inhabits Loch Ness. If we assume such a creature conformed to the laws of this universe, there is plenty of evidence that it could not exist, the most obvious being there is not enough food to sustain a large fish-eating aquatic reptile, let alone a breeding population of sufficient individuals to maintain numbers. So we can rule out a natural Loch Ness monster. If someone is proposing a supernatural monster, I haven’t heard about it and I’ll wait for the proposal. 🙂
God: real and supernatural?
Developing the mathematical metaphor, what I see as theists saying is God is “complex” – a sum of real and imaginary parts. Well, OK! We can examine those real elements. So far there does not appear to be anything to examine. But there is no overlap of real and imaginary, they are like the real and imaginary parts of complex numbers, orthogonal.
God: unreal and supernatural?
This is an unnecessary tautology. I happen to think the set of supernatural things is as empty of real things as the set of imaginary things. But others are welcome to put whatever they want into their own imaginary sets. Only claims of reality can be examined by science. An imaginary entity with no real properties or entailments is invisible to science.
I’m not seeing your distinctions, Keith.
I suggest “said to exist” is not a million miles from “made stuff up”. 🙂
Nearly everyone? Many people I know have (I would say) irrational beliefs in imaginary entities – especially gods and spirits. And I would agree that were there there any evidence that such entities impinge on this universe, then that would confirm their reality. Just because many people seems to fall into the reification trap when using “supernatural” does not mean we have to as well
“I don’t have a carbuncle” means you don’t currently suffer from a sub-cutaneous abscess with more than one pore draining pus on to the skin. It has nothing to do with whether abscesses can exist in reality. But I am not thus motivated to acknowledge that “supernatural” conveys any other meaning than “not real” or amenable to any scientific test. I can’t help other people winging off into reification.
Ding, ding, ding! A prize for an anti-theist. 😉 (Just don’t get sidetracked with the “understood in a particular way” schtick, which is rather shallow and obvious.)
Yes, ‘artificial’ is commonly understood as ‘non-natural’ and ‘non-supernatural.’ Hurrah! The CATEGORY List (of ‘non-natural’ that is not ‘supernatural’) has officially begun at 1. How far will it go at TSZ?
I’m skeptical that anyone here will be able to add to the list. Why? Because even when I’ve contested in the past that ‘artificial’ is ‘non-natural’, I’ve had philosophical debutants (and anti-philosophy naturalistic scientists) protest that even technology is (read: should be called) ‘natural’ because *everything* is ‘natural’ according to their ‘naturalist’ ideology, which they are too dense to acknowledge for what it is.
Will anyone else help KN how to see/hear/understand alternatives to ‘natural’ that are not ‘supernatural’? Silence – this is what is predicted from the vast majority (90%+) atheists & agnostics at TSZ.
Gregory,
It isn’t obvious to you, apparently.
Otherwise you would recognize that the meaning of ‘natural’ in the context of ‘natural vs. supernatural’ differs from its meaning in the context of ‘natural vs. artificial’.
A car, for example, is natural in the first sense but not in the second.
Your superior HPSS education has made you aware that a word can have more than one meaning, correct?
Alan,
Then you are making the same mistake as Gregory. The pomegranate is natural in the natural-vs-supernatural sense, but not in the natural-vs-non-organic sense.
That’s my exact point. It’s imaginary, but natural. The natural-vs-supernatural distinction is separate from the real-vs-imaginary distinction.
Not sure where you’re getting that. Theists think that God is real.
It’s not a tautology. As I’ve already pointed out, it took science hundreds of years to demonstrate the nonexistence of the YEC God.
I agree. But that doesn’t mean that they’re imaginary. 🙂
Alan,
Really? So when planets are said to exist around other stars, you assume that this is something that astronomers just made up?
Alan,
Exactly. The real-vs-imaginary distinction is separate from the natural-vs-supernatural one. Given sufficient evidence, we could accept the reality of a supernatural entity.
Of course we don’t. We can allow the evidence to determine whether we classify something as real or imaginary. That’s why I argued against your definition of the supernatural:
That definition would only make sense if we knew ahead of time that all possible supernatural entities are “invisible” to scientific study. But as you conceded above:
Alan:
Right. In other words, “keiths’s carbuncle” does not exist. Like the Loch Ness monster, it is imaginary but natural.
No, not at all. That’s why I liked the word “posit”. There was a time, when there was no method of confirming the very reasonable hypothesis that planetary bodies were not unique to the Solar system but now we are finding planets in ever increasing numbers as our detection equipment becomes more sensitive.. The SETI project operates on a similar posit, that Life may not not be unique to Earth. No priors.
keiths,
No, I don’t see this at all. Incidentally, the only experience of carbuncles is hearing my mother talk of her mother treating my uncle’s carbuncle as a young man with a hot bread poultice. She recalled the cure as being worse than the ailment.
The “Loch Ness Monster” cannot exist as any kind of real creature as there is not enough sustenance for such a creature to survive. The creature some imagine cannot therefore be real. Your carbuncle could exist were you unfortunate enough to get the right sort of skin infection without any bending of the rules of the universe.
v Only if you can show that the result of ex nihilo creation is identical to the result of natural processes.
kWhy would that be necessary? You can determine how long something has been aging by natural processes without assuming that it was created by natural processes.
Determining the age of rocks assumes an intial condition, with a unspecified , theoretically unbounded process we have no way to determine that intial condition because we have no idea how creation ex nihilo works.
Right, and stated that way, it is also an untestable proposition. Theists who claim that God is unknowable usually end up contradicting themselves by insisting that they do know certain things about him.
YECs believe they can know about God thru divine revelation.Scholastics thru reason. Perhaps unpredictable is a better description. After all , an omnibenevolent God who drowns children seems a bit unpredictable.
(And of course, knowing that something is unknowable is itself a form of knowledge about that thing.)
The problem is we don’t even know if He is unknowable. And since He seems to value belief over evidence, it seem unlikely we will,at least in this life.
That is exactly what most YECs claim(that there is scientific proof for a young earth) It’s the reason for foolishness such as the RATE project.
That seems more political than ecclesiastical, most religions view science the same as plumbing,useful but not the last word on the subject of God.
Alan:
keiths:
Alan:
So then “said to exist” and “made up” are quite distinct after all, right?
keiths,
Clever! But the clue is in what I wrote immediatley following “Not at all”. I don’t think “said to exist” is correct in this context which is why I said “That’s why I liked the word “posit”. There was a time, when there was no method of confirming the very reasonable hypothesis that planetary bodies were not unique to the Solar system but now we are finding planets in ever increasing numbers as our detection equipment becomes more sensitive.. The SETI project operates on a similar posit, that Life may not not be unique to Earth. No priors.” immediately afterwards.
keiths:
Alan:
It’s not real, and it’s not supernatural. It’s imaginary but natural.
Exactly. As a natural creature, the Loch Ness monster would require sustenance. If such sustenance is not available, then Nessie cannot be real. She is imaginary but natural, like my carbuncle.
Yes, but examination shows that I do not exhibit any of the symptoms of a carbuncle. “keiths’s carbuncle” does not exist. It’s imaginary but natural, like Nessie.
Alan,
I don’t see how any of that makes a difference. Planets are “said to exist” around other stars, and astronomers haven’t just “made that up”.
So your statement…
…seems to be obviously wrong.
velikovskys:
keiths:
velikovskys:
Yes, but there is no requirement that the initial condition be produced by natural processes.
But we aren’t dealing with “an unspecified, theoretically unbounded process”. We are dealing with a YEC God who created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. The evidence shows that the earth is much older. The only way to rescue the hypothesis is to add ad hoc assumptions, like “God created the earth with the appearance of great age”. But any hypothesis can be rescued that way, whether natural or supernatural.
velikovskys:
Not just unpredictable, but contradictory. You need a lot of ad hoc assumptions to take the despicable act of drowning children and dress it up as an act of infinite benevolence.
keiths:
velikovskys:
Many theists claim to know this, and they don’t seem to realize that they are contradicting themselves.
keiths:
velikovskys:
Sure, but the point is that they do believe that the evidence points to a young earth.
I don’t agree. A carbuncle is a colloquial term for a type of abscess. You could also, for example not have legs but imagine you did. That would not make legs imaginary. The Loch Ness monster is simply imaginary. Plesiosaurs have been posited as a possible candidate but, apart from the food problem, it is fairly clear that plesiosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
Alan,
Come on, Alan. Carbuncles exist, but “keiths’s carbuncle” doesn’t. It’s imaginary but natural, like Nessie.
IANAP (philosopher), but isn’t this some kind of category error? It doesn’t make sense, to me, to assign characteristics like “natural” to things that don’t exist. In fact, I don’t think the phrase “things that don’t exist” is even coherent. Things exist. If a word doesn’t refer to something extant, it is nonsensical to say anything else about it.
To anticipate an obvious objection, mental constructs like “unicorn” can certainly be rationally discussed. Claiming that they are either natural or supernatural is not rational, however, since they don’t exist except as concepts.
And it leads to the fallacy of reification.
I was being flippant but I think I can justify my remark. I doubt any astronomer has uttered the words “planets are said to exist around other stars [than the sun]”. Prior to methods of detecting exoplanets being developed, there was speculation that planets could orbit other stars (Giordano Bruno apparently is attributed as saying This space we declare to be infinite… In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own. So we have another example of scientific enquiry pursuing hypotheses as instruments become available to test them. This has nothing to do with the imaginary becoming real. It has to to do with the expansion of knowledge. Unknown reality becomes known reality.
Actually, I can’t imagine(?) what situation would require anyone to write “carbuncles exist” and intend to convey any useful information. And I honestly do not comprehend what point you wish to make with “imaginary but natural, like Nessie”. I have clearly stated that the Loch Ness monster concept is imaginary and simple human invention, like the YEC god and every other god, ghost or ghoulie. “Natural” is a misleading word, which along with “supernatural”, I shall now expunge from my lexicon. There is no occasion, I contend, where those two henceforth never-to-be-uttered-by-me words cannot be replaced by sensible alternatives.
And so to bed!
Well, this is interesting. Alan is arguing that my carbuncle isn’t imaginary, and Patrick is arguing that it isn’t natural!
Who would have thought that my nonexistent carbuncle could be such an object of contention? 🙂
Patrick,
I think your standard is too strict.
Fiction refers to nonexistent characters and places, but that doesn’t render it nonsensical. Also, hypothetical entities may turn out not to exist, but that doesn’t make it nonsensical to speak of them. People spoke of the Higgs boson and its properties long before its existence had been confirmed. Indeed, it was precisely because they reasoned about its properites that they were able to design the experiments that eventually demonstrated its existence.
I think it was rational to refer to the Higgs boson as natural even before it was confirmed, because it was being hypothesized as part of nature.
If I ask you to imagine a red ball, you can do it. It would seem odd to me to argue that your imaginary red ball can’t be red because it doesn’t actually exist.
Alan,
But they have said that planets exist around other stars, which is the relevant point — and they did so long before those planets could be directly observed. “Said to exist” is not remotely equivalent to “made up”.
Of course it doesn’t, and no one is making that claim, as far as I can see. Who are you thinking of?
Alan,
Well, let’s say hypothetically that you are having an Internet discussion with a guy named Alan, who thinks that your nonexistent carbuncle is not imaginary. The reason he offers is that carbuncles do exist, and that they are therefore not imaginary.
In that scenario, it would make sense to tell Alan that “Carbuncles exist, but “my carbuncle” doesn’t.” That sentence conveys useful information that Alan has apparently overlooked; namely, that the existence of some carbuncles does not imply the existence of all possible carbuncles.
If “my carbuncle” doesn’t exist, it is imaginary. My nonexistent carbuncle is natural but imaginary.
The point is that “supernatural” and “imaginary” are not synonymous, and neither are “natural” and “real”. Your failure to recognize this is what led to your faulty definition of “supernatural”, which in turn led to the absurd conclusion that the YEC God is not supernatural.
That’s a mistake. Natural-vs-supernatural is a useful distinction, and quite separate from the real-vs-imaginary distinction. My natural-but-imaginary carbuncle and the natural-but-imaginary Nessie should make that obvious.
You can always replace them with synonyms, of course, but “real” is not a synonym for “natural”, and “imaginary” is not a synonym for “supernatural”.
I’m wishing you carbuncle-free dreams.
Fiction falls under the category of mental constructs. Any statements we make about fictional characters, for example, are about the concept, which does exist as patterns in our brains, not about a real person, which does not.
If the Higgs had not been verified by experiment, though, it would make no sense to ascribe to it the characteristic “natural”. In that case, “Higgs boson” would be either a purely mental construct or a term without a referent, depending on context.
I think it would have been rational to refer to the concept has potentially referring to an extant entity. Where I disagree with you is your distinction among real, imaginary, natural, and supernatural. It seems to me that “real” and “not real” cover all the possibilities that are empirically distinguishable. “Real” means the referent of the term exists. “Not real”, “imaginary”, and “supernatural” all mean that the referent of the term does not exist, and nothing more can logically be said about it.
I can hold the concept of a ball in my mind and can further enhance that concept with a color. The concept is a real pattern in my brain. We can discuss and manipulate that. We can’t say anything about what that concept refers to in the real world, because it doesn’t refer to anything.
No, your nonexistent carbuncle is, at best, a mental construct in your brain. It is not rational to ascribe characteristics like “natural” to non-existence. It is the rhetorical equivalent of dividing by zero.
At the risk of being accused of scientism, I argue that from a practical standpoint “real” and “natural” are synonyms as are “not real”, “imaginary”, and “supernatural”.
In practice, it appears that “real” and “natural” are synonyms and “supernatural” is a proper subset of “imaginary” (aka “not real”).
Patrick,
Reasoning about nonexistent entities can be tricky. You write:
Not so. Fictional entities are distinct from mental constructs, concepts, or thoughts. When I say that the imaginary red ball does not exist, I am not saying that the concept does not exist. It obviously does! If the concept exists, but the ball doesn’t, then they cannot be the same thing.
Likewise, it is the ball that is red, not the thought (unless it is a colorless red thought) 🙂 .
It made sense to describe the Higgs as “natural” when it was only a hypothetical entity — an entity that might or might not exist. If so, why would it suddenly become illegitimate to describe it as natural if its existence were falsified?
Again, the entity is not the same thing as the term or the mental construct.
Whether it refers to anything in “the real world” is a separate question from whether it refers to anything at all. It’s an imaginary red ball, so we already know that it doesn’t exist in the real world. The question is whether “the imaginary red ball” refers to anything at all. I would say yes. It refers to a nonexistent ball, just as “the YEC God” refers to a nonexistent God.
Again, you’re confusing the mental construct with the carbuncle itself. The construct exists, but the carbuncle does not.
I would say just the opposite. If nonexistent entities had no characteristics, then it would be impossible to distinguish phlogiston from the YEC God from Ganesh. That makes no sense to me.
No, because classifying something as imaginary is quite different from classifying it as supernatural. Both sets are empty, as far as we know, but that is no reason to treat the qualifiers as synonyms.
“My siblings with blue eyes” is an empty set, as is “my siblings who are lawyers”, but that hardly means that “having blue eyes” is synonymous with “being a lawyer”.
If the supernatural and the imaginary were both empty sets, then the supernatural could not be a proper subset of the imaginary. You are implicitly acknowledging that the imaginary is a nonempty set with distinct members.
Also, “imaginary” and “supernatural” differ in important ways. Imaginary entities are nonexistent by definition, but this is not true of supernatural entities, whose nonexistence can’t be assumed but must instead be demonstrated empirically.
I’m surprised that you’re even pursuing this line of reasoning, because you already agreed upthread that
The YEC God has those characteristics, and the YEC God does not exist. By your own lights, then, it is rational to ascribe characteristics to nonexistent entities.
Ah, at last! Good that we agree on something; the imaginary set is indeed empty.
The supernatural (*spits*- I use this word as a communication aid and for one final time) by Keith’s definition must at least contain Russell’s teapot. And Keith tells us we must demonstrate the non-existence *spits again* of Russell’s teapot empirically before we can dispense with it as merely a human construct.
ETA clarity
I like that mathematical metaphor. It’s not complex!
Alan,
See? “Supernatural” is a useful word, and supernatural-vs-natural a useful distinction.
Huh? What’s supernatural about Russell’s Teapot? I thought it was just an ordinary teapot orbiting the sun.
No, you didn’t!
Alan,
You’re not assuming that I’m posting in good faith. 🙂
Seriously, though — did you think that Russell’s Teapot was supposed to be violating the laws of physics somehow?
I was thinking of the Monty Python five minute argument
An imaginary concept has no attributes. Or just as correctly an imaginary concept can have whatever imaginary attributes we can imagine. The moment someone can think of something to observe and a way to do it, then we have a real hypothesis. I’d like to ride Danaerys’ (careful, Alan) dragon but dragons are imaginary
I’m dropping this now, it seems pointless.
Alan,
The point of Russell’s Teapot was that we had no evidence for its existence, not that it was supernatural.
keiths,
You’ve used that word! I didn’t use that word!
The CATEGORY List (of what is ‘non-natural’ that is not ‘supernatural’) at TSZ has obviously stopped at 1. Anyone else?
Alan,
Take it easy, Alan. You were the one who applied the word “supernatural” to Russell’s Teapot:
I don’t think that Russell’s Teapot is supernatural, and my definition doesn’t imply it, either.