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Old 12-16-2004, 09:00 AM   #68 (permalink)
asaris
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I'm starting to suspect that we're using different definitions of natural here. By natural I just mean "Stuff like rocks and trees and animals"; it is opposed both to 'artificial' and to 'supernatural'. The problem is that if you just define supernatural as 'the stuff we can't understand'; well, then Robbagio's argument isn't very interesting.

Of course we have a priori knowledge of the physical realm, whatever you want to call it. I prefer the Kantian idiom here, because I think it's the simplest way to describe it. But the idea is just that there are structures to the mind, like time and space, which order our experience. Without these, experience would be totally random and we would be utterly unable to organize it. Moreover, the fact that 2+2=4 is certainly relevant to the physical world. How often do physicists use mathematics to describe this world? What this has to do with the argument is that it refutes the second premise, that we only get information from our senses.

You say that if we saw an incarnation, we would necessarily misunderstand it. In a way, I don't disagree with you. But this is just part of my general point that we can't completely understand God, and since failure to completely understand something is, in a sense, misunderstanding it; yeah, sure. But certainly we can know something about the supernatural through revelation. Say some supernatural being, whom we suppose to be trustworthy (let's call him Jed), gave us "The Book of Jed". Reading the "Book of Jed", we read that Jed is a nice guy. Given these premises, we can deduce that Jed is a nice guy. Certainly there are problems of evidence and the like here, but to think that in this case to believe Jed is a nice guy would be to misunderstand him would be to have a really wierd definition of 'misunderstand'.

Your response to my fourth argument misses something. I'd hardly deny that we could be mistaken about whether or not a given phenomenon is supernatural. But likewise, we could be right about a given phenomenon being supernatural. If I hear the sound of bricks dropping, it might be a random wormhole. But it might actually be a ghost. The problem is again an epistemological problem, and so can't give Robaggio his conclusion, which is a metaphysical one.
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