I don't believe in God, I believe in Gravity

I think you and others here are simply having a semantic argument for the sake of it; tying yourself in knots by torturing words and meanings and avoiding some simple facts.I don't believe any of you - yourself, Az and Jar - would say that the armless man scenario was not a miraculous/supernatural event (and yes, the words do have the same meaning in normal use) if it actually happened in the way I described.It's ludicrously easy to invent hypotheticals where the only possible rational conclusion is supernatural intervention. The only problem here is that the supernatural doesn't exist so we're dealing with a description of the impossible and the absurd.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

What you believe is of course irrelevant and unrelated to fact or truth and you continue to mistake what I at least would say.I would not see what you described as evidence of the supernatural and a most might use the term miraculous in the colloquial sense similar to "The pesto I fixed for dinner last night was miraculous." I agree making sh9it up is ludicrously easy but I disagree with almost all of the rest of that sentence and fully with the last sentence.

You believe that your wife or girlfriend will come home today. You can "predict" that she will, based on past behaviour but you know that people do fail to come home; there is a finite probability that she will not. You can't know the future; you can only believe in it.You can know to some level of confidence what you can observe.

You remind me of ICANT talking about the existence of existence. (What colour is colour?)I would agree with you that the supernatural doesn't "exist" but I wouldn't say that nothing could be supernatural.

No. It would simply be another thing happening in the observable universe for which we had yet to find an explanation.Such has been the history of science.On a side note, you might be able to convince someone if you would be willing to offer up a way to distinguish the natural from the supernatural.

Well anyone can say anything about this stuff because there's no evidence for any of it - and I'm certainly not interested in pseudo-philosophising.I'm mildly interested in why people here can't accept a hypothetical example of an obvious miracle though.

It absolutely wouldn't be. We know how cells replicate and differentiate. We know that limbs do not spontaneously and immediately regenerate. It wouldn't just be something we don't know about yet, it would be something we know enough about to know that it couldn't possibly happen.But why worry about only limbs. Let's have a man with a severed head walk around normally for a month - or anything else you can think of that we KNOW is impossible.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Well... that's what we used to know... until we saw a limb regrow instantaneously before our eyes. Except that it happened. So obviously something's wrong with our understanding of the way the world works if it rules as impossible those things which clearly take place. Why not revise our scientific theories to account for the new observations?

I suppose there's nothing too stupidly off-planet for a true pedant.Look we KNOW that a man with a severed head can not walk around as normal for a month. You know it and science knows it. It breaks god knows how many medical certainties that it's not open to sane debate.

Yet there it happens. Before our eyes.You know that it can't.I saw that it did.What now?

We dance!

Well, so long as it's not only you and the headless guy has stuck around long enough for science to have a good enough look and declare it real, then we re- think everything we thought we knew about everything.Or dance, whichever you prefer.

Perhaps not everything but that is the best step. Put it in the unknown/unexplained folder and work on it. Tagging it as supernatural does nothing.

You are saying that your would "test" God once He was proven, and yet you are confidant that your Deity of choice---science--will forever insulate you from having to be accountable.As a believer, I dont like being accountable either...its that inner nature of mine that wants to be "in control" and independent.I suppose this post will get another negative rantfrom Theodoric...who claims I know nothing about how atheists think.I can never challenge him, however, since he and others like you refuse to even care about why I think the way I do. God bless all of you anyway.

What's the difference between "pseudo-philosophising" and real philosophising? If real philosphising requires evidence, how does it differ from science? "Obvious miracle" is an oxymoron. If it's obviously a miracle then it's neither obvious nor a miracle.