Just realized I got muddled up and responded to the wrong text.
Your talk of pramanas sent me to their earlier mention (
www.sciforums.com/threads/what-does-god-do.160177/page-21 .... there was an earlier thread but it got sent to archives which are not so easily searchable ... I think you come in on the next page).
Aside from the issues surrounding the introduction of pramanas)
Musika:
billvon consulted a dictionary and discovered, among other things, the follow definitions of God:
"a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality"
"A superhuman person regarded as having power over nature and human fortunes"
Dictionaries describe how words are typically used. One would expect something like the Oxford dictionary to reflect theistic ideas of God more than it would reflect atheistic usages of that term, I would have thought. And here we have the Oxford dictionary defining God as "superhuman" with "power over nature".
The term "supernatural", of course, means "above nature". One who has power over nature is,
by definition, supernatural.
I can't help but notice the hand wiggling you employ to equate "having power over" to be identical to "being above".
As far as I am aware, theists generally assert that God has power over nature. This doesn't strike me as an atheist distortion of theistic belief. Ergo, to describe God as "supernatural" is a no-brainer.
Possibly you ought to reconsider taking people to task and consult a dictionary yourself before making silly claims in future.
Yet for some funny reason, atheists prefer to use their own word, "supernatural", instead of any one of a bevy of words theists already provide that satisfy the same requirements, eg transcendent, immanent, omnipotent, etc.
You have, as yet, still failed to explain why it is the case that atheists bring exclusive terminology to define the subject.
I see the potential for a bet each way from you here, just like Jan, of course. Because God is in every leaf and rock, you will tell us that God is "natural". The leaves and rocks are natural, God is the reality that underlies them, ergo God is natural. But at the same time, you tell us that God is Supreme Enabler, without which nothing. Ergo, God has power over "nature" as well as being embedded in it. So God is both natural and supernatural.
Supernatural things have no fundamental relationship with the "reality" of things. No relationship of contingency exists between an "enabler" and "reality" if you want to run around calling things "supernatural". No doubt this is a convenient euphemistic tool of thought for atheists, since a dumbed down version of God provides easier access to their arguments (at least for as long as the fact that atheists are utilizing their own euphemistic language is glossed over, I suppose).
The point is, of course, that if we remove the "supernatural" from the God, we are left with just the rocks and the leaves, with no God in sight. Or, to put it another way, the God merges with the rocks and leaves and has none of the personal attributes or supreme abilities associated with one who has power over nature.
Actually if you remove the supernatural from a designated supernatural thing, the designated thing ceases to exist.
This is why arguments against supernatural things are easier to float than transcendent or immanent things.
Gee.
Now what supposed agenda do you suppose atheists could have in corralling the definition of God into a more easily dismissible category at the onset of all their arguments?
Is bypassing philosophy the mark of an intelligent argument or a political one?
As you will recall, I have invited you on several occasions in this thread to present your toolbox that goes beyond empiricism - the tools that allow you to discover the evidence that God is real. Yet you remain reluctant to do that. Why is that?
In this thread and many more, I have brought it up many times, with discussions about the variety within epistemology according to western and eastern philosophical traditions. It appeared to fly over your head, so I started discussing Andamon Islanders, medieval painters and history, utilizing the services of professionals like mechanics, doctors and lawyers by the otherwise inept, etc. Your standard response is to try to swallow it all under the umbrella of empiricism.
What is your non-empirical evidence for God? Can you present some of it?
Sure.
The main contributing problem here is your automatic compulsion to approach such evidence empirically. So your q then becomes, "Can you empirically provide non-empirical evidence of God?", which is, of course, equal parts absurd and weird.
Cosmology is a set of theories about nature, is it not?
What does it mean to you to ask whether a theory is natural? It could be that I'm not understanding your question.
You were talking about (empirical, of course) evidence. You were saying that things outside (empirical, of course) evidence are supernatural. I introduced cosmology and events pre-big bang as subjects rife with dubious empirical connections (or even flat out of bounds to empiricism) and alluded to your presumed reluctance to categorize them as "supernatural" despite them meeting your same criteria (being "beyond empiricism .... as a further detail, I expect you would go the extra mile and explain how such things are not "beyond nature", but exist as the empowering core of reality, even if they are empirically inaccessible, hence use of the word "supernatural" would be interpreted as a dishonest ploy to dumb down science yada yada .... ). Now you have come forth and said, no, we have theories (pural, of course) to explain such things. So do theories equate to evidence (for instance, can one acquire a nobel prize by a theory alone? If not, why?) or are you rolling back the terms under discussion?
Please give us a few specific examples drawn from these vast tracts. That could help to advance the discussion.
One could point to any example, since empiricism has a fundamental requirement for epistemological incompleteness (aka ignorance) in order to function (can you think of anything scientists have studied that has no more requirement for further research?).
This is not to say this is because scientists are a bunch of nasty dummies (although, on account of the human condition, they certainly can be on occassion), but rather, the weighing in of the finite (human powers of perception) vs the infinite (the macro and micro universe) always swings the scales in one direction for as long as these two things face each other off in the epistemological boxing ring.
I mentioned cosmology and pre-big bang because they are easily identifiable as clear candidates of impossible victory, even in the pathological minds of those beset by the violence of such an epistemological arena.
