> witness something that defies all natural explanation
> write about it
> people say it cannot have happened because it was a supernatural element
You see this too with stuff like "anything that predicted the destruction of the temple must have been written after because no one can predict the future."
Like, the whole point of huge chunks of the Bible is that world-altering supernatural events actually happened, and the authors want people to know about them.
I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to stake out a position of "supernatural elements cannot happen" and there are absolutely cogent responses to what I just did rhetorically, I just don't like that people who think that way try to assume the center; it's worth pointing out that it's the tail that wags the dog in big chunks of historicity debates.
I think that this arises from one of two presuppositions: Either 1) the physical universe is all that exists, or 2) science is the only way to learn truth. (These two presuppositions are not strictly independent of each other.)
These are presuppositions. They are assumptions that you make at the start of the game, that you build your interpretation of the world on. They are not empirically proven in any way. (For #2, show me the scientific experiment that proved it.)
But people have built these presuppositions so deeply into their thinking that they don't even realize that they're making them. Within the silo of those presuppositions, of course miracles don't ever happen!
But, if that's you (not Brindinooo, but you the reader), try to step outside that for a moment, just as a thought experiment. For this experiment, let us hypothesize that God actually exists - not just the word or the idea, but that someone is actually there. And let us hypothesize that he can actually do things, things that change physical reality. (You could think of it as breakpointing a running program with a debugger, and changing the value of a variable, and then resuming. The value actually changes, with no antecedent that the program can see.) And let us hypothesize that God actually does this - he actually changes something.
(Digression: A typical way of thinking about the scientific method is four steps: Systematic observation, search for regularity among the observations, forming a hypothesis to explain the regularity, and testing the hypothesis.)
For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
So there is no direct scientific evidence that God exists, because science is not a tool that is capable of investigating that question.
But if God exists, and if he actually does something, even if we don't see it with science, we might see it with history. Somebody might have observed it and recorded it.
And when you read such a thing, how do you react? Do you say "That's impossible?" You're right; it is. But what is your next statement? "Therefore it didn't happen"? If that's your response, it indicates that you're in the silo of the material-universe-is-all-that-exists presupposition, and can't or won't think outside of it. Instead, I think you're reaction should be "That's impossible, but did it happen?" Because the impossible happening is exactly the signature that we would expect if God exists and actually did something.
So the fundamental question is not whether these events have a supernatural element or not. The fundamental question is whether they happened.
Well, I guess that makes a certain philosophical sense, but if we allow for the existence of an extra-physical god (or gods) that we can't test for, there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others. Maybe it was alien gods that built Pyramids, and the Hebrews took forty years to reach Jericho because they had to first go through a couple of Stargates.
>there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others
Sure there is. I could tell you that I am a mostly-anon web developer; I could also tell you I am President of the United States, or a founder of a prominent company that came out of YCombinator. For practical purposes you would evaluate my claims based on your wits and perhaps my comment history, and you would believe that one story is more likely than the others.
All are equally possible but not all are equally plausible.
I'm guessing you'd agree with that, but you'd disagree with what counts as credible evidence. Which I can understand. But the idea that you'd see "random guy on HN makes up a theory involving a fictional wormhole from a 90s television show" as no different from Biblical claims is troubling to me, most notably because the narrative itself doesn't make any claim that could be remotely construed to align with that.
> For our thought experiment, let us suppose that science observes God doing something at step 1 (systematic observation). Now, what is science going to do with it? It's going to throw it out at step 2 (search for a regularity), because there is no regularity - unless God does the same miracle repeatedly.
> But if it makes it past that step, the next problem comes at step 3 (forming a hypothesis). Under current thinking, God will never be the hypothesis. But in our thought experiment, God is actually the cause!
> And even if God were to be the hypothesis, the next problem comes at step 4 (testing). How could you test the hypothesis? "Uh, God, could you do that again, and please sign it this time"? I don't see how you could do the experiment, even in principle.
This sounds very convincing at first glance, but it completely disregards the actual history and practice of science.
In particular, for your insurmountable problems with steps 1 and 4, we actually have lots of scientific theories about singular events that we can't reproduce. Perhaps the most famous and well studied of these is the Big Bang.
If there were some god who could perform supernatural events, and presuming it didn't then explicitly try to obscure them from us, we could still study the consequences of these breaks in regular physics. If loaves multiplied for a feast, we may not be able to reproduce the event, but we could still use scientific means to confirm whether enough material had been present in the area to produce the total observed number of loaves of bread that was reported; and we could study the waste from the feast to corroborate eye witness testimonies with physical evidence (bread crumbs, stool samples, weight of the participants before and after, etc).
And historically, for step 3 - even though today gods or God are not commonly accepted hypothesis, they/he were for a long time in the history of science. However, every time something was thought to only possibly originate from supernatural causes, a natural physical/biological mechanism was later found. After this happened enough times, scientists started disfavoring this hypothesis, on the basis that it was not turning out to be useful or necessary.
"Whether they happened" is impossible to separate from your metaphysical priors on supernatural agency. You cannot evaluate the evidence for an ostensibly supernatural event in a philosophical vacuum.
People observe and record all sorts of crazy things all the time, including for all of the religions you don't believe in, but that doesn't mean anything. You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real, and offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible. I don't think you understand how profoundly unconvincing that argument is to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do.
If you're trying to convert people with apologetics, this specific line of attack isn't going to be effective.
Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?
>You're just asking people to assume what the Bible says about the supernatural is real
I don't think that's what happened there.
>offering the lack of scientific evidence as supporting evidence for the Bible
No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.
>to people who don't already operate under the theistic model of reality that you do
How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?
>Can things happen that are possible via mechanisms you don't understand, or are incapable of grasping because of your sensory/intellectual limitations?
Possibly, but I fully believe science is capable of explaining these mechanisms, because thus far science has been able to explain everything that theists claimed was supernatural in nature, while no evidence has been found to justify belief in the supernatural.
So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.
>I don't think that's what happened there.
Their claim was that science cannot prove the supernatural, but the only possible evidence would be personal testimonials - and we're in a subthread litigating the supernatural claims surrounding the Exodus story - which only exist in the Bible. So I respectfully disagree. They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.
Also, science should be able to prove the supernatural, as every claim about the supernatural is that it manifests in some physical, tangible form in our universe, which means it must leave some kind of evidence.
>No, the point is that the scientific method is not the only way to prove that things in the past happened.
It is, though. Claims alone don't prove anything. We prove that things happened in the past by discovering evidence of it, through artifacts or documents, and finding corroborating evidence, which is science.
>How would you explain yourself to a two-dimensional person, and reveal yourself to its world?
First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.
> They were literally arguing that the fact that these claims were written in the Bible was evidence of their veracity.
If you're referring to my post, that is not what I argued. I argued that a claim of supernatural events could not be dismissed as "cannot have happened", but must be evaluated on the quality of the evidence for that event.
I did not apply that to events in the Bible, but that is how claims of supernatural events in the Bible must be evaluated. Sure, they're eyewitness claims. All history from that era is eyewitness or derived from it, or archaeology or derived from it. The point is to not say "can't have happened", but rather to actually evaluate how good the evidence is for any claim.
>So this is, at best, an argument that scientific models are incomplete (which no one would disagree with) but not that scientific models are invalid, or that the supernatural is real.
One could imagine God parting a sea with scientific mechanisms we know nothing about.
> Claims alone don't prove anything
You can be convicted for murder "beyond a reasonable doubt" on claims alone.
>First, demonstrate that two dimensional people exist, otherwise it's a nonsense question.
Okay, I respect that. Thought of a better one later.
How would you explain what it means to be human to an ant? How would you get it to understand thermodynamics or whatever?
I dunno, it just seems like your overall thrust here is that humanity came out of the ooze through natural selection with everything that it needs to understand the mysteries of the universe. If we cannot see, touch, taste, smell, hear, or think it, either directly or through our instruments, it is impossible, and therefore it cannot happen.
>Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
Yes, I am certain of these things because I am an adult with an education, and an awareness of the difference between mythology and reality.
If you believe in magic, and that the Bible describes reality more correctly than the entirety of science, and that archaeology and Biblical scholarship are all wrong, and that somehow out of all of the religions that humans have concocted only the Abrahamic God is the correct one, then the onus is on you to prove that.
During Albright's time, the archaeological evidence was generally interpreted as being in support of Old Testament narratives. Later generations of archaeologists mostly took the opposite view. The bottom line is, there's very little to go by, and the little archaeological evidence that exists can be interpreted either way, depending on one's preferred conclusion.
Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,) or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference?
And notwithstanding that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.
On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?
> Could it be that later generations of archeologists took the opposite view because the preponderance of evidence uncovered in that time pointed in that direction (and because the cultural and political stigma against contradicting the Bible diminished over time,)
My understanding is that the shift can mostly be attributed to the rise of biblical minimalism as the dominant interpretive framework. Radiocarbon dating of the Jericho ruins did rule out Albright's preferred late Exodus date. But the radiocarbon date is consistent with an (in my opinion, far more interesting) earlier Exodus date, which would line up with the hypothesis that the Israeli people were the Hyksos, and which would also line up with a sequential interpretation of the timeline presented in Joshua, Judges, and Samuel.
> or are you implying that the interpretation of archaeological evidence either way is simply a matter of arbitrary personal preference?
Archaeological evidence constrains the set of defensible explanations. But the available evidence from this time period (Exodus, conquest of Canaan) is so scarce that it mostly comes down to personal preference.
> And notwithstanding that, there is absolutely no credible evidence of the supernatural at all.
How could it be otherwise? If there were reproducible evidence, then the phenomenon in question would be classified as natural.
> On what basis do you believe the Bible and its supernatural claims could have happened?
I'm quite certain that mind is more fundamental than matter, and I'm not very sure about a whole lot else.
> How could it be otherwise? If there were reproducible evidence, then the phenomenon in question would be classified as natural.
Imagine that we found, today, the burning bush, still on fire but not consumed by it, thousands of years later. Say someone tried all known techniques to extinguish it, but it wouldn't. We may be able to study and characterize it precisely and call it "natural" in that sense, but I think many would agree that it would be very clear evidence that this claim in Exodus was actually historically based.
Similarly, say that we had credible videos, and other instrument recordings, of the blue fire that the Orthodox Patriarchs claim descends from the heavens on Jesus' tomb every year on Orthodox Easter. We may even develop a theory of what the substance is and what it represents and where it originates (spatially) and so on - but if it happens spontaneously and only affects certain things (candles held by the faithful) and not others (say, gasoline-soaked rags prepared by a scientist to test this out), then even a scientist would have to conclude that this phenomenon is real and outside the realm of physics as it is understood today.
Archeology has certainly been affected by unscientific intellectual fashions: take the post-WW2 marginalization of mass migration hypotheses, which happened as a reaction to Nazism, not on the basis of any scientific evidence. It took the ancient DNA revolution (i.e. being embarrassed by outsiders who could prove the archeology consensus was wrong) to correct this purely political scientific bias.
(Note that historical linguists generally continued believing in mass migration all along though.)
Not really. Sure, sometimes long established archaeological conclusions get overturned by new digs, new sources, or just new methods or new evidence of similar events in other places and so on.
But one very important thing to add here is that there is no bias against the naturalistic narratives of the Bible in mainstream archaeology / Bible scholarship / historiography. Huge swaths of the Bible are considered firmly historical, with many important Bible characters being well attested to and many events in the Bible being accepted as historical facts. For example, the prophet Elijah and King Ahab are widely considered to be real people. The events of the exile to Babylon are (now) considered as well to be real historical events.
If you’re not a realist, just say so. Then we’ll know that there’s no point in engaging with your epistemology, because your epistemology also admits claims like “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday,” or “I am the only entity that exists,” or “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”
While I do reject realism, I disagree with all three claims.
> “the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday”
I have memories from before last Thursday; therefore, this claim would contradict what currently seems to be true. That's the best I can do. If you're a physicalist, you cannot deny this claim with certainty either: if electrical activity in the brain is truly the substrate of consciousness, then you have to admit to the possibility that you could be a brain in a vat, hooked up to some kind of world simulator.
> “I am the only entity that exists”
That would imply that I'm God. And I'm pretty sure I'm not God. Therefore, other conscious entities must exist.
> “Jupiter doesn’t actually exists, it merely appears to exist.”
To be is to be perceived, in my view. I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between the two.
My epistemology admits that "the Universe sprang into existence last Thursday" could be true even if we might have no way of proving it; to me this is obviously far more correct than saying that it must not be true because we cannot prove it.
Doesn't mean I believe it's true, though: I think the point is more being willing to admit that humans might not be the pinnacle of existence, fully able to comprehend every mystery of the universe.
> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
After hearing recently that oil is very likely going to $160 per barrel or more, I knew that I had to get out of the S&P500 in my 401k (FXAIX) and similar growth funds in my Roth.
He really laid out the case for alternate funds in real estate and mortgage securities, with a bit more precious metals.
I really didn't want to lose the gains I have made over the last year, and I think this will do it.
It's important not to assume that LLMs are giving you an impartial perspective on any given topic. The perspective you're most likely getting is that of whoever created the most training data related to that topic.
I'm sure there are people who spend their time doing this, but I don't understand the motive. Doesn't one post in comment threads because one wishes to share their thoughts with other humans?
That's one reason why I post comments (and none of my comments are AI-generated). But I think some people cut-and-paste AI responses because they like winning upvotes and running up an upvote counter.
Take my baseless speculation for what it's worth, but could it be that you were depressed because your life was too easy? We humans are meant to struggle through adversity. Can you really appreciate your financial security if you've never faced financial insecurity, or appreciate companionship if you've never experienced loneliness?
It’s a reasonable question but I doubt it. We weren’t affluent at all and I worked my butt off for everything. And that’s good, because I agree that if things are too easy it turns into a curse.
"80% as good as the real thing, at 20% of the cost" has always been a defining characteristic of progress.
I think the key insight is that only a small fraction of people who read recipes online actually care which particular version of the recipe they're getting. Most people just want to see a working recipe as quickly as possible. What they want is a meal - the recipe is just an intermediate step toward what they really care about.
There are still people who make fine wood furniture by hand. But most people just want a table or a chair - they couldn't care less about the species of wood or the type of joint used - and particle board is 80% as good as wood at a fraction of the cost! most people couldn't even tell the difference. Generative AI is to real writing as particle board is to wood.
- makes the average quality of all wood furniture notably worse
- arguably made the cost of real wood furniture more expensive, since fewer people can make a living off it.
Not to say the tradeoffs are or are not worth it, but "80% of the real thing" does not exist in a vacuum, it kinda lowers the quality on the whole imo.
- There are 8 billion people on the planet now and there isn't enough high quality furniture quality wood to make stuff for all of them.
Up until the time of industrialization there just wasn't that much furniture per person in comparison to what we have now.
The reason 'real' wood furniture is more expensive is not that there isn't demand or artisans creating it, there are likely more than ever. Go buy hardwood without knots and see how much the materials alone set you back.
The trade off isn't 'really good furniture' vs 'kinda suck furniture'. It's 'really good furniture' vs 'no furniture at all'.
Knotty softwoods can make perfectly suitable furniture. They can (and are) grown at scale.
I’m sympathetic to the viewpoint that the supply particleboard furniture has suffocated the marketplaces for mid- and low-end wooden furniture. Such pieces definitely exist affordably (I’ve bought them at places like Marshall’s, for instance). But they seem comparatively underrepresented in the market.
Maybe a consumer preference for flatpack furniture is enough to explain this? But then again, wooden furniture can be flatpacked too—ikea has plenty of it.
If you make better furniture, it will last longer, and you don't need as much wood to serve the same number of people.
It will cost more, sure, but that keeps people from just throwing it out; they sell it instead of throwing it out. The amortized cost is probably similar or even better, but less wasteful.
Yep I own a rocking chair that my great great grandfather built on a lathe and a dining table my grandfather built. Meanwhile I’ve eventually had to replace almost everything I’ve bought from IKEA.
In some cases that "eventually" has been before putting the damned thing together because the low quality particle board they use can't even survive shipping.
(per capita) buy one cabinet every time you move (they break if you try to move them), or buy one quality piece of wood furniture and resell it when you don't want it.
it's disposable plates vs dishwasher ones, but particle board vs actual furniture
You did not read my comment very well. I was not commenting on the the particle board tradeoff, or even the AI tradeoff we find ourselves in now. I was saying that reduction to a lower common denominator (80%), even though it seems innocuous, actually does have broader effects not usually considered.
Who said anything about particle board. There is factory created furniture that uses long lasting high quality wood. It will last generations and is still less expensive than handcrafted furniture.
The main issue with AI is that it still relies on the industries it destroys for its training data. You still need people to cover the news, to review products, to write about their feelings and to find new things to talk about. AI just denies these people an audience or attribution.
This is where the particle wood analogy falls apart. IKEA creates its own goods. AI relies on the work of the industry it's destroying.
One law I would like to see if expected durability. Food has an expiry date and ingrediant list. Something similar should accompany all products so consumers can make an educated choice how long it's gonna last and what's gonna break
"Nice metal <thing> you have there, would be a shame if one of the critical moving parts inside was actually plastic."
After spending some time prompting LLMs and then talking to actual people, I've once or twice been tempted to phrase questions along the lines of "Comment on x, with an emphasis on y; do not mention z."
Of course the supernatural events could have happened! Unless you're certain that:
- matter exists (i.e., physicalism or dualism is the correct metaphysical worldview)
- the universe is strictly a physics simulation
- there's no God who's capable of fiddling with human affairs (or interested in doing so)