Answering Shermer

Answering Shermer · On ID vs Abiogenesis, debate part I · debate part II

Stephen Meyer Destroys Ignorant Atheist
ByRTD yO | 2.II.2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5tEAINU3wc

Michael Shermer's line:

"I have a commitment to science and the scientific method requires that we look for natural explanations for natural phenomena, there is no such thing as the supernatural, or the paranormal, there is just the natural, the normal and all the stuff we can't explain yet"

My answer, Stephen Meyer's being somewhat different:

I wonder, since when does "the scientific method" require this precise commitment?

In Riccioli's time, it didn't.

To C. S. Lewis, our existence as rational beings (on his view fairly on and off, mostly off, I don't quite share that latter view) requires something other than the natural.

Because "nature" (as viewed by naturalism) while it can be an object to be explained or manipulated rationally, cannot be sth which produces that rationality which is capable of understanding, explaining or manipulating.

Note well also, a manipulation may be rational as to the ends chosen to a given means, but deeply irrational as to the choice of means. Example, when Dr. Mengele used captives for human experiments, the suffering he imposed was totally irrationally out of proportion to some of the petty insights he could gain.

And yes, moral proportions are (unlike the view of amoral scientific rationality) a very clear part of the rational. Or aspect.

We can already explain the rational, if we assume there is conscious rationality before there is such a thing as nature. If we assume there is someone imposing a norm and sharing it with some on whom He imposes it, by how He creates their rationality. By its being a share in His. If we assume that is there before the normal is.

Considering a supernatural like this some kind of equivalent to the paranormal is irrational, since missing important distinctions.

So, where does this rule come from? Who coined it? Was there someone before Jerry Coyne who did?

And we can prove the supernatural if we assume both the natural exists and we too do, considering it as natural, and then exhaust natural possibilities of us forming as rational entities.

Both of which are given in our experience.

If you go on and say natural possibilities are not exhausted even if every analyst has exhausted all he can think of, you are turning basically the "natural" into the paranormal, into sth as paranormal as The Swamp Thing.