A finishing blow to supernaturalistic claims

Next Chapter: Supernaturalism I (Chapter 1)

TL; DR:

Supernatural claims are based on old stories with dubious content, tradition, authority, intuition, and a telephone game, all methods that are fallible to a very high degree. There is no such thing as a supernatural epistemology, only methods that have proved to be mostly wrong again and again.

Big claims, no results, nothing can be proven or disproven. All claims are immunized against criticism, which should raise a red flag. There is not even an internal logical consistency, because all claims, in the end, claim that one knows what one cannot know.

The term "supernatural" is therefore either meaningless or a synonym for the unknown. Basically, all supernatural claims are based on knowledge about that which one cannot know. This is the reason belief and faith play a large role in the realm of the supernatural. There is no logical, causal, rational, or statistical connection between I believe that X is true and X is true, unless there is evidence. But all evidence is systematically excluded. Instead, old stories, subjective experience, tradition, authority and intuition are used as a base.

These approaches fail in the natural world most of the time. There is no reason why they should work better in a realm beyond the world we live in.

Our knowledge has gaps, and inserting supernatural claims whenever we do not currently know yields no gain. Supernatural explanations explain nothing and predict nothing, but they are comforting because you can make the world seem like you wish it to be. Wishful thinking is the biggest motive to entertain supernaturalism. This turns supernaturalism into a big and very profitable business model to exploit gullible people.

All these claims are the result of my investigation. Don't believe me; think for yourself, and read my arguments to bolster the claims I made.