How well does the following argument work as a counter towards unfalsifiable supernatural claims?

Question

Human perception is solely naturalistic; as such, empiricism and logic generated by human perception and interpretation of reality is strictly naturalistic as well.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; any claim extending beyond human perception of reality can neither be proven nor disproven.

As a result, a virtually infinite number of claims can be posited and rendered undisprovable if the aforementioned claim’s object extends beyond human perception or physical reality.

Of those virtually infinite claims, a virtually infinite number necessarily contradict each other.

Every belief or rationale is limited to its proponents’ own human perception, which is being used to justify a claim extending beyond that.

As a result, the likelihood of each individual claim being more probable than another is impossible to assess.

Therefore, the likelihood of any particular claim being actual is practically zero.

Belief against such claims is justifiable on the basis of their minimal probability.

I’m 15 and curious whether this works as a compelling argument or otherwise. I’m specifically looking for critiques, and I welcome any rebuttals.

Answer 1

A review on the strength of argument:

Human perception is solely naturalistic

This is an assumption, but due to the mind-body problem it is not general consensus in philosophy. Some would claim mind and qualia are not naturalistic. And some will believe things like dreams foretelling the future and whatnot. It's an eternal yearning of spiritual people to have abilities of perception beyond naturalism. Such people would disagree with this point.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

This does not support the rest of your argumentation, it is used to justify beliefs, not reject them. It's also unnecessary to the argument.

Belief against such claims is justifiable on the basis of their minimal probability

It's not so easy. Claims of the supernatural typically derive from naturalistic observations that have no immediate explanation. Why did this person know the future, why did that person die of a disease while this other guy survived, why was there a big volcano, and so on. So the root of superstitions is that there are observations that need a supernatural explanation, just rejecting all of them because they could each be right but not all of them does not answer the original question of how to explain something.

To the believer, rejecting all is not an option, so one must choose one supernatural claim or accept to have a gap in understanding.

Therefore, the likelihood of any particular claim being actual is practically zero

Arguing with the quantity of something that cannot be quantified is logically weak. It seems to attack a strawman that posits some beliefs have stronger probability than others.

Every belief or rationale is limited to that proponent’s own human perception,

That is also true for most other things you learn in school. In daily life you cannot observe individual atoms, the surface of Mars, the invasion in Normandy. Unless you are careful, your argument degenerates to rejection of almost every knowledge.

Also, relying on personal senses in argument is problematic, as those are subject to errors and illusions. Not even reasoning and memory can be fully trusted(else we'd all get perfect marks in school every time). If we can trust and only trust our own senses, what should those people believe who think they saw an angel, a UFO, miracle medicine, etc?

Overall it's not always easy to delineate between claims about the natural and the supernatural, the argument posits a clean black and white separation that philosophy does not provide.

And the argument given is strictly negative, it does not assert what positive beliefs to hold. A special challenge is to combine positive and negative constraints without contradicting oneself. So that's missing.

This is not to say that the reasoning is bad or wrong, the OP asks for a review, that's what this is.

Answer 2

Most philosophy is going to take a pause and reflect your first line:

Human perception is solely naturalistic; as such, empiricism and logic generated by human perception and interpretation of reality is strictly naturalistic as well.

The assumed relationship between external objects and internal representations is one of the longest-standing questions in philosophy (and psychology, and biology). We all like to think that when we perceive a dog (have an internal representation of a dog) it corresponds to an actual dog (an external object). We can use naturalistic processes (like light reflection and lensing) to describe how an image of that external object gets to the back of our eyeballs. But how we get from that eyeball image to a mental representation where we think "I see a dog" is a poorly understood mystery. And when we say things like "That dog looks sad" — where we are (somehow) creating a mental representation of an (ostensible) dog's internal state, (somehow) translated through subtle visual cues… — well, invoking naturalism becomes mere hand-waving. I mean, if I can gather up subtle visual cues that make me think a dog is sad and call that 'naturalism', then why isn't it 'naturalism' to pick up subtle visual cues from the trees, wind, and sky and think that God is sad?

Statistics won't help here. We're not about to start reframing our common mental representations so that we constantly say things like "It's likely I'm seeing a dog", so why should we reframe uncommon mental representations? We believe we see what our senses tell us. If we have a mental representation of a dog, we believe there's a dog there; if we have a mental representation of a God, we believe there's a God there. We can argue against the belief — try to convince each other that the dog we are representing mentally is a hologram, or a hallucination, or a misshapen Pop-Tart in the real world — but we're not going to start assigning likelihoods, as though the object we're representing is a dog AND a hologram AND a hallucination AND a Pop-Tart (some quantum superposition of all the things that might provoke a mental representation of 'dog').

Answer 3

"any claim extending beyond human perception of reality can neither be proven nor disproven."

This a metaphysical presupposition of methodological naturalism. The vast majority of humans, as far as I can tell, don't necessarily accept this because their theory of evidence accomodates the supernatural. Many before are willing to accept that even if they haven't perceived the supernatural, others' testimony of the supernatural is reliable. Much faith in the Gospels is just this sort of "proof". Divine revelation is a powerful claim that many people accept.

Is your argument strong? I'd say. But it is based on first principles that you and I have in common. And those who disagree with us, who accept the supernatural have their own sometimes compelling counterattacks. I would say, however, at 15 it's an articulate statement in defense of naturalism.

Answer 4

To investigate further the question of unfalsifiable supernatural claims it could be helpful to provide some examples of specific candidates for unfalsifiable claims. Just to provide a data basis for the investigation.

Which of the following claims about natural or supernatural events are unfalsifiable and why, which claims can be falsified, which have been falsified, which have been confirmed:

• Each dream is the fullfilment of a wish. (Sigmund Freud)
• Life on earth developed according to the theory of evolution. (Charles Darwin, Alfred R. Wallace)
• All humans need salvation by Jesus Christ. (The Christian Testament)
• Besides our universe there exist several parallel universes without the possibility to communicate with them.
• There is a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, which is too small for us to detect. (Bertrand Russell)
• The universe has been created by Jahwe. (Hebrew Bible)

According to which criteria should a claim be assessed if it is unfalsifiable? I do not see how invoking probability theory supports the assessment.

Answer 5

How well does the following argument work as a counter towards unfalsifiable supernatural claims?

Poorly, I'm afraid.

Summary

• The argument makes unsupported assumptions,
• including assuming the conclusion.
• It draws conclusions that do not actually follow from their premises.
• It makes contradictory claims.
• It relies on a fundamentally faulty probability analysis, which directly and fatally undermines the conclusion.

I note also that although it is ostensibly about unfalsifiable supernatural claims, nothing in the argument is specific to the supernatural. It covers "any claim extending beyond human perception of reality", which includes also conceptual claims and some natural ones. Among those is "people should not accept unfalsifiable supernatural claims," which is problematic in an argument for exactly that proposition. That is,

• If it were valid, it would be self-contradictory.

In detail

Human perception is solely naturalistic;

This is a significant unsupported assumption, but I will accept it for the sake of argument.

as such, empiricism and logic generated by human perception and interpretation of reality is strictly naturalistic as well.

By "empiricism", I take you to mean drawing inferences from our perceptions. That pairs well with forming arguments based on our perceptions, which I take as your "logic". Couched in these terms, yes, if one accepts that human perception is solely naturalistic then it follows trivially that inferences and arguments based only on such perceptions are also solely naturalistic.

However, I note that that is not a conventional definition of "logic," which is usually taken to have broader scope. I do not accept the conventional sense of "logic" to be solely naturalistic.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence;

True, but not supportive of your position. More the opposite, in fact.

any claim extending beyond human perception of reality can neither be proven nor disproven.

Arguable. I am by no means alone in questioning whether concepts such as mathematical theorems and the proposition "belief in unfalsifiable supernatural claims is unjustified" are contained within human perception of reality. That touches on open philosophical and metaphysical questions. Yet mathematicians accept that theorems can be proven, and you are yourself offering an argument for the proposition above.

But this is not essential to your argument, so let's move on.

As a result, a virtually infinite number of claims can be posited and rendered undisprovable if the aforementioned claim’s object extends beyond human perception or physical reality.

I am prepared to accept even that there is an actually infinite number of claims about reality that could be posited. I am furthermore prepared to accept that an actually infinite subset of them is neither provable nor refutable, without accepting that that says anything about whether the elements of that subset are true, false, or neither.

This obviates all the preceding points about human perception.

Of those virtually infinite number of claims, a virtually infinite number necessarily contradict each other.

I take you to be arguing that for any such claim X, you can construct a large set of mutually irreconcilable claims containing X. Unfortunately, that does not follow merely from there being very many, even infinitely many, claims that could be posited. I am prepared to accept it as true, however, at least for the sake of argument.

Every belief or rationale is limited to that proponent’s own human perception, which is being used to justify a claim extending beyond that.

Not so fast. You are assuming the conclusion here, or close to it. Who says that all my beliefs are or have to be justified by my perceptions, or by anything else for that matter? How do you substantiate that claim? In particular, how is it justified by your perceptions, as it must be for self consistency of your argument?

As a result, the likelihood of each individual claim being more probable than the other is impossible to assess.

No, that does not follow. There may be no standard for making such assessments, but that rarely stops anyone from assessing anyway.

Perhaps you mean that such assessments are not justified. I don't think I accept that in its full generality. At minimum, it needs more support.

Therefore, the likelihood of any particular claim being actual is practically zero

No, you have contradicted yourself. "The likelihood [...] is practically zero" is an assessment of the likelihood. You cannot have both that and "impossible to assess". Certainly the former does not follow from the latter.

But suppose we reject the "impossible to assess" claim, which is poorly supported anyway. I think you're arguing that given a vast set of mutually irreconcilable claims, the likelihood of each must be miniscule. This is true if the claims are all equally likely, give or take, but in no way is it justified to assume such equiprobability. It can absolutely be the case that a small subset of alternatives from such a set have non-trivial probability. In fact, there can be one or a small range with probability arbitrarily close to 1.

Belief against such claims is justifiable on the basis of their minimal probability.

Argument from (im)probability is philosophically weak, but you cannot use it here anyway because you have not established the improbability.

Answer 6

That sounds similar to David Hume's (lesser known?) argument about the non-existence of miracles. Instead of imagining an infinite number of contradictory possible claims, he write there are many actual contradictory claims, coming from various religions (each miracle being proof that they have the one-and-only-one god). He leaves finding these claims as an exercise for the reader.

Instead of each miracle being infinitely unlikely (due to your infinite possible contradictory miracles) each is only faced with a dozen counter-examples (the miracles from competing religions). He deems that good enough to disprove each miracle.

I read that in "The Great Guide: What David Hume can teach us... ", but don't have a copy. So here's Wikipedia's "of miracles" (way down the page):

Hume ends with an argument [...] He points out that many different religions have their own miracle stories. Given that there is no reason to accept some of them but not others [...] we must hold all religions to have been proved true – but given the fact that religions contradict each other, this cannot be the case.

That quote has a link to another Wikipedia article "argument from miracles", but it didn't seem relevant. The "of miracles" entry list criticisms, but they seem to address Hume's more common argument (which seems to me what we now think of as "extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proof"). In other words, I can't give you any existing arguments against your idea, but maybe a Hume scholar can.

Answer 7

The argument fails because a lot of supernatural claims start with the claim "I experienced something supernatural". Which is very much in the realm of the senses, but still unfalsifiable because it is obviously not something you can just repeat by experiment (assuming the supernatural event in question is angelic visits / communication from Deity).

A LOT of the other more metaphysical claims root in these experiences.

Answer 8

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; any claim extending beyond human perception of reality can neither be proven nor disproven.

As a result, a virtually infinite number of claims can be posited and rendered undisprovable if the aforementioned claim’s object extends beyond human perception or physical reality.

This makes no sense at all. Consider the following two theories. (1) There is a reality independent of your perception that always exists even when you're not looking at it. (2) The portion of the world that you can perceive exists and the rest of it doesn't but the world you can perceive acts exactly as if the rest of it did exist.

According to you both of these theories can't be assessed at all and there is no difference between them that matters. They predict exactly the same things for everything you can perceive so they are just as good as one another by your standards.

Theory (1) is true and theory (2) isn't but that's not because you can perceive the difference. It's because theory (2) is just theory (1) with unexplained labels attached to various parts of the world that you can't perceive saying they don't exist.

Every belief or rationale is limited to its proponents’ own human perception, which is being used to justify a claim extending beyond that.

Neither you nor anyone else has ever seen the core of the sun so the core of the sun doesn't exist by this theory. Similarly for all of the non-avian dinosaurs since nobody has ever seen any of them, only their fossils. And nobody has ever seen a fossil forming in real time so all of the scientific papers about the process of fossilisation are wrong according to your theory. In fact, basically we must throw out all of science by your standards since they all invoke processes we don't see to explain what we do see.

The root of your mistake is justificationism: the idea that there is a process called justification that can certify theories as good or true or whatever. But any argument makes assumptions and uses rules about how those assumptions can give rise to conclusions. There is no way to show those assumptions and rules are correct or probably correct or anything like that since you might just have missed a case in which they fail or a flaw in an argument. But if you find a conclusion of an argument that clashes with the conclusion of some other argument at least one of the arguments is wrong. So you can find flaws in your worldview with arguments but you can't justify them. In science, an experiment can clash with what a theory claims will happen in a particular situation so an experimental result incompatible with a theory poses a problem. That problem may be solved by either finding a flaw in the experiment or coming up with a variant of your current theories that solves the problem. So experiments refute theories, they don't prove theories or make them more probable. See "Realism and the Aim of Science" by Karl Popper for more explanation.

Also assigning probabilities to theories is nonsense. A probability is defined on a space of states, which requires a theory that explains what the states are. There is no space of all theories on which you can assign probabilities to theories. Worse, since making progress relies on taking criticisms seriously and trying to resolve them comparing theories on the basis of probability and trying to adjust the probability up and down on the basis of criticisms is in practice just an excuse for ignoring criticisms.

For more on non-justificationist epistemology, see

https://criticalfallibilism.com/introduction-to-critical-fallibilism/

and this Popper reading list

https://fallibleideas.com/books#popper

The problem with the existence of god is that it just doesn't solve any of the problems its advocates claim to solve. If we want to use god to explain morality or the origin of the universe or whatever, then god would have to provide a reason to say the world is one way rather than another. But the whole idea of god is so vague that it doesn't do this and so is irrelevant to explaining anything. There are other problems such as omnipotence being inconsistent: can god make a rock so heavy that god can't lift it?

For some criticisms of theism see Chapter 1 of "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith also has some arguments against theism and criticisms of some theistic arguments.

Answer 9

The argument works extremely well when fortified. In particular, it needs a strong explanation of what we mean by "natural" so that we can be confident that our empirical approach has not left out any supernatural forces which affect us without affecting our understanding of physics.

Such a steelman is provided by Sean M. Carroll in Carroll 2021. Quoting from the discussion on p16:

I have argued that we have good reasons to believe that everyday-life phenomena supervene on the Core Theory, and not on as-yet-undiscovered particles and forces or on new principles at more fundamental levels. The argument relies on an assumption that the world is entirely physical, and that there is a level of reality accurately described by an effective quantum field theory. Then the general properties of quantum field theory, plus known experimental constraints, lead us to the conclusion that the Core Theory suffices.

If this package of claims – physicalism, EFT, Core Theory – is correct, it has a number of immediate implications. There is no life after death, as the information in a person’s mind is encoded in the physical configuration of atoms in their body, and there is no physical mechanism for that information to be carried away after death. The location of planets and stars on the day of your birth has no effect on who you become later in life, as there are no relevant forces that can extend over astrophysical distances. And the problems of consciousness, whether “easy” or “hard,” must ultimately be answered in terms of processes that are compatible with this underlying theory.