Many of the arguments for the existence of God are centered around the idea that there are certain situations where God is more plausible than a natural explanation. The Cosmological Argument claims that God is more plausible for the creation of everything than any natural explanation. The Teleological Arguments claim that God is more plausible as the cause of order in the universe than any natural one. Some ontological arguments, such as the one Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig use are similarly assumptions that God is more plausible than no God.
I have been thinking of when a supernatural explanation is more plausible than a natural one, and I can’t think of one. Everything that we have been able to show an answer for is natural. Lightning is not magically caused by god. Thunder is not God bowling. There is not a single thing that has been shown to be caused by anything supernatural.
As an example, if I were to have a house in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest neighbor was 30 miles away, and I walked half a mile to the mailbox and returned to find random scribblings on my walls, my first suspicion wouldn’t be that ghosts haunted my house and scribbled on my walls. I would think that a person, or even an animal were responsible. Even if there were no footprints on the dust outside, I would think that it is much more likely that there was a natural explanation than a supernatural one. If I never found any evidence whatsoever of a natural cause, I would still think that it is more likely that there was a natural explanation that I couldn’t think of than a supernatural one, simply because there are no supernatural explanations for anything else.
Further, what are we saying when we say supernatural? Supernatural is not positively defined. It is negatively defined as something that is not natural. In other words, when we say that something is supernatural, we aren’t saying anything about what it is, we are talking about what it is not, and if we are saying that it is not natural, that means that every possible natural cause has been ruled out.
So, since it is impossible for every single natural cause to be known, it is impossible to say that any cause is supernatural.
- A natural explanation is always more plausible than a supernatural explanation, unless all possible natural explanations have been exhausted.
- We can never exhaust all possible natural explanations.
- Therefore, it is never more plausible that a supernatural explanation could supersede an unknown natural explanation.
These three simple steps say to me that there is no time where God is a more plausible explanation than no god.