No one has argued “any phenomenon that is measurable or observable by definition must have a natural explanation.” To the contrary, scientists and philosophers are pretty unanimous that the supernatural, if it existed, would be measurable or observable by definition.

I discuss this in detail in my article Defining Naturalism: The Definitive Account. I then give examples specifically for God in Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed and for the resurrection of Jesus in my chapter on that in The Christian Delusion.

I’m curious as to how it’s possible to produce evidence of what you refer to as the supernatural. If any phenomenon that is measurable or observable by definition must have a natural explanation, then in what way can science ever be used to investigate what you call the supernatural?

So far, your comments have been consistently valuable. Either good questions, or good contributions. So no complaints yet.

Thanks a lot for the helpful recommendations.

I am currently going through them and will probably leave some comments/questions there (I have already wrote one in the The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism article).

I have also recently started read Sense and Goodness without God. I am still very early in the book but from its ToCs and what I have read so far, it looks like it addresses some of these points in detail as well.

Also, please let me know if at any point you see that I am leaving too much comments on the blog and I will regulate myself. I know that you are very busy and might not want tons of questions from a single person especially on older blog posts.

Indeed I have some articles of relevance to your thinking.

First, on how the atheism-agnosticism spectrum really tracks more a traditional-nontraditional theism spectrum (the less traditional and weirder, e.g. the more gerrymandered, a god is proposed to be, the more agnostic one can be about it), see:

Who Is an Atheist?

On why this doesn’t work for traditional gods (i.e. gods any substantial number of people actually believe in today), including how immensely Cartesian they have to be:

Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory

On why Cartesian Demons are always too improbable to believe (as well as computational creators, i.e. aliens/AIs):

We Are Probably Not in a Simulation

And on why even the most untraditional, gerrymandered, minimally-defined god must still be improbable (and thus agnosticism ultimately still unwarranted):

The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism

And:

A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument

I still say I am an Agnostic because if someone asked me to provide the probability of the existence of some sort of a rational agent that created the world, I won’t be able to answer that the person might even think that I am deliberately evading the question.

I like the style that you use to argue for naturalism and I think that it totally debunks the theistic God.

I also know that the God I don’t rule out, you’ll definitely consider a Cartesian Demon and hence still wildly improbable.

It’s just that I think the Cartesian Demon argument doesn’t apply here which is a claim I also know that if I can’t defend only boils down to special pleading.

I think that the fact that I can’t defend or even articulate my position is for now best described by the term Agnostic. (I still wonder how much of this confusion comes down from being born and raised a conservative Muslim though)

What you and she are actually arguing about, on various different occasions, is whether her expanded-set definition is “more useful” (as well as arguing over what outcome measures make it so) or “more commonly in use” (which I see neither of you doing any empirical work on to determine). Those two arguments are over fact, not logic. Only evidence can determine whether a definition is useful or not by one criterion or another, and only evidence can determine which criterion matters more than another—as in, what people more generally want or need words to do, since “what people want or need words to do” is a question of fact, about people and their wants and needs. Likewise, how a word is more commonly used, is a question of fact (one has to reliably observe or poll linguistic populations and their usage).

“Agnostic” makes a good test case here. BD argues against the “agnostic as middle” by arguing people “should” adopt the “original” definition of agnostic. She gives no good reason why people should do that; and the observational and statistical evidence today I’m pretty sure conclusively shows the “agnostic as middle” has become the more common definition in use (as happens: word usage changes over time). So she is wrong there not as a matter of logic, but simply as a matter of empirical fact.

I think the same falls out for her usage of atheist, although I’m getting the impression she is trying to accede to the “rocks are atheist” position to accomplish something else, which seems to be her argument for reviving the original definition of agnostic so as to prevent people from calling her one, which I see being as futile as you wanting to prevent people calling you an atheist, when in actual fact she is an agnostic by some definitions, just as you are an atheist by some definitions, and you should both just get comfortable with that fact and stop trying to construct logical arguments to defy the facts of actual common usage on that point.

There’s nothing wrong with being an atheist or agnostic by some definition or other. One shouldn’t be so worried over it. All that matters in practice is whether we are using words to an audience in a way that that audience will understand (and therefore we have to speak to them in their language, not our own) and are treating what an audience says by the definitions they use and not out own (and therefore we have to be able to translate their language into ours, and not interpret their language as if it were ours). Any other arguing over the meaning of words is a waste of time.

I don’t know why you want that or why you are asking about it here, on an article not pertaining to New Testament or even ancient history.

But as I have discussed many times before (e.g. Proving History, pp. 219-23; On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 147 n. 196; my commentary on Ehrman regarding document survival and its followup; etc.), no such documents survive.

0.0000003 is sigma five.

Do you not know the number you stated was vastly smaller than sigma five? Or that 0.0000003 is not twelve decimal places?