What evidence does the paranormal and supernatural provide towards the existance of God? 
I just took a philosophy class and this was one of my final questions, I tought i had understood the question and knew the answer but i must say after taking this philosophy class im still confuseā¦
Please help me!!
Paranormal means not known as normal, and supernatural means not known as natural.
āNobody knows how x works, so y must be true.ā
Making up an explanation of what you donāt know would be a textbook example of a argumentum ad ignorantiam. The unknown offers absolutely no evidence towards the existence of God.
As long as one is using the words āparanormalā and āsupernatural,ā Tristan is right, which is why I donāt like those words. Or one of the reasons.
So-called āparanormalā abilities need another name. Depending on who Iām talking to, I call them either āpsiā or āmagic.ā āPsiā will do here.
There is nothing āsupernaturalā about psi, in my opinion. It simply makes use of a property of nature which physics has not yet modeled precisely: the alteration of probability. Since this does not employ energy, many of the expectations in physics donāt apply. However, it does have its own rules and limitations, and is not a āwhatever you want it to beā kind of thing.
As to the implication for the existence of God, that comes from the way in which divine power manifests, which, at present, is always through psi. And that in itself tells me that God does not exist at this time, but may in the future. If we understand God to be an indwelling intelligence animating the universe, then, if that intelligence existed now, we should see energy-based effects of it: communication intelligible to the non-psychic and non-mystical, at the very least. But since psi time-travels (i.e., it can impact events that have already occurred, as long as they remain indeterminate from the point of view of the person trying to impact them), a God who exists in a possible future could impact the present through psi ā but not through energy. In this way, God could increase the chance of the possible future becoming real, midwifing His/Her/Its own birth, so to speak.
Given that there is no evidence of the āsupernaturalā to begin with, no evidence can be drawn from it, to support a deity concept or otherwise.
Depends what you call: āEvidenceā.
Paranormal events have been recorded, but, when they are not explained, they are not seen as āevidenceā, because āevidenceā is āexplanationā. The human mind cencors out anything which does not fit into its sense of reality, and will panic or have a fear attack when something defies its sense of reality.
Example:
Someone sees a ghost.
They think: āCould I be wrong!? Could the most commonly accepted version of reality be incorrect!?ā
And then he or she is insane, OR, the vast majority of humanity is insane.
I prefer to stick with the idea that the majority of humanity is insane, to a relative degree. āIgnorance is blissā may not be literally correct, but, it is one of the most popular forms of relief/āpiece-of-mindā, anyways.
Tristan
What about people who arenāt making up the explanations? I donāt know anybody who has āmade upā a concept of God to account for some unexplainable event in their life. They may have seen that event as evidence towards an already existing God-concept that they heard about or partially endorsed already, but thatās quite another thing.
People who do not give an answer to that for which they do not know? Then they are committing no fallacy.
Those that experience an unknown and give the same fallacious explanation as the ones that preceded them are still committing the same fallacy. Accounting for the unknown with an already existing fallacious argument (i.e God), is the same as making it up yourself. The argument as it stands, is fallacious. It doesnāt matter who offers the argument as an explanation. Therefore, itās not quite another thing, but the same thing.
Or hallucinates. They of course would swear they āsawā a ghost. The brain cannot tell the difference between what is happening inside the brain or what is happening outside the brain. The brain, a majority of the time, is talking to itself, not processing information from the outside.
In most cases, this is not true. In cases where it is true, it is evidence of a very serious mental disorder.
Tristan
I canāt agree with this. If I see Mars seem to move backwards through the heavens, and attribute that to some theory of retrograde motion developed by a Middle-Ages astronomer (for example, because Iām living in the Middle Ages), and it turns out that theory is wrong, I donāt think I committed a fallacy* at all, I think what I did makes a whole lot of sense, especially if Iām not an astronomer.
Similarly, if I come across some situation I canāt explain that seems āmysticalā or āsupernaturalā, I donāt think Iām doing anything wrong by reasoning, āHey, that must have been the work of that Jesus guy Iāve been hearing so much aboutā, if indeed thatās the most likely explanation Iāve heard of.
I see these situations quite a bit different from ācoming up withā a theory, āWow, that was weird, an invisible, all powerful Creator who loves me, and one of the three portions of his triune self in human form to reconcile the world unto Himself must have done itā, which would be crazy.
What argument are we talking about? āGodā (the Being, the word, or the concept) isnāt an argument.
*- Technically, situations like this are guilty of the fallacy of induction, if you want to split hairs. But thatās just because this isnāt a truly deductive situation anyway, so the whole concept of āfallacyā doesnāt strictly apply.
dorkyd00d
Mine can!
What evidence of the paranormal or supernatural do you have?
The force (Electromagnetism or Gravity) that holds a atom together is a pretty good case since this force cannot be seen nor measured directly, it has no mass or weight or any physical properties yet we know it is there because of its affect. Many waves are not physical matter or particles of any kind yet we know they are there and many scientists believe that this is evidence of another dimension. Also the vast majority consensus (axiom) that something does not come from nothing points to something non-physical that has always existed since there is much evidence to a beginning of all physical matter as we know it.
Also Love and other feelings that are not physical are (IMO) good indicators of something other then this physical body and world. Why does it hurt so much to have your heart broken?
No, in all cases (that I know of) this is true.
Oh?
Imagine, please, a leprechaun sitting on top of your computer monitor.
Can you tell the difference between the leprechaun, which you see with your imagination, and the computer monitor, which you see with your eyes?
Where talking about the argument that states āunknown therefore god did itā
By ācoming upā I mean using the unknown as a premise for a conclusion. Thereās little to argue about here. The unknown is not a premise for any conclusion. The conclusion āunknown therefore God did itā is a logical fallacy.
btw. I hope Imp doesnāt mind me stealing his trademarked response style.
edit: dyslexia
Of course. But imagining is a different process than seeing.
Yeah, one is purely in the mind and the other involves a physical sense.
You did say, though, that the brain canāt distinguish between those two.
We also need to make sure we agree on what a āhallucinationā is.
Simply āperceiving something that isnt thereā isnāt specific enough, because it may suggest that that the perception is based off of no thing at all, or something that objectively doesnāt take the same form as the subjective percpetion.
In one case, the mind organized data that the brain interprets from something in the (outside) environment/āobjective worldā, and in the other case the mind is organizing data that is NOT taken from the outside world (but instead from the mind itself).
One of these is Dorkyās outside the brain definition, and another Navigatorās inside the brain.
One is an interpretation of data from one of the five senses, the other is the imagination as work.
However, the brain is always interpretting sense information according to the organization of the mind up to that moment.
Dorky, if a person sensed a kind of energy that would be interpretted by the brain according to the mindās organization of an intelligence, that isnāt alive in the flesh as we are (which, according to what weāve acquired as children, can bring either the image of a ghost, or a bright light angelic beingā¦ which can also depend on the bodyās reaction of whether or not the energy agrees with or conflicts with their own beliefs and motivations, as the body can be perceiving what a certain energy is communicating without decoding the perceptions into language) can we really say the person is hallucinating?
If so, youād have to argue that the (normal) perceptions of man are flawless, and that we truly see the objective world as it is (in which cases color blind people are hallucinating, as well as any animals whose senses differ from ours due to different anatomical structures).
As Navigator said, the man who is becoming mindful of perceptions occuring from his own mind, and believes them to be coming from the senses, the world outside his own mind, is a case of a mental disorder.
I donāt talk to straw men! 
But seriously, I was only claiming that there is a difference between imagining something and a hallucination, which is obvious. Somebody imagining a monster coming after them would experience quite a change in physiology compared to somebody who actually believed it.
What Iām also stating is the mind would have no way of differentiating between a hallucination and an actual object. This isnāt to say that everything we see is a hallucination, but rather that there can be a āshort circuitā of some sort in the brain that would cause a person to actually see something, as if it were actually there, without it actually being there. This is much different than imagining that thing, as this would take place in a different part of the brain.
You would first have to assume that this energy was outside of the mind, or at least the every-day working part of the mind, and it caused a neurological reaction, much the way sensory input can. Iām not willing to assume this, especially considering we know of cases where people āsenseā things that really arenāt there, and as you pointed out, they are usually considered to have a mental disorder.
Fortunately, our mind, most of the time, is able to accurately portray the world through our sensory input, but to assume that there would never be a technical glitch that would cause one to see, or hear, something very clearly, as if it had actually happened in an objective reality (more than that person could see/hear it) when in fact it had not would be absurd.
Letās just be clearā¦ the only difference between imagining (an event happening in the mikd that is not actually occuring in the outside the mind world), in your definition, and hallucinating, is that one is aware that their āimaginationsā are not real.
In my definition (and navigatorās, if I understood him correctly) the hallucination is the same thing as the imagination, the difference is that a perception is a hallucination when the perceiver mistakes the world in the mind as the world outside the mind (he believes that he is sensing something, when he is merely imagining it).
By ādifferentiatingā and āactual objectā I interpret the first sentence as stating that the mind canāt know whether or not what it is perceiving is a hallucination or an actual object, which is definitely true. After all, thatās what a hallucination is, a perception arising from the mind, not outside the mind, deemed (from outside) reality.
BUT āactual objectā seems to suggest that our brain interprets, and our mind organizes, an object from the outside world identical to its objective manifestation in the environment.
I just want to make sure you donāt think that what we see (when based off something in the environment) is the actual objective form or manifestation of what our brain interprets.
What do you mean āor at least the everyday working part of the mindā?
This is impossibleā¦ you sense information from your senses. Do you mean we know of cases where people imagine a reality --as a reaction of a brain interpretation-- that is not based off of immediate input from the environment? Of course we doā¦ but it is only a mental disorder if it the mind organized it into āobjective realityā.
This doesnāt disprove the possibility that we only perceive things according to the ways our minds are organized, and that āparanormalā stimuli results in āparanormalā perceptions.
Perhaps in the future science will have established the existence of these energies, and if that knowledge becomes common knowledge to everyone, people will not perceive them in the image of ghosts, but as their interpretation of how the scientific understanding of the energy would appear.
Can you try to more precisely explain this thought? Iāve reread that sentence many, many times but I am unable to get any meaning out of it.
What do you mean āaccurately portrayā āmost of the timeā? We can only talk about the brain interpreting objective portrayals of the world insofar as the word āobjectiveā is limited to human beingsā dominant ways of sensing and interpreting those senses.
The argument of everyone hallucinating is stronger than the argument of only āinsaneā individuals, because we can never prove that what you call hallucinations arenāt the brainās interpretation of something outside of it. We CAN successfully argue that every individual is hallucinating, as he believes that each interpretation the brain sends to the mind to organize is actually an objective reflection of the outside world.