Witches and occultists today say that their powers work in harmony with nature. So if a sick person gets better it seems natural but the spell-caster knows better. The spell did it using nature and without violating it.
Believers in God say that prayer always or usually works in tandem with nature too.
So, many think there are forces that can take over nature so what seems ordinary such as the toaster being too fast is in fact not.
So what do they say about those forces?
Some think there is the supernatural, which means something happens that nature cannot do full stop or cannot do right now under the circumstances. Examples follow.
1 The frog rising from the dead in the lab stunning the scientists.
2 The frog despite being pinned to a board getting away. The latter looks strange but natural but is not if the frog was really pinned correctly and firmly. With such a miracle we would shrug and settle for, "Maybe the frog was not pinned that well after all."
3 The frog is given poison. If it survives for 24 hours it can flush the poison out. But it flushes it in minutes and lives. That is an example of something that nature can do but just not that fast. We might reason, "Gosh! That is strange! But we see no miracle or magic there. It is a fluke of nature."
[Miracle believers contrast the powers of nature and the power of God. They say miracles do what nature cannot do. But that would be irrelevant and even meaningless if a miracle could be real and yet look natural. (Remember examples 2 and 3 above.)
Science would have to revise itself over 3. That shows how a miracle - and its believing ally - does indeed threaten science. You would have the wrong information about the poison over a miracle. Science cannot assume miracles. It has to act as if they do not happen. Jesus said that whoever is not for him is against him. If you are not for paying your taxes you are against your government. Science not saying, "Miracles don't happen" means nothing. It is not for miracles and and that way it is against them. The miracle underpins religions such as Islam, Christianity and Mormonism to name a few.
Also, if Jesus was like a person that was pinned and got away then what? If John goes to the gallows in front of many witnesses and shows up again saying it was not him we will take his word at face value. He may not tell how it was done. His death seems certain and his being alive now is definitely certain. We just leave it at that. What if Jesus had said at the end of the gospel that, despite the evidence, he did not rise from the dead? You would take him at his word. See the point?
Think of Jesus in the tomb. He died by crucifixion. If the men in white were actually physicians and/or sorcerers they could attempt to revive him and resurrect him. If he came back from the dead by a miracle we would wonder if the doctors or sorcerers caused that. It does not mean their efforts were any help. The doctrine is that once Jesus died he had to come back healed and happy to be our living friend and brother. To say the circumstances matter, that he would not if doctors had worked on him, is just stupid.
To sum this up, Jesus' resurrection would be largely ignored and downplayed in the Church had doctors been there OR IF JESUS HIMSELF DENIED IT THOUGH IT WAS TRUE. It is logically possible for a man to rise miraculously from the dead and think he did not and say he didn't.
The way the story is told has more power than if he really did come back by a magical act of God.]
Others talk about the paranormal. It is really just a word for the hidden force [or forces] in nature and is not really supernatural though it can do trickery to make it look like there is something supernatural happening. Many say it is real. Not all agree that the paranormal is real or does anything in the world.
The paranormal seems to be about forces that look like magic but are not.
Many would say that maybe nature does have secret laws and leave it at that. They do not like the superstitious connotations of the paranormal.
Once you say a miracle can happen you lose any right to say only identifiable miracles happen. That is like saying John steals but will only do it when he can get caught. You cannot ask anybody to agree that only clear wonders such as the resurrection of Jesus or apparitions of an angel to Muhammad can take place. Who do you think you are if you do?
Also, once you say a simulated miracle can happen you lose any right to say only identifiable ones happen. Jesus rising from the dead then would not be the point. He is just one. The real focus is on what resurrections we do not know about.
Denials of nature being nature like lies get worse and worse. As lies lead to more lies and more uncertainty so do doubts about nature lead to more doubts and more uncertainty.
So faith harms. It intends to harm a person’s grip on reality. Prayer and magic express faith and thus are based on evil intent.
People who feel disassociated from the truth and the real world may try to deal with it by sucking others in their way of thinking. They feel safer and validated for there is a feeling of being confirmed when somebody agrees with you.
[If a person claims even once that a supernatural power did something in his life then that person’s mental health may be legitimately questioned. Examples. “Satan killed my dog though the vet said it was poison”. “God posted that card in my door.”]
Consider these two scenarios.
1 You are denying that if the dog got poisoned that it killed it. You think Satan has made it look like it did. “Just because the poison was fatal does not mean it killed Rex. Satan’s power was the real cause.” Satan used the poison as cover for killing the dog.
2 You think that even if Jane posted that card in your door the one you got is not that one for it vanished into nothingness and God posted a replica. The camera would pick up nothing. Upon hearing that she did that you say, “God reversed her action and put the card in as if it were from her but it was him.”
We instinctively feel that the Satan one is worse than the God one. Why?
Well for a start we don't want the horror of thinking he is that involved in our lives.
Also if you are capable of unleashing evil, then worry about that and not if there is some supernatural or invisible source of evil. Don’t give evil more importance than you need to. That only empowers it and those who want to be evil.
But God would be bigger than a Devil. He is supposed to be so good at what he does that evil does not stand a chance with its stupidity and wastefulness. The same is true of the allies of evil. So evil only burns for a time until there is no timber left. That means that it does not matter if we work against evil or do not bother. Actually as evil thrives on lies and errors and makes false promises it is best left alone to destroy itself. Religion says evil dodges exact diagnosis, is rooted in harms end evils you probably will not know about and is basically a lie and a gaslighter. Why risk getting it wrong and making the problem worse? Why put yourself in danger?
It is complicated. Both God’s agency and Satan’s are considered at your peril. The God notion can harm one while the Satan one harms another. It depends.
I would add that Christians speak of divine hiddenness. St Paul expressed it this way, that we only see as if through a glass darkly. The problems with miracles being signs of God have been covered. They clarify nothing and once you say you have seen a miracle you cannot tell anybody that only identifiable miracles happen. Identifiable miracles could be so rare and the secret ones so common that only the latter type matter.
The Christians praise hiddenness for seems to be that there is something sacrificial and genuine if you offer service to a God you do not know that clearly and even to the extent that you are not that sure if he is real or not. This is tied to the notion that God does not force you to know him or force you to believe. Yet we would not encourage a friend to sacrifice all for some woman on social media. It is only an excuse for the evidence for God is poor and embarrassing. Divine hiddenness would mean that maybe the nice cake in the pantry has been replaced with one straight from God. It leads to a form of scepticism. Sacrifice in such a context is really contrarianism.
CONCLUSIONS
FALSIFICATION
In science, because you always have to check and make sure conclusions are correct, you have to be open to revising. So a theory must tell you how it can be shown to be untrue. Yes but what is a theory? It is really one word for many theories. It is a summary word. Each bit needs to tell you what to do to falsify it.
The fact that there are some things we accept as true without knowing how to falsify does not change the ideal. We need to falsify.
We cannot treat everything as equally important. So if you have a bunch of important ideas, give the prominence to the ones that you can falsify.
Let us look at something.
1 Rocks don’t talk is falsifiable for if you find a talking rock then you know it is wrong.
2 X species of bird is always white but you find this is wrong if you come across a coloured one.
But see how there is a difference.
Falsification denies that God belief is science for it is put beyond testing.
Critics say that if there is no God then “God never reveals himself to anybody anywhere, never has and never will” is true. But they point out that like the rock example, it is falsifiable.
Somebody getting a message from God would refute it.
They say that to row out stuff just because it is paranormal or about God, is in fact telling you that science should be unfair and selective. They say they are turning science into a mere word in order to keep the religious perspective out.
Another complaint is that if a theory is corrected and you test it, you do not necessarily throw it out. You tweak it. You see if there are additional factors that needed to be considered.
NOTE: The problems that arise if you assume that there is a supernatural or paranormal intelligence, one that perhaps caused the universe to do the near-impossible, to produce life, need communicating far and wide. You are calling the intelligence paranormal or miraculous or something like them. You are ALSO calling its action, say fine-tuning, one of those things. Something is wrong then when this pushes you into incoherence and dishonesty. Some fine-tuning.