Supernatural

Earlier last week I had a unique moment at work that provide just the little bit of philosophical talk. I don't recall the exact path that took us toward a conversation about the virgin birth, but we got there one way or another.

One of my fellow workers contented, in his own particular vulgar way, that the virgin birth was a lie, he knew without doubt that Jesus Christ was a bastard. It was only reasonable, after all, that a girl who found herself knocked up would invent a story to keep her out of trouble.

If a young woman you knew got herself pregnant and was not married, but instead insisted that the child must be from God, would you believe her?

Of course this is a perfectly reasonable conclusion, if you do not believe in the supernatural. Without a belief in the supernatural one is forced to limit the possibility of each and every claim by the process of cause and effect. A pregnancy only has a few possible causes that will yield the observed effect.

After hearing my friends blasphemous assertion concerning the legitimacy of Christ my first inclination was to contend with him. In the context of what I have just previously explained however, this would have been useless. We would first have to come to an understanding of our intellectual foundations. Each would have to explain to the other what the bounds and limits of their considerations will be.

The natural man is bound by reason, cause and effect. There is no other possibility for him. What he knows is all there is, and little room for the unknown remains.

Of course the "unknown" and the "supernatural" are not the same thing; odd though that they seem to be so often confused and confounded. Still in a purely practical sense, more often then not, the natural man has bound himself to rejecting the unknown. If a proposition does not confirm to a known application of cause and effect, it will be rejected out of hand.

So I said nothing.

He was bound by a force that did not bind me. Bound by a force that would preclude any meaningful discussion.