The term God could mean different things depending on the topic. Regardless, however, to use the term “God” to mean both supernaturalism and the theistic God (particularly of the Abrahamic religion) is an inexcusable sloppiness—often done on purpose to confuse matters and sneak in arguments from supernaturalism in support of the theistic God. My use of the term God is always intended to mean the latter, which is far from the typical definition of supernaturalism as being outside of nature and thus the purview of naturalistic explanation.

The Abrahamic God is indeed no idle bystander concerning the material world. He splits the ocean, stops the rain, creates fire out of thin air, turns humans to statue instantly and breathes life to inanimate objects, raises the dead, and in some (recent) accounts, might even have ‘guided’ evolution. This God is clearly very much into the natural world and, if not He directly, His interactions with the natural world are accessible to naturalistic inquiry. Of course some may say God, despite plenty of Biblical (and Qur’anic) evidence to the contrary, never breaks the laws of nature. This is of course a defeater to the very claim God intervenes in the natural world (unless one happens to believe nature is deterministic and “God foresaw, thus”, nevertheless one still loses the argument “God intervenes”).

I will leave this topic here for now. My focus here is on supernaturalism, that which is ‘outside’ of nature and to require a naturalistic explanation is considered begging the question. I believe supernaturalism is the fertile ground from which Christianity apologist like Plantinga and others draw their arguments from.

Supernaturalism, by its very definition, is a collection of beliefs that live (and die) in the belief forming faculty of human beings. With no casual link to the natural world, the premise of supernaturalism could be stated as “all logically consistent theories are true of reality” so long as the theories address what is ‘outside of nature’, as logical consistency is the only test to their validity.

But of course the problem here is that the reflective person S who accepts logically consistent theory A as true of reality presupposes S is capable of forming true beliefs—regardless if S accepts naturalism or supernaturalism or something else. The challenge to the naturalist is to provide verifiable evidence to A. Whether the naturalist succeeds or not, the fundamental question about S’s ability to forms true beliefs remains unanswered. And if it were indeed the case that S is improbable to be capable of forming true beliefs, the consequence of this conclusion is more devastating to the supernaturalist for supernaturalism completely depends upon our ability to form true beliefs.