Impossible Tasks in God Debate: Definitions Create Roadblocks

If I take a picture of Jesus sitting in my home tonight with an amazing glow around his head, showing me his scars, and telling me amazing stories and parables that would clearly identify him as having incredible brilliance and teaching skills, a naturalist would argue that this was great teaching, great acting, and doctored video to create the appearance of something supernatural.

If after careful analysis of the video, there was no doctoring, then it would be argued that there just wasn't enough science to discover how it was doctored, and that the illusions in the film had natural explanations. 

If I persuaded Jesus to come back on another evening, and invited 1000 folks to be there as well, and had five cameras with well know atheists manning all five cameras, and Jesus healed someone blind since birth by touching mud to his eyes, there would be claims of mass hysteria, the videos would be suspected of being altered before or after the fact, or replaced.  The fact of having 1000 folks agreeing on what happened would be further dismissed as a conspiracy by all in attendance.  And these would just be the contemporaneous skeptics.  100 years from now the skepticism would merely grow.  2000 years from now it would just be compared with other videos of the time. 

In other words, it doesn't really matter what kind or how much evidence is produced, the Bible cannot be proved to a naturalist to be supernatural, Jesus cannot have been other than man, and there is no afterlife, heaven, etc.

This also begs the question of what is natural.  If there is a God, then he would be the most natural thing of all.  If there is an afterlife, then it would merely be an extension of the natural.  The spiritual realm is certainly no more fantastic than quarks or black holes, just part of nature.

So I think we commonly end up with debates that can't be decided, much less won because the definitions of such things as truth, evidence, and natural differ between the debaters.

I come to all of these conclusions after spending 7 hours on Sunday reading about the shroud of Turin.  It cannot be explained by Science, and the historical evidence is that it really is the burial shroud of Christ.  That combination is pretty powerful.  However, the naturalists merely state, calmly, that they will eventually figure out how the image got there by some natural means, not by the transmutation of Christ.  So 1000 years from now, we could be no closer.  In the meantime, one "natural" explanation would be that this was the natural result of a man/God transitioning from human to spirit.