Has The Supernatural Hypothesis Failed?

Guys, suggestion....Supernatural - un-evidenced (apart from personal testimony), in contravention of known laws of physics and immune from, or avoiding analysis by, the scientific method, either by design or by circumstance. Likely to be 'personal' and dependent on subjective interpretation/experience.
Examples - personal accounts of psi powers, spirit manifestations/ghosts, creationism.Natural but currently unexplained - evidenced (at least some evidence beyond personal testimony), possibly requiring extension to known laws of physics and testable in principle using the scientific method.
Examples - animals sensing earthquakes, some UFO sightings, string/superstring theory.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

quote:

---

Pay attention to HOW the atheists here try and counter my arguments. You will see a pattern....both you and RAZD have come up against it many times over the last several months.

---

I wasn't aware that I was conforming to a pattern. I thought my objections were coherent, considered and perfectly reasonable, as well as being fairly obvious. How it is part of a pattern and what is that pattern?

I like to summarise it with a nice cartoon I came across:

If you want to de-program creationists you really have to get them young. The churches realised that a long time ago...remember the old Jesuit maxim - give me a child 'till seven, and I'll give you the man...
If you get kids when they still have that natural spark of rebellious curiosity then you have a chance.
I've been posting on a couple of US forums for some years and one has more younger posters (13 plus). A couple of us keep slogging away, answering the same old same old and nipping in the odd posting which could cause that mental double-take if they bite..I'd say that in 5 years we have maybe 10 posters who were absolutely convinced creationists and are now not - ranging from one who is probably still, on balance, a creationist, but very very wobbly, to a couple of rabid atheist. Two of the male posters (I presume) did a complete 180 degree flip after just a few months and are now more atheist that the atheists. That is not so good...not enough thought behind it - flutterby mentality. Others are in better shape and starting to ask some excellent questions, which is a great sign.It needs a lot of patience, a thick skin (I've been seriously threatened twice by a parent and once by an 'older brother) and a lot of time....

I don't mean it in a technical way - I know there are some psychologists who are supposed to be experts, but I don't have a great deal of faith in the behaviourists anyway. It's really just a case of trying to get to that bit of the mind that I think we all have - that curiosity that most great scientists have in spades. If you manage to hit that target enough times, then often that is all it takes - you just sit back and feed them after that (which was quite a job with one of them...I don't think I've ever typed as much before - he wanted to know EVERYTHING, and in detail. 15 years creationist upbringing undone by three prods with special relativity and time dilation. Kid was a natural - as soon as I explained light clocks he got it - not many do. That opened the floodgates.)Those are the days when I smile a lot :-)

Only did A level and 1st year undergrad engineering maths and physics. Degree in computer systems - a teaching degree not a 'proper one' :-)
I only got interested in physics in my 30s. I built a web site for a physicist and the payment was her time teaching me. I've done another similar deal since with a chap who is a particle physicist but I'm finding the maths harder and harder to get to the next step. I got tensors after a while, and manage Hamiltonians/Lagrangians by memory and brute force rather than elegance and understanding. When we start getting into lie groups then I hit a wall...
So I suppose very amateur would be the best description, but with a couple of good teachers who've given me the basics of Relativity and an outline of quantum physics where I can at least follow some of the maths, if not getting down and dirty with it....