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Junior Member (Idle past 3496 days) Posts: 28 From: Australia Joined: |
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Author | Topic: I don't believe in God, I believe in Gravity | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Inactive Member |
Any thoughts? That this is just another thread to point out another apparent error in the Genesis story.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
So I want to see what happens when the thing he himself has defined as supernatural meets his absolute refusal that anything supernatural can possibly be evidenced. The clear answer is that there is no evidence whatsoever for GOD, as there is no evidence for any other thing believed to be supernatural.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Science can investigate anything that can be investigated, be it natural or not. It limits itself to explanations that are natural, but that doesn't dictate what you can look at. That's nonsense. Science puts no limits on its explanations. If it can be measured, it can be explained. Often the explanation starts out being simple: "X exists/happens". More measuring might get a better explanation (if one exists), but even a simple explanation is an explanation.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
It isn't a concept that I'm particularly comfortable with but it isn't difficult to understand. Unless one's intent on not understanding it.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Thinking that you can know something that you can not support with any empirical evidence is faulty [empirical] reasoning. Fixed. Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Within the context of trying to understand [empirical] reality, what other kind is there? Fixed again. Reality, of course, is that which is realempirical or not. If the phenomenon you seek to investigate is wholly and entirely non-empirical, then trying to determine whether it is real or not by applying empirical standards is crappy investigatingor simply dishonest. You can't use a ruler to measure the brightness of the Sun.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Maybe all our studying shows us that this is impossible, and that it can't be explained with any of our theories... this would then leave it as "supernatural." How could this be? How could this ever possibly be? What kind of an honest person, let alone a good scientist, would look at a confirmed event that happening in front of their very eyes and declare it "impossible"? Absolute crap. And when has any scientific investigation conducted on a new phenomenon ever concluded that the phenomenon was "supernatural"? Has it ever happened? Ever? If it did, would you consider this an example of science concluding "supernatural" or an example of shit science?
It would be like "the regular theory of water, with molecules acting as they should... except this one time when they all turned into wine.." The theory doesn't make any sense and cannot be worded in such a way to account for all the information in an elegant manner. Maybe there's something about water-turning-into-wine that we didn't understand before, and we can learn about it, and then update our theories and this would then be a "natural" thing. Why must our understanding of the world boil down into a set of unbreakable universal laws? That's how we see the world now, but shouldn't an event completely out of the ordinary, instead of making us conclude "supernatural", lead us to conclude that "oh, I guess the world doesn't run on a strict set of universal laws, but on a set of conditional ... etc."? I may believe that a lake turning to wine is "supernatural"it'd certainly make me a happy young manbut as an honest and reasoning empiricist (i.e., a scientist) I would never, under any circumstance of which I can currently conceive, declare the event "supernatural" as a matter of fact. Are you saying you would?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member
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If the world of Harry Potter was our world... at what point do you say "supernatural exists" and stop ignoring all the stuff going on right in front of your face? If we lived in the world of Harry Potter, I think I'd be even less like to conclude that something strange were "supernatural" than I am now.
What criteria do you use to declare any event "natural" as a matter of fact? Science, by it's very definition, studies the natural world. It is an empirical system of investigation. Anything studiable by science is, by definition, natural. This is evidenced by the fact that science has never concluded anythingever, like never everto be "supernatural", and that no one has ever put forth a method whereby it can do so. Including you.
Of course, if it happened and can be verified (in the example, anyway). I would follow the evidence wherever it leads. It sounds like you would dogmatically refuse to follow the evidence. Which of us is doing "shit science?" Real funny. You are conflating acknowledgement of the event and acknowledgement of its status as "supernatural". I am perfectly okay with admitting that certain interesting things have happened without having to conclude that they are "supernatural", because, you know, that's not what scientists do. Why? Because calling something "supernatural" is shit science. Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
The point is to think hypothetically and see where things would lead us if such "magical acts" actually did happen. It would lead us the same way it has always led us when we deal with "magical acts". We will investigate them, figure out what's up, and then declare them "natural"; or investigate them, remain stumped, and declare them "cause unknown".
Definitional issues are boring, we can change the word to something else you may prefer, if you'd like. Definitions matter:
Sapir-Worf.
Neither you nor jar nor anyone has been able to point out what the actual "shit science" is. Been done; repeatedly. Of all the magic ever seen, no scientific investigation has ever concluded any of it to be supernatural.
So, what's wrong with the above? It should be obvious. "Fire-streak" means the thing we call lightening. "Evolution" means the thing we call evolution. "Supernatural" does not mean the thing we'd call a wine river. If you want "supernatural" to mean 'wine river', that's fine. But it won't help your argument.
If you refuse to follow the evidence, you end up being un-correctably wrong and that's the exact point when you stop doing science. If you always continue to follow the evidence, you may be temporarily wrong, but you'll always be doing science and moving forward.Science doesn't care what you label things, it cares about the evidence and where it leads. How do you distinguish the natural and the supernatural?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Equivocating gets you nowhere.
Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Isn't one of the current laws of nature "matter cannot be created or destroyed?" I think it's a rather large law of nature. Fundamental, even. What would you do upon observation of matter being created from nothing? Would you declare the event supernatural? Would you modify your law? Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
Now if a supernatural hypothesis "works" - If it leads to a raft of objective empirically verified predictions - Why doesn't that qualify for your supernatural folder? How would we distinguish a supernatural hypothesis from a natural one?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
The problem is not that such claims cannot be tested. The problem for supernaturalists is that their claims have persistently been found to be false. I didn't ask about testing. I asked about distinguishing.
A testable claim derived from divine revelation, communicating with GOD or whatever would be a supernatural hypothesis. How are these methods different than the methods used for natural phenomena? What makes communicating with GOD different than communicating with Kubo the jungle savage? And, again, just what is a supernatural hypothesis?Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
You're just equivocating again. It is clear to everyone else what is meant by "natural" in this discussion. "Supernatural" is not used in the same context as "artificial". Love your enemies!
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Jon Inactive Member |
There is a definition of "natural" that can be reduced to "occurs in the universe." And, of course, that is the only definition applicable when discussing the philosophy of science.
quote: quote: There is only one sense for the word "nature" in a discussion of science, and that is the sense that everyone in this thread (aside from yourself) has been using. Your introduction of the lay sense of the term is an equivocation:Honest person: Science can only study the natural world (= the entirety of the physical, empirical world)
Stile: No; science can also study things that are not natural (= things not affected or effected by humans). The use of the word "natural" in the sense that it's non-man-made is just as popular and normal. Probably even more so. Yet entirely misses the mark in a discussion on the philosophy of science. Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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