Creationists think Evolutionists think like Creationists.

But it is not a question of whether the evidence is satisfactory or not. I can claim any evidence in any field of science is unsatisfactory. If you think this is a debate about the validity of the evidence, you are not understanding.The question is whether or not ANY evidence is satisfactory to someone who has already decided that all explanations must be materialistic. If that is the mindset before an experiment even begins, how can you draw the proper conclusion. Scientists don't make conclusions before the experiment even begins.

You know there is a school of thought that says that the testing of any supernatural phenomenon can only work if the participants believe it can work (and there are even studies to prove the results are different depending on the believe of the participants or even what you tell them beforehand). The very notion of disbelieve destroys the sensitivity necessary to achieve the result.Who are we to say that's wrong.

But your "buying it" is irrelevant, because you haven't read the data.There are studies that show that if you tell the participants that it works, before you do the study, the results will be more positive.

No, its not the placebo effect. We are talking about the volunteers administering the tests, like the one's turning over cards, or sending out the mental image.

I think you are contradicting yourself without even realizing it.First you are trying to say that any studies of the super-natural have been proven wrong (as if you really know about every study ever done on psychic behavior-which clearly you don't) but then you go on to say that it is useless to even find out about super-natural phenomenon because once we discover this, we can not know the cause so its a useless endeavor. It would be useless to find out the truth, if that is what it was?You further make a another logic fallacy with this: What law says that because we don't know a cause, we can make up any at all?Do we know the reason for the uncertainty in QM? According to you, since we don't know the cause, we can make up any we want-and yet oddly, you are already asserting that one day we will know the reasons-and of course those reasons will all be naturalistic.There are so many contradictions in your reasoning its hard to keep track:We can look for a super-natural cause or we can't? We can make up any explanation for the unknown or we can't? You are asking for examples of thought experiments that show evidence of non--materialism, but you are already saying they have all been proven wrong.Studying intelligent design means to stop asking questions about how the origins of life, and yet the validity of the ToE to explain the origins of life is unquestionable.Wow, Are you a dualist?

For once I am in total agreement with you. Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.

"There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other" WT Young, 2002What a silly notion, respect for another lump of chemical stews. He might as well have said there is no better love, than the respect between a human shaped mass of cells, and a sponge shaped mass of cells. Or a lump of clay for that matter.Don't you realize that this feeling of love and respect is just an illusion, brought on by a corrupted chunk of carbon, joining up with more corrupted junks pieces of carbon? Its like saying a thorn bush should respect e coli.Love, respect, feelings, emotions, what a faulty mess of chemical hodge podge. Do you love boron? How about uric acid?

percy, surely you have a greater imagination than this.Lets say we have someone recounting a near death experience. And this near death experience is occurring while the patient has flatlined, no heart beat and no brain activity. But let's say the person can recall conversations that were going on during the time he was flat. And he recalls the conversations correctly. And lets also say that he actually could see things from his vantage point floating above the room, that he wouldn't have been able to see lying on a table. Is that not one way that we could have evidence for the supernatural?BTW, do you know that Roger Ebert, an atheist (or perhaps agnostic), says that he had an out of body experience recently, while he was in and out of death during his treatments, and he heard his wife talking?

What I just suggested to you is not evidence, but fossils are evidence for how the theory of evolution works?Seems you have a double standard for what constitutes evidence then. Can't you turn your logic around and just say fossils are just evidence of things we don't know but can explain later.

By what standard are you using to say that one piece of evidence is suitable to say it it connected to what it appears to (such as the fossils) and another can not be said to be evidence of (seeing things while you are dead) what it appears to be?It sounds to me that you are just arbitrarily decided that one evidence looks good to you, because it makes sense, while another doesn't because maybe we are just being fooled, or just need more information to decide its really wrong. Why is one not scientific?If you take this type of arbitrary standard, of course you are never going to find the evidence. Because every time there is evidence, you can just say, well its unknown. If tomorrow a great cloud appeared in the sky, and said "I am a spirit Percy, this is the truth!" and then suddenly disappeared, and everyone in the world saw and heard it, you could still just say-well, its unknown. If it happened everyday for ten days, you could still make that claim.If you tore up a piece of paper and threw it into a waste basket, and a blast of wind came along, and blew those pieces of paper into the air the moment you threw it, and also at the same time someone walking with a jar of glue tripped, and threw that into the air, and the two combined, and rearranged the bits of paper to spell, I AM THE ONE, once again you can just say, well who knows, maybe its just coincidence. Well, maybe fossils are just coincidence.Since you are leaving yourself the option of always selecting the "we don't know" category whenever it suits you, you are not really following the evidence where it leads. You are cherry picking evidence that suits you.

You are operating off a presumption, similar to what Percy is saying, that nothing can point to a non-materialistic cause. That doesn't actually MEAN that nothing can point to a non-materialistic cause, it simply means you are saying that it can't.I would suggest that the idea of a timeless, motionless universe (non-universe) before the big bang, changing to a universe full of matter and time is evidence for a supernatural occurrence. Of course, because you are creating your own definitions about what is evidence and what isn't, and what the evidence shows, then anything you say by definition can be true, because you are creating the definitions. but that doesn't mean others must accept your definitions.Likewise, infinity is an impossible concept, in the natural world that we live in. As such, evidence for infinity is also evidence for a supernatural world.Your sort of self-imposed "out" whenever the evidence is not in keeping with what we know of the natural world, does not need to be a valid point for all.There can't be an infinity in our world. So you either reject the theory of QM or you accept that there are things outside of our natural world. You can't have one without the other.And I would say, that to imagine our world in its most extreme sense, when you contemplate what "is" something, and what "is" something else distinct from the other, you will see that everything is everything else, you are the air, and the stars, and the water around you, and the space between your atoms is also the space between others and the ends of your fingertips and the ends of the space next to them are the same thing. So if your are standing next to a tree, where does that tree end, and the space between you and it begin? Where does the tree end and you begin?There can be no definition of the tree, and of the space and of you. They are all the same.

What you are saying is simply untrue. YOU have decided that all explanations are naturalistic. That doesn't make it so. Is the explanation for the cosmos naturalistic? Why, because you say it is? is the explanation for the beginning of life naturalistic? because you say it is? Is the explanation for how light travels naturalistic? Because you say so?You have defined the parameters, so you claim them to be correct. If I see it, and can explain it, it is naturalistic. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. And your third category, if I see it, but can't explain it, it goes into the unknown folder. Or do you name that the nonsense folder? Or the salad folder?

What is your definition of evidence?

You are unwittingly making my point for me.In what we know and consider to be our natural world, infinity can't exist, because if something is infinitely large, it is equally infinitely small.You have just explained that mathematics and physics have identified infinite things. If that is the case, how can they exist in the world we know. How can parts of an atom that make up your body be infinitely small? Can you explain this? You are made of infinitely small parts?How thin is the skin that makes up your body? if we have instruments to view it microscopically, all the way down to its thinnest point, if we keeping magnifying it over and over again, how thin is your skin? Does it disappear?You can't just take the cop-out that Jar does and just say this is sophomore salad. We are talking about things we know, and what we know is that if we delve deeply enough into the existence of matter, at some point it ceases to exit as a separate entity. This isn't just made up fiction.You have just shown that physics and mathematics is either wrong, or we live in a world beyond the natural that we know. Take you pick.

In fact, I would take this even further. Given the fact that we know that there is no such thing as the smallest unit, that things just keep getting smaller or disappear altogether if we look closely enough, we are virtually guaranteeing that the world is super-natural. Because this is what super-natural is, the inability of something to be able to exist in a natural world.If we had found out that the smallest thing that could ever exist is say, an atom, and nothing can be smaller, than we might have reason to say we have a defined, natural world, that can be explained. But since we already know this is not the case, and we know that at some point when we look closely enough, all matter vanishes, we have just defined that our world is super-natural.So, to all those who want evidence of a super natural world, I say physics has already given you that evidence. Life disappears into another world when we look closely enough.