Peanut Gallery

Do you think people living 2000 years ago knew they could do that?- Oni

So your argument has absolutely nothing to do with the existence of the supernatural, and is simply an objection that we can't know?

The only thing I am denying is the ability of human beings to accurately explain a phenomenon based on our limited knowledge. Of course not. Nothing is impossible. There could be upside-down trees, and flying unicorns. My argument is simply with the use of the word supernatural and what it describes. There are still eclipses, volcanos errupting, diseases, and anything else that was considered supernatural - likewise there can still be a god.But what does any of that have to do with the term supernatural being more than a place filler?- Oni

No. My argument is that anything refered to as supernatural is simply something not yet understood.Even god, whatever that may be, when, for example, we did find out, would not be refered to as supernatural. Maybe, not even god.The sun was once called god, now it's called the sun. Whatever someone these days calls god, may one day not be called that anymore. It has been my position that terms such as god, supernatural, magic, and the like, are just linguistic place fillers.- Oni

Then your objection in your previous post is irrelevant.There's a god. He doesn't follow any kind of rules or principles. It's not that we don't know them. He just doesn't.That's supernatural. That's what it means. It's not a place holder.

So then my point to Straggler stands, supernatural means whatever you want it to mean. 10,000 years ago, 5000 years ago, 1000 years ago, 500 years ago... today. At any point in human history, if I asked what supernatural meant, I'd get a different answer.One can only wonder what it will mean 1000 years from now. Did you make that up or you know this for sure?- Oni

That's a stupid objection; because the entire notion of natural causes has only been recently developed. The notion of supernatural as we discuss it now is the only sensible way of looking at.By that method, you're completely wrong about the tribesman, he could call it supernatural but he'd be wrong. Now, try very, very hard and see if you can't imagine something which is actually supernatural. Note how it's a completely different concept than someone just being wrong about something natural. Are you just completely incapable of understanding the notion of a hypothetical?

Settle down kitty, retract your claws. Seems that way to us doesn't it. I'm sure it seemed that way to everyone who has discussed it. But that's like saying the Christian concept of god is the only sensible way of looking at it.That is a fallacy. Yes, but this would require me to know ALL the limits of reality. What I may imagine to be supernatural may simply be my limited knowledge on any one aspect of reality expressing itself conceptually - how does that make it supernatural? No, I understand it just fine.- Oni

Just wanted to add: Whenever you're ready to move the goal posts again let me know.- Oni

Hi Oni, I think your natural explanation is called artificial insemination.Wikipedia says: SourceJohn Hunter reported on artificial insemination in medical literature in 1790.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Hi, Straggler. I didn’t say this.What I said was that this is not what RAZD and Bluegenes are debating about.----- You should know me well enough by now to know that my theistic beliefs are based on childhood indoctrination and chronic indecisiveness. I don’t think I’ve been particularly cryptic about this.----- I didn’t say this either.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Straggler entertains the thought of doing bluegenes homework for him with: I ask how do we know this? Believe it or not, I am not asking for some hereto-before obscure scientific investigation in a peer-reviewed respected journal (although that would be terrific!) - no, just a simple, pedestrian way of phrasing what all of us non-believers in the IPU would say if we could only find it in our heads. It would have to stand up to spirited scrutiny, which I suspect would be forthcoming from RAZD.A story about a bunch of anonymous computer geeks coining the term and having it spread on the internet is NOT what we need. That would NOT be scientific objective evidence.You cant just say "we know the IPU is a made-up entity". Some people in all walks of life everywhere also fervently claim "I know God exists." We have to avoid that sort of explanation completely.Given that in this forum the expertise needed to explain certain complicated things is best left to those who have expertise in that field, I ask - What is the field and who of us is best qualified to answer?How to test the proposition that the IPU is made-up:Cannot use measuring devices of length, mass, electric field strength, and so on, etc....This may be something in Library Science? It may not be a story about some computer geeks, but instead a systematic pattern of stories through the archives from a fairly well narrowed-down point in time, before which there was no mention of an IPU, after which there was plenty of citations. It's like the folks that collect and tabulate neologisms - that kind of in-depth assiduous sticking to careful details.Do you understand? What would evidence that the IPU was made-up look like?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oni asks: The tribesman can be shown via diagrams and space photos and trips on the shuttle what an eclipse really is in terms that he already knows and can understand.The atheist cannot be shown via diagrams and photos and trips on some vehicle what God really is in terms that he already knows and can understand.All of the historical changes of explanation from once-believed supernatural to now-believed natural have taken place with small understandable increments of the descriptive body of knowledge. When the belief that the Sun was a God changed to it being just the star we orbit around, the explanation did not require anything more than incremental changes to the body of knowledge, including many other ancillary things, even if its implication was profound.A supernatural event/entity would be much different. It could never be understood by the body of knowledge we have.Now, you could argue - "Well, that body of knowledge was ignoramous!" - no, wait just a moment & hear me out. Let's again consider the Sun God to star process: Sun God believers did other things as well: they built fires, they found vegetables they could eat, they bore children, they threw stones through the air - all manner of simple mundane things of everyday life. They also, for a great long passage of generations, had found Confirmation Bias in their sincere Sun God belief. As time went by the simple mundane things grew in number & familiarity. Soon many descriptive explanations of these mundane things came around and eventually we even got to Greek Philosophers wondering about the natural world, while still worshiping Apollo, and you can connect the dots - the point is that at no time was any generational consensus confronted with a change of explanation that they couldn't understand out of the (by now) rich supply of mundane knowledge.Something supernatural would never be understood out of the rich supply of mundane knowledge. NEVER.Now you & Straggler & I might happen to believe that the {Supernatural Subset} of the Set of {"I dont know"} is identical to the {Empty Set}...at least tentatively for now, but just by saying so we have given such a set an existence in our minds, empty or not, that is very different from saying there is no meaning to the term.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Oh please!Now using words to mean what they mean is "moving the goalposts"? Seriously?Get off the wall, Humpty.

No, it doesn't. Because it's HYPOTHETICAL. Oh, for goodness sake. How many times? IT ISN'T YOUR LIMITED UNDERSTANDING OF REALITYIn this HYPOTHETICAL example, THERE ACTUALLY IS A SUPERNATURAL. And yet you keep making objections that make no sense if you do. So either a) you're being deliberately awkward or b) you don't. Which is it? If it's a) we can give up on the conversation now.