Peanut Gallery

Sorry. I posted this before I saw Adminnemooseus's post.The original content is hidden. Edited by Bluejay, : I hid the content.

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

See Message 165

Just catching up with the latest in the Great Debate.RAZD seems to still be denying that the human imagination is a known source of supernatural concepts...........?Surely this is simply inarguable.

Hi all,Anyone here want to tell Straggler what is obviously wrong with his comment? This is so typical, Straggler, that you gave me a good chuckle when I read it.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
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Hi, RAZD. No, not particularly.It's not like it would do much good, after all.

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

What hasn't done any good is pointing out to you how Bluegenes proposal is able to be falsified by natural means despite your repeated false assertions to the contrary.What hasn't done any good is explaining to you how an inability to have confidence in the consistency of natural laws and absence of supernatural interference (because according to you such assumptions are "heuristic and statistically invalid) would make any confidence in any scientific prediction impossible. Message 263What won't do any good is to point out to you that, as is the case with any naturalistic theory, this isn't about disproving anything but is instead about a positively evidenced claim that can be naturalistically falsified and which can make a number of verifiable predictions about human behaviour.But we can't disprove the existence of the supernatural so you and RAZ will continue down that little rabbit hole no mater what anyone says to you.Ho hum.

So you do acknowledge that human imagination is a known source of supernatural concepts. Excellent. I detect some progress on your part.Can you name any other known sources? Preferably a source for which there is positive evidence as being extant external to the minds of man.No? Didn't think so.......Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Hi, Straggler.It should be obvious to everybody by now that I am too blatantly stupid to understand your perfectly clear logic that everybody else clearly understands, and that it would behoove clear-minded, logical people like you to thus avoid further discourse with me.Of course, you have not yet figured out that trying to use logic to disprove nonsense is just as illogical as the trying to use nonsense to understand the way things work, so you will probably ignore my advice here once again.Oh well. I'm secure enough in my idiocy to back down and let you have it. I will not be participating in supernatural topics anymore on this board.

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

Actually far from it.You present some of the better opposition to the arguments that the likes of myself and Bluegenes put forwards. But you seem to take great offence and find much frustration at the inevitable disagreement you find yourself facing. Pure deductive logic can tell you nothing that isn't already present in the assumptions you start with.Which is why I keep hammering on about positively evidenced tentative conclusions. And taking issue with the relentless demands for logical disproofs of unfalsifiable concepts that I keep being confronted with. Nobody thinks you are an idiot and I dunno why you are getting so stressed by these things. It's a debate board for heavens sake. If we all agreed with each other there wouldn't be anything to discuss. If you regard even your own supernatural beliefs to be derived from such wholly naturalistic causes why do you have such an issue with a theory that concludes that all human belief in the supernatural is likely to be similarly sourced?Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Straggler says: Tell me, Straggler - what positive evidence do you have that the IPU was made up? Is the result of Wikipedia good enough?Maybe you could break your evidence up into subjective, hearsay and objective, focusing on the 3rd category.We often allow, in this discussion board, links to reputable sources as cites of good positive objective evidence and that the screen images and words are not being fabricated in front of us in order to perpetuate some kind of falsehood.This is not "there is no evidence of an IPU, therefore it must be made up", which would be a negatively evidenced tentative conclusion. Lack of IPU evidence cannot be used here. I would want to see evidence of the making up of the IPU.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Are you suggesting that it isn't?See Message 366 for the complete step by step argument which you have yet to find any fault with.But to repeat in summary - ALL of the positive evidence that favours both the ability and proclivity of humans to invent such concepts Vs the fact that something immaterial cannot have been experienced as an aspect of reality external to the mind of man and must therefore have originated as a concept by means of human internal imagination.Are you disputing that there is any evidence that we have this ability and proclivity? Do you want me to make up a series of mutually exclusive supernatural concepts to irrefutably demonstrate this ability to you?If you really want to pursue the IPU argument let's take it to Has The Supernatural Hypothesis Failed?What supernatural concept(s) are you citing as more likely to actually exist than be made-up based on the evidence available? Be specific.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Hi Straggler, you amuse me still. Given that I have always said that human imagination is A known source of fictions, this should be no real surprise.What you continually fail to comprehend, it appears, is that having A source is an entirely different proposition than having an ONLY source - which is your pet claim. There are many sources in the literature. I've also pointed out several to bluegenes, while indicating that he had not done his job to show how his hypothesis dealt with that information. But I am not the one making the claim here -- you are, when you claim that human imagination is the only source of new ideas, a claim that is not substantiated by anything other than assertion so far. It is enough to point out that there are other sources listed in the general literature, and that it is your task to show that they do not apply.Amusingly there are TWO fatal flaws in your basic argument, and I've yet to see you or anyone else address either of them.The first flaw, is that just asserting your position does not make it true, repeating it does not improve the validity of it either. Without substantiation it is only your opinion. You need to actually demonstrate that no other source is possible before you can claim that it is the only source.The second flaw is even more amusing than watching you strut around waving your banner of unsubstantiated assertion, as it means that your argument is pointless.If human imagination is the only possible source of new information, then de facto ALL knowledge is the product of human imagination.Whether the new concept is true or not.Thus "being made up" does not equal "is not true" ... and your argument is pointless, like saying the sky is (normally) blue or that mushrooms grow in the forest during a storm at night: it may be a true statement, but it doesn't demonstrate that one idea is any better or worse than any other.This has been posted several times, so it should not come as a surprise to you - you just have failed to deal with it. And I note that you have still failed utterly to provide objective empirical evidence to support your assertions, including those where you claim to have evidence.Cognitive dissonance is like that. Until you break that barrier, it will keep you from seeing how silly your position is, and why it fails to be logically worth pursuing.TaEnjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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The original thread, and this Peanut Gallery thread, have both become so pickily pedantic or pedantically picky that I have given up following them.If you want your stuff to be read, make it readable and interesting.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Er no. You seem to have excluded the rather important source of new information that is the observation of new phenomenon. Y'know observing things in the real world. Things that aren't imagined. All sorts of sources are possible. The actual observed existence of the supernatural is a theoretically possible source of such concepts. As are alien beings controlling our minds, fluctuations in the matrix and all sorts of other fantastical unevidenced possibilities. But human imagination is the only known source.Why do you think the actual existence of the supernatural is any more likely to be the cause of human conceptions of the supernatural than magic moonbeams projecting such concepts into our heads?Both are equally evidenced. You are citing human literature as a source of supernatural concepts and claiming that this is evidence of a source other than human imagination? Seriously?Can you give me an example of a supernatural concept that you consider as more likely to actually exist than be a product of human imagination based on this evidence? Ah yes your insane notion that anything which hasn't been falsified by objective evidence demands our complete agnosticism. I dare you to answer this one:How confident are you that when I drop my pen it will simply fall to the floor?How confident are you that the entire universe was not created supernaturally in full (including our memories) two nanoseconds ago solely to make me look silly when I drop my pen, expecting it to fall to the floor, and instead watch in bewilderment as it flies out of the window?Is the above supernatural possibility falsified? No. Obviously not. Not until I actually drop my pen.So on what objectively evidenced basis are you rejecting this supernatural possibility as pointlessly unlikely?Or am I wrong to have confidence in my pen simply falling to the floor?

Thanks, Bluejay,Correct, blind is as blind does, and nobody is as blind as someone convinced that they are right, regardless of evidence to the contraryEnjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

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Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click)