Peanut Gallery

Hi, Straggler. You cannot have confidence that any supernatural idea came from human imagination when it is inherently impossible to demonstrate that it is otherwise.What part of this are you not understanding?Edited by Bluejay, : took out the word "prove."

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

Hi, PD. Someplace supernatural, of course.----- One of the qualifications for a scientific theory is falsifiability. Thus, there has to be a way to test it such that it could potentially be falsified.Bluegenes has identified the test that he thinks would falsify his theory: And, yes, if this could be established, it would falsify Bluegenes’ theory.The problem is that this cannot be established with any degree of confidence at all.Let’s assume that RAZD presents some allegedly supernatural being to demonstrate the existence of the supernatural, and Bluegenes begins the testing to see whether this being is actually supernatural.Ultimately, the testing can only come to one of two conclusions: either it will find a naturalistic explanation, or it will not. It cannot actually find a supernatural explanation, because the supernatural will only register as a failure to find a naturalistic explanation.So, everything that is actually supernatural will be relegated by the tester to the we don’t know how to explain it bin. And, things in the we don’t know how to explain it bin don’t get considered when creating theories. But, things that we can explain do get incorporated.Thus, the human imagination is the only known source of supernatural beings is a conclusion drawn from doctored data: all data that might actually demonstrate the alternative is excluded because we don’t have a way to ascertain that it actually does demonstrate the alternative.I’ll grant that I know of no allegedly supernatural being that has caused a problem for the test. But, since the test is rigged in the first place, this doesn’t really seem like an important detail to me.

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

Hi, Straggler. Yes, you’re right. And this is a heuristic, not a high-confidence theory.And, as I explained to Purpledawn, the evidence used to uphold naturalism over supernaturalism is doctored.There is no way to positively separate it’s supernatural from we don’t know how to explain it yet. Thus, all the real candidates for genuine supernatural beings have been thrown out of the final data set, allowing the theory to be formed using only the evidence that supports it.You know how you say, all beings for which we know the origin originated in the human imagination"? Well, that’s you doctoring the data, by excluding all the data that stands a reasonable chance of disproving your theory.Thus, there really is no alternative evidenced naturalistic explanation.

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

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.

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.

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.

Hi, CS. The theory that fingerprints are unique to individuals leads to the inductive conclusion that all fingerprints of a given conformation come from the same individual (these fingerprints are "white swans"). We can conclude from this that there are no fingerprints of that type that could have come from a different individual (such fingerprints would be "black swans").Edited by Bluejay, : "could have"

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

Hi, Modulous. I'm generally in the empiricist/objectivist camp with you and Straggler, but I'm not able to get Bluegenes' idea to work out in my mind. This issue of falsifiability is the central problem for me.Is it possible for a theory to meet the criterion of falsifiability when the only alternative explanations are not falsifiable?In principle, it would allow a few people interested in validating Bluegenes' theory to invent a few gods, then, using only these data points, conclude that all supernatural beings are the product of human imagination, because these are the only gods who sources were known.All the other god concepts would be relegated to a "we don't know the source" bin. But, given the attributes of supernature, isn't the "we don't know the source" bin where we would expect all genuinely supernatural beings to go?So, wouldn't the only way to refute Bluegenes' theory be to somehow demonstrate something that most of us argue is untestable, and thus, indemonstrable?I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that humans do make up supernatural things. Science fiction and fantasy novelists do it all the time. I'm rather convinced that the Easter Bunny is made up, a relic of ancient bestiaries that thought all animals existed for moral lessons and symbolism.I'm just concerned with the justification of the universal inductive conclusion in this case because of the unfalsifiable nature of the only alternatives.Unlike before, I'm open to a change in my position now, but I'm still stuck on this one point.

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

Hi, Straggler. This has the feel of a semantic loophole. I don't think the word "human" is the important part of this argument. Is there any good reason to distinguish alien imagination from human imagination?Also, since we have yet to encounter aliens or genetically modified chimpanzees, we can hardly claim to have the ability to test Bluegenes' theory against them as alternatives.So, these alternatives are just as unfalsifiable as any others that have been brought up.

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

Hi, Modulous.Thanks for the response. So the question would have to be an approach of one-by-one elimination of many god concepts. And then, at a certain point, a pattern of eliminations can be justifiably extrapolated to whatever god concepts remain using inductive reasoning.So, if we find a pattern of lightning bolts in the absence of Thunderbirds, Thors or Zeuses, we can predict that we probably also won't find any Indras or Marduks either, and thereby conclude inductively that the phenomenon of thunderbolts is independent from deities.----- Where my above example might be seen as a weak induction is where we take the conclusion, "thunderbolts are not thrown by Thor," and make it into, "Thor does not exist."However, if thunderbolts are the only evidence of Thor's existence, then the two conclusions may not be so different. I still tend to think they are different, though, simply because using the evidence that Thor doesn't throw thunderbolts to conclude that Thor doesn't exist seems to be based on the premise that Thor was invented to explain lightning, and not that lightning was simply attributed to Thor.Obviously, if there were many phenomena associated with Thor, and Thor was found to not be involved in any of them, the induction would seemingly become less weak. The question is then whether or not Bluegenes has presented sufficient evidence. I haven't followed the Great Debate closely enough to know how much evidence Bluegenes has presented, but I would probably require more evidence than Bluegenes would before I would consider this objective completed.Still, I may not now have much of an objection to Bluegenes calling it a theory. I still don't personally consider it a theory, but I'm starting to see it as one of those things that can just be let go in conversation.----- Oh, it killed me: you can be sure of that. However, you and I will never be aware of that, because we now exist in an alternate reality in which the event---which was real---never happened.See? Even quantum immortality is on RAZD's side! You'll never win!

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

Hi, Straggler. The difference is that Bluegenes theory isn't just a theory that happens to have a supernatural alternative: it's a theory that's explicitly about supernature. I don't understand why you think this shouldn't make a difference.----- I agree. Actually, I think it would be interesting whether or not the aliens had theistic beliefs. There are a whole lot of interesting and important questions we could then ask about the existence and nature of spirituality, or the phenomena of intelligence and belief, etc.But, right now, all of this is just hypothetical. How can a hypothetical deity that may or may not have been imagined up by a hypothetical race of aliens be part of the construction of a "high-confidence theory"?Review what an application of the scientific method in relation to this would look like:Observations: All gods for which we know the source come from human imagination.Prediction: Aliens will not imagine gods, because they do not have human imagination.Experiment: Discover aliens, document any supernatural and/or theistic beliefs that they have.Conclusion: Theism is unique to humans.You can't seriously claim to have done this. So, until such time as this experiment can be run, your version of Bluegenes' theory can only attain the status that General Relativity had before it was shown that gravity bends light. And that status was simply not "theory."So, if Bluegenes' theory is really a theory, then it isn't because of what hypothetical aliens may or may not imagine.Edited by Bluejay, : Questions require question marks.

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

Hi, Modulous. I can see the logic in the argument you present here; but, I'm still a bit leery of it, because it seems to assume that Thor is nothing more than a human explanation for a naturalistic phenomenon.How can we define Thor as "the cause of thunder" without implicitly assuming that Thor was invented by humans to explain thunder?Surely, if he were a genuine entity, he would be more than just an explanation for a naturalistic phenomenon, wouldn't he?

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

Hi, Straggler. The difference: Bluegenes' theory is explicitly about supernature. Evolution is not.Theories about supernature have to address supernature. Theories about nature only have to address nature.RAZD and I have both said this already, multiple times, in fact. Your only response has been to ask us to spell it out for you, as if we hadn't yet.Now it's your turn: why do you think a theory that is explicitly about supernature does not have to deal with supernature in a different way from a theory that is explicitly not about supernature?----- Wow, that's... pathetic, really. You brought up hypothetical experiments on hypothetical entities that, if run, would hypothetically have the potential to falsify your version of Bluegenes' theory, and these hypothetical experiments are the only things you have proposed as even having the potential to falsify it.Now you've somehow turned this into my inability to find a falsification for Bluegenes' theory? It's my contention that the theory is not falsifiable, and I admit that I don't want it to be falsifiable, so why do you expect me to be the one to look for potential falsifications?----- And how do you propose that I do this, Straggler?When I asked this before, Bluegenes suggested the following: What is meant by "verification"? It would seem to amount to nothing more than exhausting Bluegenes' skepticism. Neither you nor Bluegenes has been more specific than this.I suggest the following tests to determine whether a mermaid is supernatural:

1. Look for all possible evidence that it is a hoax (e.g. sutures).
2. Once satisfied that it is not a hoax, genetics testing to look for chimerism, artificial insertions of non-human genes, etc.
3. Once satisfied that she is not a chimera or a genome-splicing project, suspend all skepticism and become a believer in fairy tales.

Maybe you could think of a few more steps to put in between #2 and #3: maybe parallel evolution, or very skillful genome-splicing by someone with better technology than we have. I don't see any reason to believe that any scientist will ever favor "supernature" over "extremely improbable parallel evolution" or "advanced alien technology."

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

Hi, Modulous. This seems like a reasonable argument, but I still think the way of defining things is artificial, and presupposes the tested entity to be an artifact of the observer's belief or perception, rather than an actual being about whom the observer may or may not have a correct perception.As a "real" example, consider me. If it is revealed at some point that I was never actually a Mormon, the result would not be that some actual entity was discovered to not exist, but that an actual entity was discovered to not possess an attribute that it was thought to possess. To me, referring to this as the discovered non-existence of some entity "Bluejay the Mormon" seems like just a semantic twisting of the reality that there is an actual entity there, whose existence has not been effected at all by the discovery.

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

Hi, Straggler. This is the statement of the theory: You don't believe that this statement is explicitly about supernature?
This is a positive claim about what supernatural entities are.
How is this not explicitly about supernature?----- Damn it, Straggler! It has been my position from the beginning that this cannot be done, even in principle. Why do you think my argument requires me to do what I believe it is impossible to do?You and Bluegenes have proposed three hypothetical ways of falsifying your version of the theory, and I've shot all three of them down. How is the burden of proof not on you to bring potential falsifications forward?I challenged your assertion that the theory follows the scientific method, and have mounted several pieces of evidence on which to build my case. All the positive evidence about the issue of falsifiability is so far on my side. At what point does the burden of proof shift to you?All you really have to do is switch to Modulous's view of Bluegenes' theory: i.e., that some individual god-concepts are falsifiable. If you switch to that mode of argument, I will concede defeat. Gladly. But, my experience with you on this topic suggests to me that you will instead doggedly persist in your same vane of argumentation and make stupid statements about me demanding proof and disproof.

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