HI Bluejay, thanks.
Do you agree with me that science can only really work directly with ideas or hypotheses, and not with the realities that the ideas or hypotheses are supposed to represent? If so, then let's treat every putative supernatural being as a hypothesis.
Science works from objective empirical evidence to form an hypothesis of
how things work, but not
why they are so. Science can only work with falsifiable concepts to eliminate invalid concepts of how things work.
... bearded giant who throws thunderbolts like a spear, ...
... The Thor hypothesis was thus falsified.
We can show that the concept that this is
how "Thor" causes lightening and thunder etc does not match physical reality.
So, when I say "Thor," I'm talking about a putative anthropomorphic, ... not about just any entity that may be in some way associated with the cause of lightning.
To me this is more like a caricatured strawman of the god/s than an actual description: it would need to be established what the original believers said about the god/s rather than assume that saturday morning cartoons capture them properly.
Ideas like this can only come from two sources: observation or imagination.
Here I have some trouble just accepting this on face value. There are several ways that information comes to an individual: they can observe it directly, they can imagine it, they can be told about it by someone else, they can read about it, etc etc etc.
There are a myriad number of ways that information is conveyed, to the point where
most of the information we have about
how things work is conveyed in these ways rather than by personal direct observation or personal imagination.
Now it can be argued that
in the end it comes down to observation or imagination, but that is
assuming that these are in fact the only sources for everyone, not demonstrating it.
If you were told a concept by a supernatural being posing as a human (as many people believe happens), then how would you know? If you dreamed some concept that turns out to be accurate, did you imagine it or did some spirit cause you to have that dream (as many people believe happens), then how would you know? If you are gently nudged by positive\negative (hot\cold) feelings by ancestral spirits in how you behave (as many people believe happens), then how would you know?
Without some means\method\etc to test an eliminate these possibilities, I cannot arrive at a finite conclusion in this regard by logic alone.
In other words, it has not been demonstrated that there are only two ways.
At this point, note that, unlike the Thor hypothesis, the Neo-Thor hypothesis is not, in any way, based on any sort of observation. So, this means we made up "Neo-Thor." Even if it turns out that Neo-Thor is real, we still made him up, and it is only by pure coincidence that we were right, like the broken clock that tells the right time twice a day.
Unless your Thor hypothesis is a strawman of the original god/s, so that the strawman is falsified while the original is not.
One of the problems I have is that people seem to think that god/s (a) should be describable in simplistic terms and conversely (b) that simplistic terms like this are full and completely accurate descriptions. This rather means that any human description is
necessarily a strawman at some level of relationship to any actual god/s - to be treated with skepticism regarding accuracy.
If you experience something you do not, can not, understand, how can you accurately describe it without eliminating parts you do not understand enough to describe and simplifying it to your personal level of understanding?
Enjoy.
ps - love the new Avatar.
we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
Rebel American Zen Deist
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