Peanut Gallery

Agreed. You'll note this is a universal statement. This, and the twenty billion and one times it has been pointed out to you, should clue you in that this is a theory.How can one make a universal statement like this? By phrasing it as a falsifiable theory based on specific examples. Such as the world of literature, and the supernatural claims that have been falsified (Uri Gellar for example).The theory is universal 'All x are y'
The evidence is specific 'All examples of x known are y'You should really stop attacking the theory as if it was a statement of fact. There are some interesting possible lines of objection you could raise. You know a lot about biases and cognitive dissonance so I'll leave it to you, ever the skeptic even of his own faculties, to decide why it is you persistently do this. The same thing you do in every other science. You say 'the theory predicts these unknown cases also originate in the human imagination'. Your dichotomy about having to assume one way or another was a false one.If it is important, you might decide to proceed as if the theory's predictions are correct...or you may not.

Right, you have agreed that the only other possible choice is that the originator of the supernatural being may have also experienced it. But that we cannot know for sure.So there remains only one KNOWN: imagination.And there remains one UNKNOWN: human experience. For someone so well versed in science and debate, it is sad to see you resort to this type of nonsense.- Oni

It would be really really really stupid to claim that it has not been established that humans have the capacity to make up supernatural creatures, and have ever utilised that capacity. If someone were that dense - we could easily prove them wrong by making something up on the spot, right?Let's see what RAZD has said:

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There is no objective empirical valid evidence presented so far that a single supernatural is positively known to be a product of human imagination.

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This does appear as if RAZD is denying that ANY supernatural being is known to have been made up. We could point to Gandalf, we can point to Rudfrul (who I just made up). These are 'positively known to be a product of human imagination'. Even RAZD will concede that the FSM is a known product of human imagination...apparently depending on when you ask him the question over the course of a discussion.The only reason made up beings were being made up was to counter this kind of statement from RAZD.

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You have not shown that a single entity is made up.

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Again, a dense claim like this is easily shown to be false by simply making up a single entity!

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Curiously, I have yet to see scientific verification that a "single individual such being of any type or genre" has been demonstrated to be entirely a product of human imagination.

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Later, RAZD added an arbitrary condition:

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You have yet to demonstrate that a single supernatural entity from a single documented belief is made up, with a citation for the source of the entity and documentation that someone does or has beleived in it at some time.

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As if someone believing a claim to be true has some kind of importance. bluegenes told us why he was making up all those crazy supernatural beings:

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I've demonstrated that humans can and do make up supernatural beings, which is all that the experiments were designed to demonstrate.

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RAZD's defence has been:

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Making up intentionally fictional caricatures is not making up supernatural entities, that would take the additional step of verifying that they are in fact supernatural entities

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Which heightens the farce. Here he is demanding that bluegenes verify that the supernatural being is in fact a supernatural being as a means to confirm that he has identified a real supernatural being that was made up by humans!?This is crazy, yes?Is it any wonder that bluegenes responses seem crazy? He's having to respond to ever crazier counter arguments!

Yes. All true. - But.So - it seems we, RAZD, bluegenes, Onifre, Straggler, Catholic Scientist, Rahvin, you & me, have not all agreed on what a supernatural entity is.Just what is a supernatural being/entity/event? Well, it apparently cannot be defined as something that cannot be explained away as human imagination, or bluegenes would be saying nothing. Is it something not yet explainable by the current laws of physics? No, because then we could cite any scientific explanations of previously unexplainable things as falsifications of bluegenes theory. It has to be something in between...similar to the phrase "I'll know it when I see it!"Consider the concept of a biographical story. The story could originally intend to only have elements of reality. At various points in the development of the story, fictional elements creep in. At some point in the development of the story it becomes defined for the rest of us as a supernatural being story, when the being does something or is given an ability that is supernatural.I can guess that RAZD was assuming any of the commonly known supernatural entities out of the past historical record. Like the Thor out of the old Norse religion system, not like the Thor out of the Marvel Comic book world.I can only conjecture that RAZD's lament, about there not being a single shred of evidence, refers only to those sorts of supernatural beings, although - admittedly - he did start the whole shebang off with the obviously fictional IPU. (However, it must be added that this was only to see what kind of methodology bluegenes was planning on using when the Big Guns were eventually brought up - it was, as they call it in Go, a sacrifice stone - a yosu miru.)Ah well. Can the original source of any supernatural being story of historical significance by determined? 10% of them? 40%?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I said proving a negative. Note the specific term. Proving is different from establishing a greater relative probability of accuracy. I consider very, very few things to be proven in the sense of a logical proof, be they positive or negative claims. But that's why I them discussed a specific instance in which believing a negative claim (in other words, having confidence that the negative claim is more likely to be true than competing claims) would be wholly appropriate. You're applying our argument to gods again, and I specifically stated that I wasn't trying to talk about that.When I throw a die, I do know how many sides that die has and thus I can establish the relative probabilities of any given side coming up.When I look for a pen on my desk, every square inch of the desk I observe without observing a pen reduces the likelihood that there is a pen on the desk.There are circumstances where one can determine that a negative claim is more likely to be accurate than a positive claim. If I search my desk, and I don't find a pen, it must be more likely that there is no pen on my desk. There is no other possible way to interpret that data, unless you mean to say that the observation or lack thereof of a pen on the desk is irrelevant to the presence on the desk of a pen. That being utterly absurd, I'm sure you must then agree that searching my desk and failing to observe a pen means that it is more likely that no pen is on the desk than competing hypotheses. ...RAZD, pens are very well-defined objects that obey normal physical laws in very intuitive ways. Pens are not invisible. They take up space. They block and reflect light. They obey gravity. They don't move on their own. Given a finite space like my desk, it is incredibly easy to search for a pen and from that data determine its presence or absence. You're trying to make my pen example into an analogy for god/s, and I specifically stated that the pen example was not directly analogous to god/s, and even went so far as to provide reasons.Are you so terrified of admitting that it is possible in specific circumstances to establish that a negative claim is more likely than the alternatives? I would have thought that it would be very easy to agree that failing to observe a pen on a desk after thoroughly searching the desk would count as strong evidence that there is no pen on the desk and therefore would establish that the absence of the pen on the desk would be more likely than its presence. The question specifically limited itself to the area of the desk. The pen very well could be sitting on my chair, or glued to the ceiling - but who cares? The question is "is there a pen on my desk?" If there is no pen on my desk, the presence of the pen anywhere else is irrelevant. I am not talking about god/s. I am talking about a specific item: a pen. I am talking about a specific location: a desk. I am talking about a very specific scenario that you and I and every other sane individual on the planet should be able to agree on: if I don;t see a pen on my desk after I search it, there is most likely not a pen on my desk. Could be a pencil. Could be a television. Could be a printer. A pen could be on my chair, or on my neighbors desk, or on the floor, or glued to the ceiling. None of those matter. The scenario is very simple.Now, do you agree or disagree: If I search my desk thoroughly for a pen, and do not find it, the most likely hypothesis is that there is no pen on my desk. Where do you get that? RAZD, is there a donkey in your house? How do you know? Are you assuming that you're right based on your opinion? If you search your house for the donkey, are the probabilities of donkey/no donkey still a flat 50/50?Are you truly unable to give a greater than even chance to the presence or absence of well-known discrete objects within a finite space you're familiar with? So I can never establish any change in probability regarding the presence or absence of a pen on my desk regardless of how thorough I search? The chances are always 50/50?Your chain of reasoning requires that the observation or lack of observation of a pen on a desk is irrelevant to the actual presence or absence of the pen on the desk. That's absurd, RAZD.Let me try to redirect you then, using a very real world example from history.During WW2, there was a very real fear of sabotage and other forms of espionage. In February of 1942, California governor Earl Warren went before Congress on the matter of a potential "Fifth Column" of Japanese saboteurs infiltrating the US. One person pointed out that no actual sabotage had taken place, and no form of espionage had ever been shown to have been committed by any Japanese-Americans. His response?

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"I take the view that this lack [of subversive activity] is the most ominous sign in our whole situation. It convinces me more than perhaps any other factor that the sabotage we are to get, the Fifth Column activities are to get, are timed just like Pearl Harbor was timed... I believe we are just being lulled into a false sense of security."

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Governor warren observed that there had been no sabotage or other "subversive activity." He reasoned that this increased the probability that a "Fifth Column" of saboteurs existed.From your statements, I predict that you would say that the absence of sabotage does not change the probability of the existence of saboteurs, that we still just don't know.Is my prediction correct? If not, what do you think of Governor Warren's reasoning? Again, Im not talking about gods, I'm not making analogies. I'm asking your opinion of Governor Warren's reasoning in this matter, nothing more or less.

Hi mooseplease see my PNTmessage 4we could also put the bluegenes thread on hold if he is willing, as the results there may be of interest to him as well.Enjoy.

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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)

Hi Rahvin,I don't want to get into a lot of detail here, I have enough on my plate (and not just here) so I will address one issue. But it seems that you want to use your argument as a general analogy for all cases of attempts to estimate probability on poor and inadequate information, starting with a straw man. This is a straw man for your claim that we can judge some degree of probability, because what you have set up is a situation where the result is known, it is fact, and thus the probability is one if the pen is on the desk and zero if it isn't, there are no in between conditions of knowledge.If you change the condition to ask if the pen is near the desk and only look on the top surface of the desk then you have three possibilities: (1) the pen is on the desk, (2) the pen is near but not on the desk and (3) the pen is nowhere near the desk.If you look at the desk top and do not see the pen then the probability, based on the two remaining possible conditions is 1/2 that the pen is nowhere near the desk (you've eliminated the first by not seeing the pen).The reason you can calculate the probability in these situations is because you know all the possibilities in both cases.We could add a fourth case, (4) the pen does not exist, and then we see that the probability of this being right in this example is 1/3rd.The more possibilities the less the probability. and in none of these cases does the probability get more than 50:50. Do you? Only when you know the possibilities can you calculate the probabilities. If you don't know the possibilities then you are guessing\assuming based on your knowledge and biases, but this is an opinion, not a calculation.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : 4th case.Edited by RAZD, : clrty

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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)

I have no idea on percentages - but evidence that they are human invention is still possible even if it cannot be demonstrated to the degree of facthood. Mutual exclusivity indicates at least large portions of many of them must be invention, for example. And we can also learn about the psychology of humans...if it turns out we have a propensity to detect design, agency and patterns and the propensity to confabulate stories about these perceived agents and how they achieved the pattern and why...then we have further evidence that these concepts are created in the imagination of human beings.When a supernatural being is called forth to explain something humans experience then the evidence suggests that this is human invention. This is because whenever those phenomena are investigated we don't find elfs, nymphs, demons, goblins, unicorns, ghosts, vampires, domovoi, leszi, djinn, thunder gods... but are still able to explain those phenomena because we find something else (static electricity, sudden infant death syndrome etc) that does the job.Whether or not any of these is of 'historical significance' is your call I guess.I will submit, for sake of novelty: The Indian Rope Trick, which thousands have claimed to have witnessed.First - several accounts that are a bit similar have cropped up from time to time, but it really spread as an idea after a hoax article in a newspaper. There have been various accounts of witnesses to magic shows confabulating tricks that are orders of magnitude more impressive than the magician actually performed, and with the Indian Rope Trick we have a fairly solid case this has happened. The actual trick as it is actually performed is much shorter and less impressive. There are other tricks that are performed separately than may well have been combined by witnesses to create an impossible trick.So there is a supernatural being (a magical fakir) that has been shown to be almost certainly a product of human invention. Obviously the fakir wasn't invented, but that he was a magical fakir that can defy nature clearly is. We've flown above the clouds during a thunderstorm, and never seen a deity rolling across them in a chariot. Indeed, we've established that the noise of thunder is not the sound of chariot wheels banging against the firmament.Speaking of firmament, Marduk killed Tiamat and:

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He split her up like a flat fish into two halves;
One half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven.
He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman,
And bade them not to let her waters come forth.

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We've not seen any primordial chaos monsters draped over the sky holding back an ocean when we've got up there. I think it's safe to say this was invented by storytellers.Likewise, all barn fires where we have found the source of them has turned out to be caused by things such as 'poor fire discipline', rather than displeased spirits as various pagan religions have proposed.Let's face it, supernatural beings, when they are genuinely believed in, are folktheories. They explain why things act the way they do or something like that. They are theories with no evidence, and are either subsequently falsified or modified by people like RAZD so as to be unfalsifiable.

Hi RAZD,I'm still up for this.Let's see what Admin does.Petrophysics

Hi bluegenes,In Message 91 you said: Here is the information the author of Genesis had no way of knowing without outside help.If the creation story in Genesis 2:4-25 is a myth how did the author know man contained the following elements.1. Oxygen
2. Carbon
3. Hydrogen
4. Nitrogen
5. Calcium
6. Phosphorus
7. Potassium
8. Sulphur
9. Sodium
10. Chlorine
11. Magnesium
12. Iron
13. Silicon
14. Fluorine
15. Iodine
16. ManganeseIf that story was made up out of the imagination of the author some 3500 years ago, how did the author know you could find all these elements in a human.I would dare say if you could ask him where humans come from he would tell you people have sex and sometimes that produces a child.Yet he was very specific in stating that God formed man from the dust of the ground.It has been a while since I studied agriculture but if I remember correctly you can find all these in the dust of the ground.Since this man had no way of knowing what elements were in mankind or in the earth someone had to give him the correct information.Otherwise how would he know to say God formed man from the earth?It is a scientific fact we contain these elements and that the earth contains these elements.How would a man 3500 years ago know that information?Well he probably didn't know that information. How could he? Some entity had to impart that information to him.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 ICANT.What I was talking about in relation to the creation mythologies was looking for points that matched the modern scientific view, in which, as you know, we were not literally created from dirt. Perhaps a description of supernatural beings creating animals from other animals in a string, then ending up with us, like guided evolution, instead of directly creating, or something like that.However, you've got an interesting point. The creation myths choose a wide variety of material for supernatural beings to have made us from, and it usually seems pretty random. But "dust", if we read it as "soil', is one that could have been drawn from observations, hence the chemical accuracy.The people (or person) who authored genesis were farmers and would have been very aware of our relationship with the soil. It feeds the plants that we eat, and which our domesticated animals eat, so indirectly, we gain nutrition from it, and are in a sense "formed" from it.Then, perhaps more importantly, they could observe what happens to animals, including us, when they die. They become soil, or dust; so: dust to dust.They were as smart as we are, just without the modern science and technology, so they could easily make these observations, and, unfortunately for your argument, wouldn't require a supernatural being to help them.Still, that's a better attempt than RAZD has made with the creation myths so far to put some noise onto my theory.

Hi bluegenes, Actually the person who wrote Genesis was a shepherd, a tender of the flocks.But I got another question for you.How did the author know about Pangea?He wrote in Genesis 1:9 "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so."Somehow he had knowledge that in the past the earth looked like my avatar as that is the picture he painted in Genesis.How would the author of Genesis know that in time past all the land mass was in one place as in Pangea which is a recent discovery?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."

Good try. He didn't. Life had been around for at least 3 billion years before Pangea, and his description of the early earth should be a fiery ball, not watery. I'll count it as a little bit of noise, if you like, but it's not unlikely that, as you've got 4.5 billion years to play with, his description is going to fit somewhere.Then he messes it up big time by putting modern sounding vegetation on the land before creating the sun and the stars, which should have been there for billions of years.If I found you another creation mythology that is a closer fit, would you change your religion?

You're cherry picking things that might be interpreted to be accurate.How about those things that are clearly wrong?

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

Two questions: 1) Why didn't the author just write down the actual elements? Why say "the ground" and not include the actual elements that make up the human body, and leave it up to your interpretation?2) Why did god need the ground to get those elements? Couldn't he just magically produce those elements and make a human without the use of soil? Which, btw, doesn't contain all of those elements in every location, every single time. Not even all the time.Some/most soil is crap. Well the Chinese had already built a culture, had herbal medicine and time keeping devices which helped them figure out lots of astrological movements when god was creating the first man.And what about the Bronze age and all the metal work that took place, long before 3500 years ago?So humans knew the land was rich and that chemistry occured with different processes.- Oni