Science and origins

In terms of supernatural (as opposed to natural), science has no comment on such things, as the "supernatural world / plane / what have you" cannot be observed by scientific endeavors.Basically, once the supernatural becomes observable, it is no longer supernatural, and enters into the realm of the natural.So no, I would disagree that it is a throwaway term, although I may be misunderstanding your point. All supernatural means is an order of existence beyond the scientifically visible. As such, science is silent on it.If there were some way to link some sort of "intelligent designer" as the cause of all natural processes, then wouldn't that designer then become a part of the body of natural processes? The very fact that it is now known lumps it into that category. It is able to be observed.In any case, the word needs to be properly defined before we can even begin to debate about it.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.

In order to be subjectively experienced, the event / thing / deity in question would need to objectively exist in some form or another. This would mean that the problem is the disconnect that happens when it is experienced by several people.Yes, subjectivity plays a role in how valid something is to someone, but but there also needs to be something there to actually perceive. Also, notice how almost every account of supernatural events experienced by religious people involve only that one person, and the stories more often than not all contradict each other in some way.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.Edited by RDK, : No reason given.

Hey Oni. Would you agree then that this isolated "event" might be 100% inside your head; a figment of your imagination? If you're not using your sensory inputs, then you're not really sensing external stimuli. I'm sure there are things that are overlooked by the neuroprocesses that interpret information from our sensory organs. Our ability to experience the world around us via sensory input is not infallible; there are plenty of animals that have done it for longer (millions of years) and do it a lot better. But my main point is that while we, individually, using our natural bodies, can't necessarily be sure that we haven't missed anything somewhere along the line, we do have machines that can do it for us. There's a difference between not being able to sense things like subtle weather variations or tectonic plate movements due to our bodies' deficiencies, and not being able to detect them at all.But yes, I would agree with you that we can't be 100% sure. Perhaps there has been no need for homo sapiens to sense "events" like the one we're discussing, which is why we just never evolved the ability. But in all seriousness, the probability is small. Or it could just mean that there were natural explanations for what seemed like supernatural events. Absolutely. But to think that we've missed something obvious--something that's been sitting right in front of our noses but requires a sensory adaptation that we haven't evolved yet--is kind of silly. If we were constantly bombarded with something of that nature, don't you think we--or any other of the myriad of organisms all throughout history--would have evolved something that would help us to identify it? I'd be much more inclined to believe it if it were an unusually isolated incident, or something that only happened once in a great while.

Yes, but if we took that to be true (or even a remote possibility) then continuing this debate would be essentially pointless, no? Yes, I would agree. It is entirely possible that we have not previously developed a "sixth sense", so to speak, for a stimuli that we had not been presented with. That, or, conversely, we have been presented with it at some point and time (or even still are), and there has just been no need to develop a sensory system for it. Up until about a hundred years ago, we knew next to nothing about processes on the atomic level. If your prediction is correct, we should still know nothing about atomic processes simply by virtue of the fact that we cannot view these processes on a macroscopic level.Comparatively, our eyes suck. Because of this, we developed things--like the microscope--to do our dirty work for us. But how did, as you put it, "awareness" of these microscopic levels arise in the first place? By machines we invented to help detect them. I agree with you here also in the sense that we could be as blind to our surroundings as we may consider dogs to be comparatively blind to theirs. I suppose it's hard to personalize this kind of situation simply because we have to imagine the possibility via abstract conversations--like this one--instead of experiencing it firsthand. There's no good data to fall back on, other than that we know simpler life forms don't have the depth of understanding we do.Instead, we just have to shoot the shit and contemplate. Edited by RDK, : No reason given.