Peanut Gallery

Straggler continues: I guess it's not for you. For me it is. Almost as if you're behaving like the guy who asks a believer why he believes in God and, upon NOT hearing back a satisfactory answer for the guy asking, he keeps on asking Why? like the 4-year old in the kitchen to his mom.Continuing: Straggs - I'm using YOUR definition. If you shoot me in the foot with this, you are also shooting your own foot. Actually I do want to revisit that definition (and fix the late-night mucho-ale excusable spelling as long as I'm visiting There again. See below at the bottom).Continuing: Oh how could you! How could you! Are you some kind of Noah? Now the Lord saw some sinning, and it gave him pain
And he said, "Stand back, I'm gonna make it rain"
He said, "Hey, brother Noah, I'll tell you what to do
Build me a floating zoo

​

And take some of them...
Green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty-backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born

​

Don't you forget my unicorn - Shel SilversteinWhere is the IPU??? - buried in the "etc, etc, etc."? Such an ignominious fate for one so prominent here in this discussion!However, it's nice to see that you dropped Harry Potter from your laundry list (and also left out the Flying Spaghetti Monster). I go by the current body of evidence. So the level of evidence against a Christ or a Vishnu or an Allah or a Yahweh isn't at the 1=0 level - but again, it is not for me to decide. This one - the one this thread is about, the one bluegenes proposed his theory about. Isn't an expert in Norse mythology exactly from the portion of the scientific community that would be the scientist to ask? It is mythology, after all, probably a branch of the library sciences. Remember, I am not in RAZD's camp on this. His demands are not my demands. My claim is based on my trust in the scientific community. I yield authority to the experts in the field. Yes - that is how I paraphrased how bluegenes phrased it in Message 167: Perhaps I was being overdramatic in the courtroom with the use of "shadow". Okay, but by L'Hopital's Rule, this "beyond a reasonable doubt" has to be at a much stronger lever of confidence than the level of confidence needed for ordinary natural phenomenon. Any particular phenomenon being considered for a falsification demonstration would quite clearly be an extraordinary claim, to invoke Sagan. I think you might be getting at what RAZD & others have been driving at. I'm not in that camp. But I would like to hear about this.The point I want to address is "Well empirically obviously"....Obviously? What? Video equipment? Audio recorders? Seismometers? Telescopes, microscopes, John Thomas Scopes? All manner of calibrated measuring equipment? The whole litany of man-made objective natural detection equipment...well, dammit, let's see what bluegenes was using. Oh wait. He wasn't using anything like that yet. Later on as the debate unfolded, I'll give him the brain scans, which are very tentative. He spent a lot of time citing patently inadmissible evidence of a hearsay nature, subjective story-telling that no courtroom would allow. His equipment has been only designed and built to detect evidence of fiction. He has not been able to provide a way to detect non-fiction. Imagine a pond that just had a stick of dynamite go off in it. Are there any living fish? Bluegenes equipment so far is only capable of finding the dead fish floating on top. He & his surface boat & short-handled fisher's net has found and pulled up into the boat zillions of dead fish. Everytime he sees something that looks like a fish floating on the top of the pond, he scoops it up and observes that it is a dead fish. He then extrapolates that all the fish are dead. There are no living fish. He gets out of the boat and back into his little red Italian car and goes home. Again, I yield to the experts in the field. Ooh, he changed the color of his hair, too! Not until after the other parallel ongoing investigation had reached a conclusion with an accepted result that this being is supernatural, in consilience with the mythologists' report. Which will NEVER happen, according to the Xongsmith Analemma.FOOTNOTE:
The revisit of your definition of supernatural: I gues I now want to change this to read: The term "inherent" has too much absolutism baggage. Materially? Why? Some connotation of a courtroom, as in "Your honor, I'd like to bring up now a material witness"....

Staggs, did I go over your head? I don't think so. Did I inject a humorous jokette? That was my intent. Are you so deficient in your sense of humour that you failed to see the references to 1.618's name and the post number? RAZD caught it. Sorry for your loss. Not right now. Not today. Later, maybe. Sorry for my loss.

I've told you how to falsify bluegenes theory. You can extend this to any supernatural concept which is empirically detectable.If you want to claim both that it is impossible to falsify bluegenes theory whilst also claiming agnosticism to the actual existence of supernatural entities then you are going to have to reconcile those claims by giving an example of something that is genuinely supernatural, which might conceivably exist but which still doesn't make bluegenes theory false.Let me know when you have done that.

Yes I missed it.Dude that is actually quite clever.....I will reverse my rating.

NO. You told me how you would attempt it, but you are not a member of the respected experts in the field. I don't have to do anything of the kind.Don't hold your breath.
Instead let's get another drink. We need them in the days ahead.

As i....

Straggler continues: I don't have to do this. The scientific community would take this under their wing. I am NOT qualified!!! There are 2 different worlds going on here - what the scientific community would do and what I would do. I am not qualified!The scientific community would, in theory, accept a supernatural instance of something, but NO, in practice, they won't. As Bonnie Riatt sang, "I can't make you love me, if you don't". It's the Xongsmith Analemma again...a theory about what *they* would do, not me....

Hi bro, Take out Voldermort (fictional character from intentionally fictional story, characteristics borrowed from other stories, etc)None of the rest are, or have been, demonstrated to be products of imagination. Not by Straggler, not by bluegenes, not by anyone else that I am aware of. The question though, is whether there is a supernatural element to thunder and lightening. The "natural explanation" only covers the natural elements tested by science, and without a means to test for supernatural presence, this cannot be assumed to be absent.This is your analema: that scientists will only be able to see\observe the "natural" elements and that their explanations will necessarily be limited to the "natural" elements by what they see\observe. If it cannot be demonstrated in any specific cases that do not start with known fictional characters, then the hypothesis is useless and it is not a scientific theory.If there is no methodology that can differentiate between imagination and supernatural experience, then there is no way to apply the hypothesis, and no way to test it.This is not my "stupid degree of certainty" it is the degree of certainty that science demands comes from testing an hypothesis before it can be considered a scientific theory: you must demonstrate some specific instances where it is true (validation test) or you must demonstrate some specific instances where it could have been falsified but wasn't (falsification test). Neither of these have been done.If you can't test for supernatural presence, then the hypothesis cannot be falsified, and it is not a scientific theory.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : methodology

Why can scientists only "see/observe" the natural elements? Aren't scientists human beings?If human beings have any capacity to detect the supernatural, then scientists, being human, will share that ability. If humans have no capacity to detect the supernatural then it what sense can you, as a human being, claim to have any knowledge about it? How can it affect the universe if its effect is undetectable?If "something happens", but the universe is exactly the same in every possible way afterwards, in what possible sense did anything actually happen?

Hi again PaulK And yet, curiously, I do not write that way, nor have you quoted me writing in that manner.Your confusion is not my problem. In your opinion. When you haven't tested for evidence for the other, then you are biased in your approach, and will end up with biased results. But I'm not asking for absolute proof -- that is apparently more of your confusion -- I am asking how you are able to ascertain whether or not supernatural essences are present, rather than just assume it to be the case (based on your personal opinions). Here you have confused Jefferson with Franklin ... Which is precisely my point -- you cannot claim that something is present or absent if you don't test for it with a methodology that is known to test positive when present and negative when absent. Amusingly, once again, this is precisely my point -- you cannot claim that something is present or absent if you don't test for it with a methodology that is known to test positive when present and negative when absent. Here you seem to be confused between what you are testing for and what you expect to be able to determine. You will only be able to determine what you are testing for, so if you are only testing for natural elements that is all you will determine. Interestingly, confusion is one of the symptoms of cognitive dissonance, caused by the conflict between strongly held beliefs\opinions and contrary information. If you are confused by someone else's post it could be due to cognitive dissonance.Enjoy.

Crash asks: No. They are faceless aliens who have taken a Vow Of Silence on this issue.Actually, to get more serious about it, scientists are those who have done everything imaginable to remove their human foibles from coloring the results of their experimental observation. They have spent long, long years of study to make sure their own prejudices and world views are not clouding the results.

Straggles tries to make a point My apologies, I should have checked the message better, what I actually wrote was: You can't have degrees of knowledge: there is know and don't know.But the posted reply didn't show the mock codes, which were intended to indicate that it was a joke. I've edited the post to correct this. As my brother pointed out I mentioned more than just opinion. What you seem to ignore is the issue of confidence. Specifically high confidence in highly tested behaviors. What a pile of self-serving simplistic drivel. Or, in other words, that we can have confidence in conclusions based on objective evidence, and the more they are evidenced the higher the confidence we can have.Enjoy.

You aren't actually reading the conversation, are you?

Hi crashfrog. thanks. You are correct that they will also be able to have religious experiences etc.The issue is what you can measure and test and determine from such evidence. In this regard scientists will only look at (see/observe) the information that bears on "natural" elements and their explanations will be based on those natural elements. See what PaulK proposes measuring and whether or not it includes supernatural elements.Enjoy

Hi Panda (1) it's RAZD, "Rebel American Zen Deist" not RADZ ... (you aren't actually reading the signature, are you? )(2) If one of these is demonstrated to be a product of the imagination in this conversation, then please post a link to it. If none have, then what is your basis for your comment?Enjoy.