Riketto Wrote:It can really be a very knotty question to deal with.Only if you don't deal with it honestly. Consider your example of emotions. We know emotions exist because we experience them and we see others experience them and react in similar ways, ways we understand. We can judge the intensity of emotions and we can even determine when a person is acting too emotional or suppressing emotion. People even know how to manipulate the emotions of others, or feign emotion by the way they act. We have a number of ways to determine that emotions exist.
Emotions, therefore, do not exist in some dimension that we cannot possibly experience, because we experience them all the time. Hell, science is researching emotions in order to better understand them. That is completely different from this spiritual or metaphysical dimension you claim is impossible to detect, yet for which you have many descriptions and explanations and information, and for which other people have completely different descriptions, explanations and information.
My guess is that this is where you'll try to go off on a tangent using exceptions to the rule regarding expression of emotions. But that won't change the point I just made. You cannot use emotions as an example of something undetectable that exists. Same with thoughts and ideas, so let's skip those as well and see if we can't address the obvious problem with proving the undetectable.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould