(April 11, 2018 at 10:24 am)SteveII Wrote:(April 11, 2018 at 10:13 am)Mathilda Wrote: How come you can't test a hypothesis of the supernatural using natural tools yet you can observe it using your natural eyes and senses?
Or do you have supernatural eyes? Maybe even spidey-senses?
Sounds like special pleading to me.
I should have been clearer. You can observe and examine the effect of the supernatural. You cannot observe or examine the supernatural cause with natural tools.
The same is true for almost everything physical. For example, I do not actually *see* the table. I see the *light* that interacted with the table. In other words, I detect the effects of the table and not the table itself.
This is typical: when I hear a bell, I actually hear the *effect* of that bell on the air: pressure waves that we call sound.
We never detect neutrinos. We detect the *effect* of those neutrinos on certain nuclei that become radioactive when hit by neutrinos. And we don't even detect those nuclei: we detect the light produced from the decay products moving through matter. So we have a second order 'effect' that serves as a detection.
And the point is that an *effect* is a detection. And if we can use the effect to distinguish information about the 'cause', then we can do scientific analysis.
So why is the 'supernatural' so special? If it has effects that we can measure (detect), then we can do science.
Hmmm....I guess that means the term 'supernatural' has consistency issues.
