(April 29, 2014 at 2:26 pm)Chad32 Wrote: Supernatural forces can't be tested,On some level it seems as if they should be testable. That is what groups like the Randi Foundation offer a reward for. If you told them you could walk on water and they arranged for a test and you did so, and there did not appear to be any reasonable alternative, then we would have tested and verified a supernatural act. If you could restore amputated limbs with a touch, it would be something easy to verify and quite difficult to ascribe to some alternative natural explanation. If you could take a few fish and loaves of bread and serve thousands of people and recover more food as leftovers than you started with, that could be tested and verified as a supernatural act.
What we cannot test are claims about beings that exist yet cannot be detected and only reveal themselves in private and personal ways that leave no evidence. But as is often pointed out, there have probably been thousands --if not millions-- of such beings worshiped throughout human history. And we cannot falsify a single one of them, if they are defined in that same manner.
"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
