Any Theists on AF, I Challenge You to a Debate on the Existence of God

[watchamadoodle]

That's a good point. You can demonstrate that a proposed natural-supernatural-natural cause and effect chain is false beyond reasonable doubt. This is because the supernatural step in the middle is redundant from the scientific point of view. The claim can be reduced to prayers do X.

But you cannot prove that supernatural causation has occurred. I suppose that's the difference. Take the prayer again, say you tested the claims and it did show a strong correlation between prayer and the prayers being "answered". All you have shown is that there is reason to believe the prayers are somehow causing an effect.

The fact that the person making the claim described the supernatural process in the middle does not mean that the experiment has demonstrated that supernatural process to be true. There could be another natural process that took place that no one is aware of, which explains it. Or it could be any number of supernatural causations. You cannot possibly distinguish between these supernatural causations, or distinguish them from no causation at all.

Simply put, you cannot set up an experiment where you do supernatural action X and then measure natural response Y. If you could do supernatural action X, it wouldn't be supernatural. By its very definition, it's a useless term to science.

Say we found out ghosts are real. We haven't proved the supernatural exists, we've proved that ghosts are natural and that we were wrong to call them supernatural.

As soon as you demonstrate how the supernatural cause works, it ceases to be supernatural.

OK enough now, I'm boring myself!

Those are good points. It even makes me wonder if we can falsify supernatural claims as you mentioned. If a natural state leads predictably to a future natural state through a supernatural mechanism, is that mechanism really supernatural? Maybe the supernatural mechanism needs to have free will to cooperate or not - otherwise it becomes a force of nature like gravity? So that would mean we can't be certain we falsified the supernatural claims through experiments - maybe the supernatural decided to hide during the experiment?

Something I've wondered about is statistics. The collapse of probability waves in quantum mechanics is supposed to be random. If God was using this to steer nature according to his will, would we be able to detect this by comparing a series of events with expected probabilities densities? We wouldn't know for certain, but we might be suspicious. (I probably am using the wrong lingo, but hopefully it makes sense.)