(March 26, 2015 at 8:24 am)robvalue Wrote: Sure, you could rule out all known natural explanations, but you can't rule out unknown ones. It would still be speculation to say that there are no unknown natural explanations.Hence why I said nearly every natural explanation. But I think that for some of the described events we could make it very, very difficult to deny the supernatural if we could test them in the right setting. My point being that the fact that we never get the chance, and that any seemingly supernatural event turns out to be natural once we understand it, points towards there not having been any such events.
"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