(May 26, 2020 at 3:57 pm)Rhizomorph13 Wrote: This is exhausting
Science includes any way that a thing can be tested so what other ways are there to know things that are somehow outside of science?
Here's an example. I'm not saying it happens; it's a thought experiment.
The human mind is complicated. Ideas may occur to us unexpectedly.
Freud-type explanations say that there are parts of the mind that are only partially accessible to us, and that unexpected ideas, obsessions, etc., "arise" from those parts. But this is notoriously unfalsifiable.
The ancient Greeks thought that any idea, obsession, inspiration, etc., that occurred suddenly into the conscious mind had been placed there from outside. A god, a daemon, a muse, or something like that gave it to us.
Imagine that there really are such entities giving us ideas. How would this be testable?
Poly would insist that even though we don't know where the idea came from, it must be natural. But this can't be tested. Maybe he will even insist that in the future super-MRI machines will read our subconscious minds and tell us where the ideas came from. In other words, he is sure that although we don't know now, we can just beg the question and say that it will be testable some day.
In a sense, this is not supernatural, according to the definition I'm using. It is in the nature of the mind to take in ideas. It is in the nature of the daemons to give us ideas. But it isn't testable according to science. It may happen all the time, and we wouldn't know it. Especially if we rule out a priori anything that isn't testable by science, we will just assume the idea came from within the mind in some way (even though this, too, isn't really testable).
As long as people like poly announce by fiat that only testable things exist, we will assume only testable explanations exist. But there may be other things going on all the time, which affect us.
I'll anticipate the objections of the committed metaphysical naturalists: they will say that daemons, if they exist, will someday be demonstrated by science. But they don't know this.
