A very clever alien..

[downbeatplumb]

The answer is simple, check their breath and look for signs of the pieces of dinner in their mouths. Farts also smells like food naturally. There are many different things the alien could try, such as check of signs. and clues. The alien could ask his wife who made him the dinner about the kids, she might have gave the dinner to one of the children. He could also see or remember what kind of foods the kids like to eat, and if they have any allergies. 
By the way the theory of everything can keep going on. I and the bible believe in progressive intelligence, i do not believe in evolution, things tend to mix or develop someway, this works with some animals, etc but it does not apply to humans evolving from apes. Animals can evolve through circumstances, did you know that the shape of a child's head can naturally be different from another due to how they come out of the mothers vagina. One person sees a big head in his back garden, and thinks it was an ancestor, giants existed long ago according to both science and scripture.

"Science" does not agree that there was a race of giants.

Find Out How the Giant Skeleton Hoax Started (nationalgeographic.com)

Interestingly the phrase "Theres a sucker born every minute" was first coined about people paying to see a fake giant.

Cardiff Giant - Wikipedia

So no there were never giants. For one thing you cant just scale people up and have a working person. There is a reason that elephants have a very different structure to mice.

[Aristocatt]

Maybe I am just missing the point here, but I'm not really understanding what this hypothetical is intending to elucidate. I have an idea about it that I write out below...it just seems...dumb.
So the example, if I am understanding it is to figure out how to prove the kids ate the meal with only deductive logic...any attempts at empirically solving the problem will have some extraordinary hypothetical attached such that it isn't a viable way to infer the actions of the children.


Out of curiosity, what happens if the man can't deductively prove that his kids ate his meal?  What do you think this implies?

I'm a little confused why an atheist, or anyone for that matter, would find it troubling to discover that the truth statement of a particular temporal event is not solely deductively provable.

As an aside, you mentioned your own solution to the problem, but it required empirical inferences...
"He knew that his children were the only other people in the house"
Isn't really functionally different than...
"He knew that his children's stool samples had trace amounts of the dinner cooked for him".

If we can infer things about the mans experience, than it isn't solely deductive.
If we can't infer things about the mans experience with relation to the great dinner mystery, than you haven't adequately solved your own problem.
In fact, the entire premise of this argument seems to rest on that single empirical inference being available.  If he hadn't been able to infer that his children were the only two people in the house(which also rest on all sorts of other inferences like -- his wife was not home, no intruders were in the house, his wife made dinner), he wouldn't have any reason to believe his children ate the meal. He would have to ask himself "what evidence to I have that my children at this meal".

[GUBU]

Maybe I am just missing the point here, but I'm not really understanding what this hypothetical is intending to elucidate.  

Klorophyll is trying to get us to admit that he is the greatest person ever and that he and only he knows the truth and for us to throw ourselves at his feet begging for his mercy. It's the same thing he does every thread.

And with every other thread he fails miserably, because as you said, the attempt is dumb.

[Paleophyte]

Hi there,

Stop the silly stuff you're doing there. Just imagine some extremely high IQ alien, for whom QM and relativity are kindergarten stuff. This clever alien was able to figure out all our major advances in mathematics instantly. For our alien, following arguments and deducing things is a piece of cake. Earlier today, the alien announced that he reached the absolute best explanation of all observable phenomena in the universe, he even proved that his Theory of Everything cannot be improved any further.

Our same alien asked his wife this night to make dinner for him, as his research work is taking all of his waking time. She wasn't there when he returned home. Feeling completely exhausted, he fell asleep for some minutes, woke up and went for his long-awaited meal.

It appears one of his two kids mercilessly swallowed it. After he confronted them, they simply said : any formal proof that we ate your dinner, sir ? He thought long and hard and couldn't come up with any conclusive proof, that one (or two?) of his kids, as a personal, intelligent agent, went on and devoured his dinner. He just kept asking himself, banging his head, his deduction machine, really hard against the wall : what's wrong with me? I know that these bastards are the possible explanation for my meal's sudden disappearence.. But they're pressing me for some hardcore syllogism with them in the conclusion..? Did these fools really outsmart me ?

Can any atheist here help the alien, and back his kids into a corner?

So is god supposed to be the undetectable meal with no nutritional value? Or should we divide the kids in two then eat of their flesh and drink of their blood?

Dear Mr. Alien. I feel that I should apologize. Even a simple fiction like yourself deserves a more worthy creator than this simpleton that has imagined you. You are currently bouncing around in his prefrontal lobes but if you can find your way to his brainstem and shut down his autonomous nervous system then there's probably some good eating on him. I have a good recipe for BBQ sauce if you need it. Again, my sincerest condolences and wishing you the best of luck with your meal.

[rado84]

Can any atheist here help the alien, and back his kids into a corner?

[RozzerusUnrelentus]

The answer is 42.