Prior to this post, the term supernatural has been used 10 times by four different posters.
Not once was it used by me.
I am not the one bringing the supernatural into this discussion.
The proper distinction is not between natural and supernatural, which, at this point, is little more than a loaded word used by dishonest people to bias the discussion.
The proper distinction is between natural and artificial.
Can we distinguish between the two, please?
A television is not natural, but does that mean a television is so-called “supernatural?” According to some of you, like John_Stamos_Left_Ear, it does.
** Asking for the falsification criteria for abiogenesis: *Not in any way valid.
*** If ever there was that one smoking bullet which proved the vast ideology behind the meager science, you’ve just given us it, Mr. Chimera.
Is there any other branch of (alleged) science in which asking for the falsification criteria would be met with little more than hissy fits and evasions?
Actually, by strict criteria, a television is natural. We are natural creatures: everything we do is an extension of nature. Which is to say, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” is not particularly meaningful.
If life on Earth was established artificially, what was the agent that did it? More importantly, whence arose that agent, and how? How far down the road do you want to, as Trinopus put it, kick the can?
I made exactly this distinction and pointed out that it simply pushes the explanation for life on Earth back a step.
If life on Earth doesn’t have a natural cause, and it’s creator, (or it’s creator’s creator, or it’s creator’s creator’s creator…) doesn’t either, we are left with two possibilities;
Life in our universe has always existed. There is no origin.
Life ultimately has a “supernatural” origin.
Since we know both of these to be false, we are left wondering what you are talking about.
Ok, this is the crap GWD is on about, and he’s taking the Popper position, which is not by any means the established scientific reasoning accepted by all.
As it says;
Many contemporary philosophers of science and analytic philosophers are strongly critical of Popper’s philosophy of science.[10] Popper’s mistrust of inductive reasoning has led to claims that he misrepresents scientific practice.
Bartley in 1978 claimed,[11]
Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."
— W. W. Bartley in Philosophia 6 1976
Rafe Champion said,[12]
“Popper’s ideas have failed to convince the majority of professional philosophers because his theory of conjectural knowledge does not even pretend to provide positively justified foundations of belief. Nobody else does better, but they keep trying, like chemists still in search of the Philosopher’s Stone or physicists trying to build perpetual motion machines.”
— Rafe Champion “Agreeing to Disagree: Bartley’s Critique of Reason” 1985
David Miller,[13]
What distinguishes science from all other human endeavours is that the accounts of the world that our best, mature sciences deliver are strongly supported by evidence and this evidence gives us the strongest reason to believe them.’ That anyway is what is said at the beginning of the advertisement for a recent conference on induction at a celebrated seat of learning in the UK. It shows how much critical rationalists still have to do to make known the message of Logik der Forschung concerning what empirical evidence is able to do and what it does."
— David Miller “Some hard questions for critical rationalism” 2011
All you have shown is that you don’t understand the principle of falsifiability despite the fact that your error has been repeatedly corrected in this thread.
We’re in total agreement regarding the vacuousness of the term supernatural. From my experiences, and as I just said in a prior post, it’s used almost exclusively as a loaded word to bias debate.
When I do see someone try to use the term earnestly, it tends to be hot mess of logical fallacies and semantic games.
Their distinction between the natural and supernatural: Natural = Anything which exists. Supernatural = Anything which is not natural.
So, by definition, the supernatural does not exist.
They then arbitrarily label that in question as supernatural, which, using their definitions, means it does not exist.
Finally, they use this labeling as proof of that in question’s nonexistence.
It’s terrible, horrible, no-good textbook circular reasoning, yet I’ve seen high-ranking academics use this very argument and think they’ve really knocked it out of the ballpark. It’s pathetic. I’ve even seen a few people in this thread using what amounts to this “argument,” essentially.
Let’s make this clear: Something either exists, or it does not exist, and choosing to label that something as “supernatural” has no bearing on which of those is true.
It’s the natural/supernatural distinction which is meaningless, for all the reasons I’ve just stated (and more, I’m sure).
On the other hand, the natural/artificial distinction is highly meaningful. For one thing, it’s how we distinguish between so-called “acts of God” and crimes.
Would you say the distinction between natural death and murder (artificial death) is meaningless?
Okay, regardless of the term, would you deny that the specific alternative you had in mind for abiogenesis, was not the hypothesis that life has always existed, or that life does not exist, but was in fact the hypothesis that a god did it?
I suggest that this is exactly what you have in mind, but you are wary of stating your opinion overtly because some part of you realises how absurd it is.
For the person doing the dying, the only likely difference is the timing. And if the murderer is a mountain lion or a bunch of pneumococci, the distinction becomes even fuzzier. Humans are part of nature, so the things we make and do cannot be anything but natural. You certainly cannot call murder “artificial death”, because, as far as death goes, the end result is the same. You can call the glow of a lightbulb “artificial light”, but it is still a flux of photons, no different from the flux of photons from the sun, or a forest fire.
As has been pointed out to you, that’s indeed the correct stance to take, even on a vanilla-Popperian understanding of science: you can ask for the falsification criteria of theories of abiogenesis, but asking for falsification criteria of abiogenesis itself is just a category error, since abiogenesis is a phenomenon to be accounted for scientifically, and not a theory trying to account for certain phenomena.
But of course, as your overexcited bolding and italics show, you don’t care about the factual issues at hand in the slightest; you want to show the corruptness of science by showing its failure to adhere to dogma—which is itself ironic, as science is non-dogmatic. Thus, all you’re demonstrating is the inability of your own dogmatic view of the world to even grasp the opposite position you attempt to criticise.
This goes back to what I said in the original post, that abiogenesis proponents can forever hide behind the skirt of ignorance.
*“This proposed model of abiogenesis has failed, however, that only means some other model must be true, we simply haven’t discovered it yet.”
*
This is why I’m asking what can falsify the entire field of abiogenesis, not merely individual models. So far, the consensus seems to be: nothing.
There are no hypothetical discoveries that would tell us abiogenesis (the evolution of inanimate matter to life) is false.
So, let’s switch things up. Rather than asking what discoveries would falsify abiogenesis, let me ask this:
How many years of failing to demonstrate abiogenesis as true before we consider another possibility?
Notice how, eshereal’s question, is completely ignored in the response to this post. The OP instead diverts attention by firing back with the semantic argument of whether human actions are “natural” or “artificial”.
eshereal already explained why we think they are ultimately, properly considered natural, if you disagree, fine. Why avoid the question? It uses the term “artificial” in a way apparently consistent with your own definitions.
You come home from work and find a package on your doorstep. How do you falsify the hypothesis that it arrived? Not that a neighbor, or a delivery driver left it, not that it fell from a plane, or grew out of the ground but that it arrived at all.
Until they can suggest a method of falsification, the package-arrival proponents can forever hide behind the skirt of ignorance.
Of course, you’re not for a moment suggesting that the package was always there, or that it’s not really there now, or that, oh, I don’t know, a magical, invisible ape-god wished it into existence. You’re just leaving the question open right?
Life exists. At some point it arose, unless it has always existed. So, to disprove that it arose from non-life at some point in the past, we would have to prove that it has always existed. That would disprove abiogenesis.
Exactly! Abiogenesis is not a theory – it’s just a word for the moment that life began. To deny that such a moment ever occurred is to propose that either: 1. Life does not exist, and never has (it’s just a dream, man!), or 2. Life has ALWAYS existed (which is demonstrably wrong on the several-billion-years-of-Earth-fossils level, without even getting into current debates among physicists about what “always” means – parallel universes, branes, and all that jive…)
I think if you ask for the falsification criteria for climatology, you’re more likely to be met with incomprehension than “hissy fits”.
I know sciency-sounding words are neat and super fun to throw around, but remember that they actually have intended meanings and are not typically all that illuminating when arranged at random.
If you don’t believe me, the negative proton-flux phase horizon proves my point beyond any doubt.
