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Originally Posted by DaveMatrix
Ya gotta love the Easter Bunny & Santa Claus retort that comes up in almost every thread where "scientific proof" is lacking. I especially like this one in relation to proof of God, a truly ridiculous & absurd comparison, that always comes off as condescending.
This is where the fallacy of the ‘proof’ becomes evident. How many scientific theories have been ‘proven’, only to be later overturned when new facts come to light? The answer must be countless. In science, proof is not an absolute, it merely means that we haven’t yet been able to disprove it. Scientific fact is nothing more than this year’s best guess. An educated guess, but a guess none the less, as I've said before.
When a new theory fits the observed phenomena better than an old theory, generally speaking, it then becomes the accepted model. Sometimes this can take a while, as was the case with the heliocentric solar system or the dangers of cigarette smoke. Often, this new model is then overthrown when a later and more sophisticated theory offers slightly more, or slightly better, answers.
Time will tell......new theories will evolve & new evidence will no doubt be found regarding ESP....
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This is so absurd, I literally cannot come up with a reply. I don't even know where to start.
Is your argument, then, that because some hypotheses have been proven invalid or inaccurate in the past, that we should accept new ones with absolutely no evidence to back them up, because they're what people want to believe? Well, if that's the case, then to hell what people think! The Easter bunny exists, dammit! I can't prove it, but I know in my heart that it's true!
God has no place in this discussion and evidence has no place in a discussion of God. Religion is based on faith. People who follow Christian dogma pride themselves on the fact that they hold to their beliefs without any proof (that being the very definition of faith). When it comes to supposedly real and observable phenomena, however, we're not just in a different league, we're in a whole other sport.
Yes, occasionally we come up with models that better describe observed phenomena. This is where we get a progression from, say, Newtonian physics to quantum physics. However, this still has no bearing on the discussion. I could walk you through the scientific method (since, based on the above post, your grasp of it seems to be tenuous at best) but that's not relevant to the current debate either. Science is the process of explaining the world around us; designing and testing hypotheses to explain observed events. Before we can design and test hypotheses to explain paranormal phenomena like ESP, they need to be observed first. Observed doesn't mean that your cousin Jed saw some guy bend a spoon with the power of his mind once; such things can be and very often are faked very convincingly. Therefore, observed means the phenomenon must be demonstrable and repeatable in a controlled environment. To date, there have been a huge number of people who have
claimed to be able to accomplish this; yet the JREF's prize money still hasn't been spoken for. Nobody has been able to back it up.
One study out of more than I'd care to count has shown results that indicate there may be something to such phenomena, and that single one was shown to be flawed in design.
So, once more for emphasis. Before we worry about how or why something works, we need to see that it works at all. Give me one single shred of conclusive evidence behind psychic abilities and I will forever concede the point; until then, all the rest is just so much semantics and feel-good rationalizing bullshit.
Psychic powers do not exist.