In the We Won thread someone who calls themselves rvb8 wrote: “We do not accept the supernatural because we can’t test for that.”
Well. Consider the following two statements:
- Supernatural phenomena exist.
- Natural phenomena are all that exist.
The two statements are mirror images are of one another. If one is true the other is necessarily false. They are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
And neither can be confirmed by test.
Notice the double standard here. rvb8 rejects statement 1 on the sole ground that it cannot be tested. But he affirms statement 2 (it is necessarily entailed by his statement) even though it cannot be tested either. The incoherence of scientism is obvious. Yet many cling to it in the teeth of its incoherence. Look, I am not even trying to prove the existence of God or the supernatural. That is a discussion for another day. My purpose is modest: Stop with the double standard already.
UPDATE: rvb8 doubles down
In comment 7 to the thread below this post, rvb8 responds with some doozies:
“And neither can be confirmed by test.” No Barry! One of these can be confirmed by testing, I’ll leave you and BA to figure out which.
Do tell. OK rvb8, I’ll bite. Please describe the test in which one would investigate every single phenomenon from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe to confirm that every one of those phenomena was natural.
“The two statements are miror images of one another.” No Barry! Something that does not exist cannot reflect an image because photons will not bounce off something that is not there.
Umm, the “mirror” was not an actual mirror. Go to your dictionary and look up the word “metaphor.”