Sayonara

No. I am demonstrating the flaw in your approach. I am not making any statement about the flavour or scale of some arbitrary belief. A fact is some objectively true statement which can be verified, usually something which is known to be or to have happened. You can't substitute 'known' with 'believed', because this puts the claim in the realm of opinions and imagination. If a fact is shown to be false then it is not a 'false fact', it is simply false (or a falsehood, if you require a noun). It is self-evidently rash to make a claim which might be objectively true, and to call it a fact prior to any attempt at verification. Sort of. The city of Troy appeared in that story in the same way that the city of London appeared in the story of "28 Days Later". Today it is the name of an archaeological site but this does not magically remove the real cities (yes, plural) of Troy from history. Similarly the existence of the cities at the Troy site was well recorded in parallel with the Homeric use of the location as a backdrop for his fiction. The Romans were particularly au fait with Troy. The only 'discovery' was the location of the layered ruins of the cities, not the fact of their existence. I fully understand the point you are trying to make, I really do. But if you are going to illustrate it by example then you need an example that actually fits. You might also want to consider that the concept of belief being irrelevant to a thing's existence or occurrence is a moot point if that thing does not exist or occur. In this case, that would be the same as saying "yes, if flying saucers visited earth then our belief in them would not change that. However, in the same vein we cannot state that they have visited purely on the basis of our belief or lack of belief in that occurrence". And when you attribute the historical renderings you are talking about to alien visitation with no evidence to show why those renderings can only refer to alien visitation then you are making a statement from belief, and belief only. Which I can clearly see is sufficient for you, but it has no scientific merit. On the contrary; all positive claims require support, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Evidence or GTFO. Pointing towards a body of data and suggesting that scientific study might be a good idea is laudable. It's just the bit where you pre-suppose the conclusion before any such study is carried out which is problematic. The point is that if you follow King's reasoning route, then you can safely insert anything where "time travelling frisbees" appears in that sentence. Which is clearly nonsense.

Does anyone else recognise the particular style of verbiage yet?

Venus near the horizon shining through a top secret military weather balloon on fire.

In those cases, under those conditions, you would not be able to call those studies "scientific" either. Mind you, the USAF and sceptics may not call it that to begin with.

All those renderings of flying discs from historical texts? They're time travelling Frisbees. It's a historical FACT because the drawings are right there and the claim could be proven true or false. A claim should only be considered a fact once it has been shown to be true, not before. It isn't "just like Homer's Troy" at all. An assertion? You just said it was fact. A fact and an assertion are very different things. But yes, it IS an assertion. Which as yet has not been shown to have any factual basis. In science you cannot take a presupposed conclusion and reverse-engineer supporting material to buoy it up. This is the antithesis of the scientific method and utterly dreadful reasoning. If that's how you want to proceed, fine, but don't do so under the impression that you are engaging in anything other than a festival of fallacies.

When you said "historical fact", what you were actually describing is an unsupported assertion. Please don't trot out the "historical references point to alien visitation" line in response, because it's been pretty much conclusively shown in this thread already why that is unsound reasoning. Strength of conviction does not translate into credibility of evidence.

Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more! What is wub?

Beneficial, yes. Scientific? No. Good job he wasn't trying to publish a paper in Nature.

Multiple anecdotes constitute hearsay. It might be enough in civil proceedings where a judgement is determined on the balance of probabilities (and in that kind of environment it might well be referred to as 'evidence'), but for the purposes of scientific enquiry it is simply not reliable. That seems entirely reasonable.

You seem to be implying that if anyone says "we should", then you can make the same argument for cave drawings etc. Unfortunately the two scenarios are not the same. In the case of the lab, we have a set of evidence from which results are empirically derived before the evidence is destroyed. In the case of cave drawings, paintings, carvings, etc, we have... cave drawings, paintings and drawings of something which we can't confidently identify. I understand what you're asking - how can we have confidence in the lab scenario and not the others? It's because of the way the results were collected. In the lab the evidence would have been studied critically, and the results collected by testing a falsifiable hypothesis. But nobody can have any idea what was going through the mind of the person who daubed, painted, or carved a particular design, much less whether it was based on an actual object or what such an object might actually have been. Are you seriously going to take the honesty, accuracy, and perceptual reliability of a long-dead artist on faith while you're mixing in a big bag of wishful thinking? Many cultures have stories of gods or other beings who rode "chariots" through the sky, so it's not surprising that these would be depicted in various artistic ways. But this doesn't mean that those cultures were inspired by actual beings flying about in their moon cars - it is much more likely to indicate that some of those cultures had storytellers with fairly romantic notions of how deities might manifest their powers, and some of the others had storytellers who were happy to shamelessly copy their fables. No it doesn't. Science is by necessity agnostic towards any given indemonstrable entity. You never try to justify a foregone conclusion in science, because that's not scientific. Yes, that would be the anecdotal stuff that mooeypoo mentioned. The plural of anecdote is not 'evidence'. Science doesn't ignore history. It addresses historical records (whether these be human-generated, archaeological, geological, astronomical, etc) with the appropriate level of scepticism, and scepticism does not mean "randomly dismissive". I doubt it, since Komodo is about 4000km from India. However the Bengal monitor grows to nearly two metres. It's entirely possible that this is what Alexander was shown (and you would show the local brute to the outlander, wouldn't you?) and of course he would have no suitable frame of reference in which to describe it to others back home other than as a "dragon". And boom! - just like that, unreliability enters the records of that encounter.

Is he making a list and checking it twice?

Dearest xatheistwarfare, Please see this thread.

Maybe you are. Ask waratheist to check.

Sunsphere, nobody would deny that you are providing 'something to think about'. But when you use the terminology "I have a theory..." to scientists you are telling them that you have an intellectual preparation, if you will, which will be presented in a very specific way according to a very methodical framework. So that's naturally what they expect you to provide. You will not be able to take a conjecture, postulate, or speculation and squeeze a theory out of it by looking up definitions. You need to learn about the nature and requirements of a theory as it pertains to the scientific method, so that you can structure your thinking around the processes that the method encompasses. Of course there is nothing stopping you discussing your idea further in this thread without using the scientific method... it's just that while some people might run with it, others will lose interest. When proposing a new hypothesis in any science, a good general rule of thumb is that the new hypothesis should provide better explanatory power than the one it is replacing. This might include providing a simpler, more powerful, or less problematic explanation of some observable mechanism, and it should of course be an explanation which observable reality does not contradict. Occam's Razor is always a good principle to apply. There is a primer on Wikipedia for understanding the structure and purpose of scientific theories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory

Indeed.

Except in all those cases where there is genetic predisposition to becoming addicted to the extant biochemical response that such synthetic drugs trigger. Point Fail! Just to clarify: are you saying that you think homosexuality is a learned behaviour, which can masquerade as being "natural"? If so, firstly WOW. Secondly, it should be a trivial matter to formulate a falsifiable hypothesis that can test this conjecture... oh wait, waaaay too late. Being 'a drunk' is not the same as being alcohol dependent. "Functioning alcoholics" have physiological differences to you and I that result in their bodies essentially shutting down without a certain level of alcohol intake. We can say anything is due to genetics. But if we want to be taken seriously it helps to show data that supports a specific, falsifiable hypothesis. In the case of drugs, it depends on the drug in question. In the case of alcohol, if you're talking about your average habitual binge drinker then I tend to agree. But if you're talking about actual alcoholism then you are grossly misinformed. Only in the sense that in your frankly vacuous opinion you've couched it in those un-empirical, simplistic, and unreal terms. Drug addicts tend to agree with you, then go off and score later on. Alcoholics talk gibberish. Believe me, I've tried. This last paragraph of yours seems to imply that if homosexuals object to you criticising their existence then it's okay, you can just laugh off their objections as the same gibberish that you would expect from the druggies and the drunks. Which has to be one of the most disingenuous things I've seen on here for a while. I fully realise this is a very scathing reply. But if I read your reasoning correctly Pioneer, that post deserves it. For the love of ungod please show me where I have mis-read you.

I have to say this one image he posted really speaks to me. It's a very powerful meme indeed. I can't stop thinking about new potatoes and mint sauce. Just can't stop.

The problem is that people don't tend to actually read the poll question or the poll options - they vote for what they think they are voting for. You've pretty much always got to have an "other" option because you can't ever be certain that you have conceived of every option that is possible. I've changed "some other option" to "some other option that assumes they're real" in the vain hope that people might actually read the words.

I vote we keep him this time. It's cute that he thinks of himself as formidable opposition when he can't even write in sentences, and frankly I think we could do with a new jester.

Most people here realise you don't need to have a personal stake in a topic to debate it, so I wouldn't worry Errr... someone may have made that claim of sudden appearance but I am fairly certain it was not me. I am well aware of the status that was held by homosexuals earlier in the twentieth century, and how things changed. That's why threads like this will always make me want to die inside a bit. Because even though the transcripts from the parliamentary debates and the records of the court proceedings - which determined that calling homosexuality a mental illness is definitely NOT acceptable - are all a matter of public record, you still get threads like this which inevitably get taken over by people waving their facile, ill-informed, bigoted opinions about despite being entirely in the wrong. Not that that is happening yet in this thread, but I guarantee you it will eventually. I think that the best way to counter this is to show that the burden of proof was shifted before the thread even started. It's not incumbent on anyone any more to justify homosexuality not being a mental illness. Society has answered that question more than adequately. Instead, someone making the positive claim "homosexuality IS a mental illness" has the onus to justify that claim. Let's take Genecks' bubble of reasoning from the OP:

It seems to me that the content of the entire thread adequately demonstrates that the question assumes definitions which don't reflect reality. As such, I see no reason why anyone should kowtow to those provisions. If we are going to strip back the question to "Is the erotic feeling for members of the same gender a mental illness?" then I would feel compelled to respond with the following question: "Why is attraction to females expected from males but suddenly a 'mental illness' when seen in females?" When one puts the situation in those terms it becomes more apparent where the positive claim lies.

Or to put it another way, the question is flawed.

The key word is "intent".

Especially when it's something we do as a matter of course.

/wave