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Comment by NateEag | Hacker News Reader

Time for me to burn some karma.

What evidence do we have that these phenomena are strictly natural?

There are some ingenious explanations in this thread of how you could create something like this effect with known technology.

If we don't a priori eliminate it on the grounds it is impossible (as a Christian, I do not, but many here do), I imagine that supernatural beings trolling humans (especially modern scientific reductionists) could look a lot like this and is also a plausible explanation.

If you have a grudge against the concept of the supernatural, maybe think of it as "graduate students got drunk and starting messing with the Earth-universe simulation".

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When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

The principles of science do not allow us to rule out the possibility that these events are the result of alien life or supernatural phenomena. But it does give us plenty of evidence that there are more mundane, more plausible explanations.

And when you're faced with a potentially world-changing revelation, like confirmed contact with extraterrestrial life, it is basic due diligence to speculate on and rule out those mundane explanations first.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But you have to eliminate first. That is how you arrive at new knowledge, and that is how paradigms are shifted.

Could it be supernatural beings trolling humanity? Sure. But such an extraordinary claim requires correspondingly extraordinary evidence. That it was a secret, terrestrial weapons system designed to confound FLIR also requires evidence, but it's a much more likely explanation, and can generally be accepted as probable with correspondingly less evidence.

I understand all that.

If the entities actually behaved as described (which is a big if, no doubt - people make mistakes and a military test might be trying hard to deceive them) - no visible exhaust, massive instaneous acceleration/deceleration, etc...

Sure, it could absolutely be a natural phenomenon.

But it's not crazy to say the claimed hoofbeats sound kinda stripey.

>people make mistakes and a military test might be trying hard to deceive them

A couple people have mentioned this in this thread and my problem with it is that a military test designed to deceive that same military's personnel seems dangerous in a way that could cause people to lose their lives. Unless you mean that a different military is testing?

>When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

or coconuts

>What evidence do we have that these phenomena are strictly natural?

Well... natural phenomena are the only phenomena for which evidence exists at all.

That's why the Bible says faith is the evidence of things unseen, as opposed to data.

That sounds like circular reasoning to me - you seem to be saying that if we can observe something it must therefore be entirely natural.

That doesn't follow, though. The obvious example would be that if Jesus actually rose from the dead by a miracle, then people who were present could see him and put their hands on his scars.

Is the supernatural inherently not scientifically testable?

Absolutely.

It does not follow that it could never be observed at all, if it exists.

> That sounds like circular reasoning to me - you seem to be saying that if we can observe something it must therefore be entirely natural.

I'm saying that we have yet to have observe something which can be proven to be supernatural.

Asking whether evidence exists that a phenomenon is strictly natural presumes there exists evidence of something other than nature to classify against. As yet, such evidence to the contrary doesn't exist, so for the time being, all evidence of any phenomenon is of its natural state by definition.

>It does not follow that it could never be observed at all, if it exists.

The unfortunate paradox of needing to provide evidence of the supernatural is that any such evidence would, by definition, need to be natural, and would contradict the premise. So if it can be observed to begin with, that's evidence that it isn't supernatural.

Well, then it's certainly camera shy.

Where exactly in the Bible does it say that?

Hebrews 11:1

If it occurs in nature, and interacts with nature, why would it be supernatural? Why does “supernatural” have to be the first answer we think of when we face a baffling unknown?

ah thank you for the breath of fresh air. so many people are quick to represent the unexplained as supernatural, but the fact of be matter is that everything that is contained within "nature" can be explained by natural causes. just because we aren't aware of them yet doesn't mean that they aren't there.

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