Posted: Nov 19, 2011 8:26 am
Teuton wrote:Clive Durdle wrote:
The supernatural needs to go the way of aether - as a wrong hypothesis.
But if the (mechanical) aether existed, there would be nothing supernatural about it, would there?
For example, what about Qi, the scientifically undetectable life force in whose existence most Asians believe? Should we naturalists say that it's a nonexistent natural force or that it's a nonexistent supernatural force?
(To say that anything that exists or occurs inside spacetime is natural is too weak to be adequate as a definition of "natural".)
We should say that anyone who actually adheres to that ridiculous formulation of 'qi' doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they should go study what the fuckers who formulated the concept were talking about. The 'scientifically undetectable life force' version of 'qi' is only spouted by charlatans and fucking hippies, and the mountain-dwelling lunatics of whom the old Chinese proto-scientific community consisted would giggle their fucking shoes off to see it.
They weren't ever talking about undetectable magical bullshit anything. They were trying to work out how shit worked, and anything undetectable would have been as nonsensical to them as it is to us.