Reply #11: I thought that knowledge of meteorites predated the 20th c. by quite a bit

[Orrex]

James Burke discussed it specifically in "The Day The Universe Changed," though I haven't seen it recently enough to recall the exact time.

Anyway, you're mischaracterizing the supernatural as it pertains to an infinite entity. If this "God" fellow exists as described, then he's certainly got the wherewithal to totally foul up a scientific study, and he can even do it invisibly and undetectably. Therefore, any experiment purporting to prove God's existence (even via a proxy such as prayer) is doomed to fail simply because it's nonfalsifiable. End of experiment.

All that nonsense about "Commonplace Item X used to be considered impossible" misses the point, by the way. Allegedly supernatural phenomena have been extensively studied, and to date not a single case has been borne out through controlled experiment. If you can find me even one case in which the allegedly supernatural phenomenon was verified through scientific experiment, I would be most grateful for the enlightenment.

Likewise, it's not useful to claim that scientists in the good ol' days could seek the philosopher's stone and still be respected, because the practical implications of the scientific method was still being hammered out. Pasteur's work all by itself shows us how primitive were the rigors of controlled observation. And it's hardly a strong argument to claim that, because we're not as ignorant as we once were, we therefore know less now than we did back then.

Because scientists who stray to far from the strict fundamenalist dogma that is scientific enquiry are often banished to the fringes.

They're not "banished" because they pursued controversial experiments. Instead, their ideas are rejected if they do not hold up under scrutiny. And if those scientists persist in their unverified claims, perhaps bolstering them with additional unverified claims, then the scientists may themselves become discredited. But that's not because they defied Science Dogma. It's because they engaged in consistedly bad methodology.

Also, if a debunked claim is put forth repeatedly, it needn't be seriously considered unless its new formulation is sufficiently different from its debunked predecessor. That's why we don't have to test Sylvia Browne, James van Praagh, or John Edward, because their claims of "talking to the dead" are identical to those that were debunked decades ago.

DU is positively infested with a paranoid fantasy about the hegemonic Secret Masters of Science, such as the ones who forcibly inject pure mercury into everyone's veins and who conspire to suppress the agents of truth such as Hulda Clark and Kevin Trudeau. Any time a wild and unsubstantiated claim is not embraced, its proponents here at DU cry "you're closed-minded, and your science is your religion." It gets quite tiresome after the thousandth time around the track, so please let's try to reach beyond the "panties in the crack" accusations.