I'm sure ynot hasn't lost sight of that but the point is that, according to Robin, one of these two things is possible. She thinks that it's perfectly possible for the spirit of a dead person to tell John Edward to tell someone who has a tooth in his pocket that he has a tooth in his pocket. So asking her why, in that case, the spirit of dead person doesn't tell John Edward to tell the police where his body can be found is a perfectly legitimate question. Either both are possible or neither is.
No, we've been round and round that, above. The mechanism or method by which Ability X operates is unknown (for the sake of discussing the validity of the question, let's suppose, as the question does, that there is indeed a method of receiving messages from the deceased). We do know that JE can receive (let's suppose...) some classes of message. We also know that JE can not, apparantly, receive some other classes of message. This is evident from the messages JE (let's suppose) receives and communicates.
Robin has not, to my knowledge, claimed to understand the method. The intricacies of "that's not how it works" have been touched on above too, knowing (let's suppose) how something doesn't work is not the same thing as claiming to know how it does work (that's assuming Robin actually said that, but alas the quality of skeptical claim in this thread has been lamentable, so it's in reasonable doubt).
ynot appears to have made the assumption that 'receiving communication from the dead' is identical to 'talking to the living' (though even live people often won't tell you where the dead body is - Ian Brady being a distasteful real life example). He has no grounds to do that, nor indeed any grounds for supposing that one class of communication is as like another as to make no difference to an unexplained phenomenon (and let's stop supposing for a moment and remember that it's a fraudulent phenomenon, so he doesn't even risk being proved wrong, he can make any old claim he likes). No matter how you stress the similarities between two things, what remains as a difference may be a crucial difference. Feel free to provide your own analogy here.
I see that its a tempting question. It looks good, especially if you thought of it and there's a live woo in the water just waiting for your flashing lure with its hidden hook. But the flaw is primarily in pretending that you can define the phenomenon that you are attempting to disprove. It's like a strawman, really, you define the phenomenon in such a way that you can disprove it.
So the grounds for the question are flawed, it's not quite the perfect gotcha that it may have appeared when he thought of it. Furthermore, it has no value to this thread, none at all. We've covered this at length too. There are two possible answers:
a) A simple, honest "I don't know". Value: zero
b) A rationalisation, of variable complexity, which will be familiar phraseology beloved of apologists for all manner of woo. Value: zero
I can't see myself being moved much as to the validity of the question, we've had that argument and I've heard "they're the same thing!". Except in the ways they're different, of course. So not much scope for movement there. But I am very open to someone persuading me there's a third possible answer (though let's not suppose for a moment that there's any chance it will be 'gosh, ynot, why didn't I see it before, JE's a fraud!') and to the possibility that I have seriously undervalued one or both of the possible answers I've foreseen.
What I am obliged to suppose ynot wants from his insistent, strident repetition of this flawed 'gotcha' is that Robin will all at once abandon a belief and fall to her knees, clasping ynot's hand in tearful gratitude before the assembled skeptics shoulder him around the forum for a lap of honour, but it's been a long night and I may just be slightly wide of the mark there...
