You're putting words in my mouth. Please don't.
I don't know what the hell AmyStrange experienced. I'm certainly not special pleading for a different standard. I'm saying that handwaving inconvenient data as coincidence is unskeptical.
I've not put any words into your mouth I simply used your argument to comment on the flies appearing above a piece of rotting meat in the bottom of my compost bin. Neither you nor I saw what happened, using
your reasoning regarding AmyS's claim we are "handwaving" away the idea that flies are spontaneously generated by rotting meat.
However it isn't handwaving as we
know that rotting meat does not spontaneously generate flies, we don't need to re-research every appearance of flies over rotting meat, we
know that rotting meat doesn't spontaneously generate flies. With AmyS's experience we know the paranormal doesn't exist, therefore whatever they experienced wasn't paranormal.
You seem massively confident that the paranormal has been exhaustively studied and satisfactorily explained. I think it was a fairly trivial and spotty effort, largely resulting in "not proven" more than "proven impossible", as you say.
There were many teams of scientists researching the claims of paranormal powers for decades, in different countries, different universities, different militaries and so on, thousands of scientists examined the claims. The research was anything but "trivial". And remember people started with the expectation that paranormal powers existed, being the first to prove it would have been a Nobel prize level of recognition and kudos.
(After those decades our knowledge of how the world works has also advanced and as I said earlier we now know there is simply no gap left to hide paranormal powers.)
Our knowledge that paranormal powers do not exist is as conclusive as us knowing rotting meat
doesn't spontaneously generate flies, that the body is
not composed of four fluid humours, that the earth orbits the sun, and the earth is
not flat.
Anyone today holding out for the paranormal to exist is the direct equivalent of the nutters who claim the earth is flat.
As long as you handwave the AmyStrange cases as coincidental, you are begging your own conclusion. You need to actually demonstrate the odds, here, to relegate AmyStrange's experience into statistical noise range. I don't thinknits practical to do, or even possible.
This is your special pleading again; do you think we need to re-research, to re-check every time we see flies above rotting meat that those flies were not spontaneously generated by the rotting meat? Or do you accept that we
know that is not the case, so we know that any account of flies above rotting meat is
not spontaneous generation?
What it boils down to is that I stick a pin in such phenomena, with a nod to Asimov that we have insufficient data for a meaningful conclusion. You are happy to dismiss anything that does not beg your question. Chocolate and vanilla.
I agree that we do not have enough information to know what happened (I said that earlier), but we can rule some things out based on what we know, so we know whatever the experience was it did not involve paranormal powers as we know they don't exist,
exactly like we know flies are not created by spontaneous generation from rotting meat.
