You cannot demonstrate that what elves can do is impossible, because you can't produce elves to actually show them working their magic.
But you don't
need an elf, if you want to determine whether they can influence human beings.
If you can show that the only things that can ever possibly influence human beings is one of a small set of forces; And you can show that those forces are not in play when the putative elf influences are occurring, no elf is needed to do the test.
Your argument depends too heavily on proving a negative, which is quite impossible.
I don't know why this claim is so popular. It's not true.
It's correct to say that you cannot
always prove a negative; But there are certainly negative claims that are easy to prove.
Our current set of known forces includes four, but some scientists suspect the existence of a
Fifth force.
That applies to cosmological scale objects, and cannot influence individual humans. So it's completely irrelevant to my point, and was explicitly and deliberately excluded from being relevant in my argument, precisely because people always drag it up as though it undermines my point.
There's a LOT we don't know about how physical systems work at very large scales and very high energies. None of these unknowns can possibly change what is known to be true at human scales.
Perhaps the elves can command it. We'll just have to wait until we manage to capture an elf.
If they could, they still couldn't use it to influence individual humans. Any more than you could manipulate gravity to affect me, but not the person standing next to me. It's a wide area phenomenon, and cannot be targeted at "small" objects like individual solar systems.
I'm joking of course. I don't believe in the occult, but you'll never prove to the satisfaction of those who do that there are no occult forces.
You can't prove anything at all to the satisfaction of those who refuse to employ reason.
The best you can hope for is to convince some of them that there is no credible evidence of them and that alternative explanations of proposed evidence for them are more plausible.
Nope. You can't do anything of the kind. People who choose belief over reason are completely out-of-scope for ANY attempt to dissuade them from their idiocy.
That's where we are with physics. It's counterintuitive but demonstrably true that there cannot be any unknown forces that act on human scales. So any elf, god, or superhero can ONLY act on humans via those forces that we do know about...
Science cannot prove metaphysical physicalism--the thesis that everything is physical. That is its foundation, i.e. the assumption that it is based on. To undermine that assumption, one needs to show that there are physical phenomena that cannot be explained by any known physical force.
Not only are there no such phenomena, there cannot be any such phenomena unless our models of reality are wildly and very obviously wrong.
They're not. We checked.
Theists are overwhelmingly spiritualists who adopt the assumption that physicalism is wrong. That is why religion and science tend to be seen as incompatible.
They are incompatible. But it's far more extreme than you seem to grasp.
Humans are (at least in part) physical objects. We have demonstrated that physical objects cannot be influenced by any means other than those described by physics. Therefore spiritual influence on physical objects is physically impossible.
So I would not say that one can disprove the existence of god scientifically.
Then you would be mistaken.
There's nothing in epistemology that says that it
should be possible to disprove gods scientifically. And indeed, until recently, it seemed plausible that such proof would never be achievable.
But then we achieved it, as a surprising byproduct of our completely secular efforts to understand physical objects.
Rather, one can make an argument that spiritualism (metaphysical dualism) lacks any evidence to make it a reasonable assumption.
Oh, you can certainly make that argument; And it's a very good one. But now it's also possible to make a far stronger argument, and to say with certainty that metaphysical dualism is simply wrong.
And we also need at least an attempt to explain phenomena such as the Big Bang and the existence of order rather than randomness in the physical universe.
No, we don't. Not in the context of discussing whether individual humans can or cannot be influenced in unknown ways. This question is ONLY related to the origins of the cosmos by the very fairytales under dispute; There's exactly zero reason to imagine any connection whatsoever between a hypothetical god that influences humans, and an equally hypothetical god that creates universes.
I do think that science accomplishes that, so I am with you in spirit, but I struggle with positions that suggest science can definitively rule out the existence of gods.
Why?
Is this just because you've convinced yourself that the false claim "It's impossible to prove a negative", is true?
All it can do is render gods an unnecessary explanation for what we can observe.
Not at all. We are fortunate to be living at the first point in history when scientific approaches have enabled us to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that gods aren't a possible explanation. Obviously they have been known not to be a necessary explanation for several centuries.
