Biff the unclean

If someone has blonde hair, then that is the truth, and if I say he has blonde hair, although I am guessing, I am saying the truth.
No, you are not. You, by making the statement, were claiming to have information that you do not posses. That is the very definitation of a lie.

Truth is objective and independent of man's guesses.
And being objective is dependent upon the evidence.

So too a supernatural afterlife may objectively exist, even though no evidence has been found to confirm it.
You can't claim objectivity in the absence of evidence.

Truth is ascertained by evidence, but it remains true even when no evidence has yet been found.
Without the evidence you have no way to determine what is true and what is not. If you claim something is true without evidence you are telling a lie.

Evolution was true before Darwin marshalled strings of evidence for it in 1859
One of my prize possessions is a first edition by Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, on the subject of evolution. People didn't pull evolution out of their imaginations as a fantasy--like the supernatural. It was a conclusion that was unavoidable from studying the fossil record. It was abundantly obvious even from the sparse amount of fossil EVIDENCE available in Erasmus' day. All Charles did was discover the EVIDENCE as to what was the driving force behind evolution.
No one was making any claims without being in possession of the EVIDENCE before they made them. When Ken Norris said "The scientific method is nothing more than a system of rules to keep us from lying to each other," he hit it right on the head. That's all science basically is…being truthful.
If you cannot provide EVIDENCE that there is a supernatural you cannot claim that there is one and remain truthful.

JERDOG

yes it does make a sound.
lets use this same analogy but instead substitute the sense of hearing with the sense of sight.
If rays of light shine into a forest, are the rays of light there if no one is around to see them? Of coarse they are.

Shadowy Man

Then riddle me this...

If no one is around then how do you know a tree is falling??

Normal

Your reasoning seems flawed to me. Whether there is evidence or support it or not, the assertion "You have blond hair" is either true or false. They might be deceiving you by claiming to know, but that is irrelevent to the truth of the statement.

Biff the unclean

Nope, sound requires being heard. With no ears to hear them they are just vibrating air molecules. Rays of light are nothing but rays of light. Without eyes to see them they are not a sight.
Are they still there, of course the are. But they aren't sight or sound until they are perceived.

Shadowy Man

This is a semantic argument. Most people I know define sound as "vibrating air molecules" not as "the sensation perceived in the mind by the detection of vibrating air molecules".

According to the definition that I, and most people I know, use the sound is there irrespective of whether the sound is heard or not.

Biff the unclean

Of course it's a semantic argument. But apparently most people you know would be wrong about what sound is. The question about the falling tree isn't if it creates sound waves it's if it creates a sound

But this is all beside the point…which is that if you claim something is a fact--in this case the supernatural--that you have no way of proving is a fact (no evidence to support your claim) then you are not telling the truth. You are lying.
If at sometime in the future it should turn out that what you said was correct that does not mean that you were telling the truth because when you made the statement you had no way of knowing that.
If I claim that there are IPU's I would be lying because I have no information that would indicate that there is such a thing. If a hundred years from now someone should stumble across one I would still be lying. Because I made a claim to information that I did not posses, that I did not know to be true when I made it.

Shadowy Man

Well, that's funny, because most people I know have PhDs in physics or astrophysics. I guess they wouldn't know too much about sound, now would they.

Anyway, whatever, I think I have had this argument on this board before, and it will always come down to a definition of the terms. You say tomato, I say tomato.

Normal

I think the point he was trying to make is that sound only exists when there is a receiver of it. I assume those people you know got PhD's on observable evidence, which is the key thing. Sound which has no evidence of existing is the same as sound that doesn't exist.

Biff the unclean

Your reasoning seems flawed to me. Whether there is evidence or support it or not, the assertion "You have blond hair" is either true or false. They might be deceiving you by claiming to know, but that is irrelevent to the truth of the statement.
When I make the statement "you have blonde hair" or "there is such a thing as the supernatural" implicit in that statement is that I am giving you information that I possess. But I am not. I am giving you information for which I have no evidence. I am presenting to you as truth something that I have no way of knowing if it is true or not. That makes me a liar