I agree with everything you said.  I guess the moral of the story is
that support for a supernatural claim requires more than mere evidence:
it requires extraordinary systematic evidence.  So the reason you and I
are materialists is that, despite dedicated resources and intelligence
devoted to finding such evidence over the past century, no such body of
systematic, extraordinary evidence exists.  It is fair to say that most
claims by supernaturalists are ill framed and beyond meaningful direct
scientific investigation: proponents cannot specify what observations
would disconfirm the hypothesis.  But that doesn't rule out the ability
of science to indirectly defeat supernatural claims.  For example,
strong evidence that the image on the Shroud of Turin is a 14th century
manmade hoax, created with commonly found pigments, INDIRECTLY defeats
the supernatural claim that the Shroud's image was supernaturally
caused by God over 2000 years ago.  The fact that Shroud proponents
irrationally refuse to accept the resutls of science, is their problem
- but it doesn't mean that the supernatural Shroud claim is not
rationally defeatable. After all, there are people with PhDs who refuse
to accept sound evidence that HIV causes AIDS or that the holocaust
happened.  This problem has nothing to do with natural versus
supernatural.
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