A ghost is captured

[Az]

damn straight.

[Agathon]

The point is that ridiculing people for strange or false beliefs is sometimes unfair. There can sometimes exist good reasons for believing falsehoods - that's the price we pay for not being omniscient.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Agathon
And you can go **** yourself too, you superficial singing cowboy.

Hook, line, sinker.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Agathon
The point is that ridiculing people for strange or false beliefs is sometimes unfair. There can sometimes exist good reasons for believing falsehoods - that's the price we pay for not being omniscient.

This is precisely the point I made. I don't see anyone here ridiculing folks who believe in ghosts. Disagreement, yes, but not ridicule. The only ridicule so far has come from a believer against those who don't believe.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


Hook, line, sinker.

Actually, what you said was pretty funny to me as in my experience most science students who do Phil end up supporting some form of verificationist anti-realism (like logical positvism) so they can use it to argue against religious belief.

You know, the old "Santa Claus exists" is meaningful, but false; but "God exists" is simply meaningless, since there is no possibility of verification.

[Giant_Squid]

But there's absolutely nothing empiric about this distinction. Why on earth should I believe something that has absolutely no scientific evidence in its favor just because a whole bunch of other people believe it? I'm not one for bandwagons.

If a person dismisses every bit of evidence for a belief as silly, superstitious, or a fraud, then of *course* there isn't going to be any evidence for the belief.

Take, for example, meteorites. During the 18th and 19th centuries, respectable scientists were virtually unanimous in believing there was no such thing as meteorites because they didn't fit in with scientific theories (the sky does not have rocks in it, therefore, rocks do not fall out of the sky). People saw meteorites and occasionally got them and took them to scientists. They were told that either they were drunk, they were crazy, or they were liars. Occasionally some crackpot in search of attention would fake a meteorite and get caught at it and scientists would trumpet this as proof that all meteorites were fakes. Then when people made scientific theories about asteroid belts and how maybe there *were* rocks in the sky, they were told that there was "no evidence at all to support them".

Something like a third of the American population claims to have seen ghosts at some point. I would call that at least slightly suggestive (but usually it is just said that they're hallucinating or dreaming). There are tape records and pictures of ghosts. I would call that evidence (but usually it's said that they are fakes). Certainly a lot of them probably are, although there are very few that we can prove to be faked, but that still leaves a whole lot of them unaccounted for. To say there's no evidence for ghosts is absurd - it's simply that we refuse to accept any evidence.

As for this picture, my money's on it being fake. The door bit is suspicious, and it's too cliched.

[monkspider]

Good post Giant Squid, one of the more sensible ones in this thread.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by skywalker
UR, have you read Michael Shermer's Skeptic column in Scientific American? It's wonderful for that kind of stuff.

I got his book Why People Believe in Weird Things. Good read. Carl Sagan's A Demon Haunted World is also excellent.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Giant_Squid
Take, for example, meteorites. During the 18th and 19th centuries, respectable scientists were virtually unanimous in believing there was no such thing as meteorites because they didn't fit in with scientific theories (the sky does not have rocks in it, therefore, rocks do not fall out of the sky). People saw meteorites and occasionally got them and took them to scientists. They were told that either they were drunk, they were crazy, or they were liars.

I don't believe that is the case. Ever since the overthrow of the Geocentric system, astronomy was in quite a state of flux because of the rapid advances. Ceres, the biggest asteroid we found so far in the Asteroid Belt was discovered in 1801. So we knew there are rocks in the sky for more than 200 years.

Furthermore, I can't remember the prevailing theory of the time forbidding rocks in the sky. Afterall, we knew the planets were rocks already. Just because Newton added aether didn't mean you couldn't have rocks all the same.

Originally posted by Giant_Squid
Something like a third of the American population claims to have seen ghosts at some point. I would call that at least slightly suggestive (but usually it is just said that they're hallucinating or dreaming).

Yet there is never any mass witnessing AFAIK. I can't recall any instances where many people saw the same ghost at the same time, which was later verified true.

UFOs got you beat. There were times where a whole bunch of people saw the same aerial phenomenon, they even have photos of them. Sure enough, so far, all of them turned out to be various rare natural phenomena.

Originally posted by Giant_Squid
There are tape records and pictures of ghosts. I would call that evidence (but usually it's said that they are fakes). Certainly a lot of them probably are, although there are very few that we can prove to be faked, but that still leaves a whole lot of them unaccounted for. To say there's no evidence for ghosts is absurd - it's simply that we refuse to accept any evidence.

Lots and lots of people asserted that they have seen aliens and some even asserted abductions. Before this century, there were loads of people asserted they saw demons. Many people were very positive that they saw Nessie.

None of that could be substantiated.