Dear parapsychologists, I invite you to convince me that you are scientists.

[Blake]

@Testy

Well, I didn’t claim that “we know everything about consciousness,” just that it has some prerequisites. It requires a physical matrix to operate. We have experimental evidence of this going back as far as recorded history. Kill the brain and consciousness stops, every time. I await evidence to the contrary.

But this is still begging the question.

You say that every time we kill the brain the consciousness stops, but what about all those reported cases where the brain was destroyed and the ghost continued to walk the earth. You can only claim that every time the brain is destroyed consciousness stops if you already accept as an axiom that ghosts aren’t examples of people who remained conscious when their brain was destroyed. You cna;t then use the claim that caonsciousness requires a brain to prove that ghosts aren’t examples of people who remained conscious when their brain was destroyed. You can’t use your axiom to support your argument and vice versa.

On that last part of your post, it would seem to me that the other side of the debate is the one “begging the question.” If they believe ghosts exist then it is up to them to prove this, or at least show some real evidence.

Yes, quite. Like I said, both sides are begging the question. Once agian though the argument for disbelief is the lack of evidence, not a claim that we know exactly what is required for concsciousness.

I understand where you’re coming from but it is a lot more philosophical than I am usually comfortable with.

It’s not really philosophical, just logical (I hope).

My usual response to the woo-woo crowd is along the lines of;

“What a steaming pile of horse shit. Wishful thinking and the need for a psychic security blanket backed up by a pile of anecdotes from deluded dullards.”

And well put too.

All anyone can do is present the best arguments he has in the hope that someone that has not yet made up their mind will be swayed.

I agree, and that’s all the more reason that the arguments we present are logically and factually coherent.

[Testy]

@Blake

But this is still begging the question.

You say that every time we kill the brain the consciousness stops, but what about all those reported cases where the brain was destroyed and the ghost continued to walk the earth. You can only claim that every time the brain is destroyed consciousness stops if you already accept as an axiom that ghosts aren’t examples of people who remained conscious when their brain was destroyed. You cna;t then use the claim that caonsciousness requires a brain to prove that ghosts aren’t examples of people who remained conscious when their brain was destroyed. You can’t use your axiom to support your argument and vice versa.

Yes, quite. Like I said, both sides are begging the question. Once agian though the argument for disbelief is the lack of evidence, not a claim that we know exactly what is required for concsciousness.
<SNIP>

Blake
OK, I think I’m following you a bit better now. Both sides are begging the question using the argument that I did. OTOH, this only applies IF I accept the reports of disembodied consciousnesses walking the earth. So far, no one has supplied anything except tall tales. Am I getting closer to your point? And is this a valid objection to the issue of both sides begging the question?

In any event, I wholeheartedly agree that the best objection to the supernatural is the simplest, no evidence at all. My thanks for clarifying my own views and pointing out the flaws and holes.

Best Regards.

Testy

[Testy]

Alterego

Just wanted to say thanks for the reference to the Dawkins videos. Those were extremely enjoyable. The thought I kept having was the reaction of the health-scam purveyors that looked up and saw Richard Dawkins wandering into their shop followed by a camera crew. Would that be a bad day or what?

Regards

Testy

[lekatt]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Impossible explanations for any phenomenon may be dismissed out of hand with no investigation. It is not closed minded to assume that the impossible is impossible. It is patently unscientific and anti-intellectual to even posit impossible explanations for anything much less try to test for them. “Ghosts” cannot possibly exist in the physical universe, therefore they don’t exist, therefore any attempt to test for them as a hypothesis is a waste of time and shows the individuals engaging in such nonsense doesn’t have the faintest grasp of scientific method

I always wonder about this kind of post. Does this person really know all the things possible and impossible in the universe? What a huge amount of knowledge this person must have. Or is this person only repeating what he has been told by others. Einstein said you can look at the world as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle. Gee I wish I had that kind of knowledge. Maybe I wouldn’t see anymore ghosts.

[Acid_Lamp]

I’m trying to figure out what would constitute good proof for peer review. If I document by video or photo, the answer will be: " You faked it with camera tricks or computers. "

If I prove that my media is legitimate, the answer will be “You faked the scenario then.”

If I further prove that the scenario is legit (hard as hell to do adequately), The answer would be “It’s a fluke then, we don’t bother with things that can’t be reproduced.”
This would be the most difficult one to provide proof for I might add. A hard skeptic would take advantage of the smallest of cracks, (for instance a five minute period when we lost power, or the computers doing the digital recording had a fit) to throw out the whole case.

The issue I take with that answer is that if the mechanism of expression is unknown, it would be extremely difficult to reproduce the observed effect. It’s like asking a blind person to describe the color red. Particularly if the effect occurs sporadically.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@lekatt

I always wonder about this kind of post. Does this person really know all the things possible and impossible in the universe? What a huge amount of knowledge this person must have. Or is this person only repeating what he has been told by others. Einstein said you can look at the world as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle. Gee I wish I had that kind of knowledge. Maybe I wouldn’t see anymore ghosts.

I don’t have to know everything that’s possible to know that some things are impossible and ghosts are impossible. Not only because they lack any medium which could generate consciousness but because they lack any matrial substance at all. If they are not matter and they are not energy then they don’t exist, by definition.

It’s not just consciousness which is a problem, by the way, it’s also sensory perception, memory and locomotion. Can a ghost see and hear? If so, how can something with no material substance interact with light and soundwaves? Can a ghost remember things? If so, what does it remember with and how does it store those memories?

Consciousness pretty much IS sensory perception + memory and a ghost is physically incapable of either of those things.

Incidentally, if a ghost can see and hear and remember, then why do people need brains and eyes and ears. Why the physical redundancy for stuff we can do with our “spirits?” Why can’t blind people just see with their ghosts?

Also, how does a ghost move around? Locomotion requires both energy and some kind of physical interaction with the environment. What does a ghost use for energy and how does it interact with the pysical universe in order to move around? If it can’t touch anything it can’t move, pure and simple.

The standard answer to these questions is the fatuous claim that we don’t know absolutely everything, therefore we can’t say anything is impossible. I call BS on that. If we can’t make any a priori assumptions at all about what is possible and what is not, then we can’t do science at all. There are literally an infinite number of prima facie impossible hypotheses – all with exactly the same amount of evidence as what exists for ghosts – for virtually any observed phenomenon, even the most mundane. Who left the toilet seat up? Was it a male living in the house or was it telepathically raised by a superintelligent rock on Mars? Can we rule out the latter possibility as patently absurd and nonsensical and dismiss it out of hand or do we have to seriously consider it because we don’t know everything there is to know about consciousness or whether rocks can be intelligent or whether telepathy can exist? Ghosts are actually LESS possible than intelligent rocks. At least rocks have material substance.

Imposing an irrationally absolutist standard upon what may reasonably be called “impossible” is specious and counterproductive and childish and scientifically impractical. Some things are so wildly, astronomically unlikely that it is perfectly reasonable and fair and indeed necessary to rukle them out a priori and give them no thought, especially since there are an infinite number of such hypotheses for virtually all of our life experiences.

I sometimes use the analogy of crime investigators. Should detectives puruing a serial killer entertain the idea that they may be chasing a werewolf or a reanimated mummy or a ghost, or is it safe for them to completely ignore any and all (of the infinite number of) hypothetical supernatural explanations and just pursue the natural?

What is it about the ghost hypothesis for spooky sounds or whatever that makes it a preferable explanation to the influence of telepathic Martian rocks? There is the same amount of evidence for both.

[KGS]

@Testy

I understand where you’re coming from but it is a lot more philosophical than I am usually comfortable with.

If you’re uncomfortable with a topic, it shows that you are learning. That’s a good thing.

The only possible negative variable is whether you are willing to learn or not.

[Testy]

@Acid Lamp

I’m trying to figure out what would constitute good proof for peer review. If I document by video or photo, the answer will be: " You faked it with camera tricks or computers. "

If I prove that my media is legitimate, the answer will be “You faked the scenario then.”

If I further prove that the scenario is legit (hard as hell to do adequately), The answer would be “It’s a fluke then, we don’t bother with things that can’t be reproduced.”
This would be the most difficult one to provide proof for I might add. A hard skeptic would take advantage of the smallest of cracks, (for instance a five minute period when we lost power, or the computers doing the digital recording had a fit) to throw out the whole case.

The issue I take with that answer is that if the mechanism of expression is unknown, it would be extremely difficult to reproduce the observed effect. It’s like asking a blind person to describe the color red. Particularly if the effect occurs sporadically.

Acid Lamp

I agree with you but think about it a minute. You would be showing up with a video that, if true, would overturn a lot of physics and biology just for starters. Some of the laws you’d be overturning have stood for many years despite numerous tests. Given that this is the case, isn’t it right and proper that people view this with extreme skepticism? To overturn laws like thermodynamics or one of Newton’s laws requires overwhelming evidence to stack against the evidence in favor of the law.
Aside from that though, aren’t ghosts supposed to be more reliable than the rest of the paranormal? I thought they had regular beats where they walked or drifted or whatever the hell they do. Go video one and when people don’t believe you, invite them to come and make their own video.
Go talk to pbbth and view his laundry ghost or you could hang out with Lekatt for a while as he seems to see them on a regular basis.

As an aside, given the number of camera phones floating around I’m surprised that, if ghosts actually exist, we’re not knee-deep in videos of them.

Regards

Testy

[KGS]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I don’t have to know everything that’s possible to know that some things are impossible and ghosts are impossible.

That’s a bald assertion, Dio. You’re assuming certain things are impossible because our limited knowledge of Science hasn’t proven them yet. But that’s not how Science works. Many of our fundamental scientific beliefs are things that were believed to be impossible just a few centuries ago. For example, Neuroplasticity:

The concept of neuroplasticity pushes the boundaries of the brain areas that are still re-wiring in response to changes in environment. Several decades ago, the consensus was that lower brain and neocortical areas were immutable after development…

Decades of research have now shown that substantial changes occur in the lowest neocortical processing areas, and that these changes can profoundly alter the pattern of neuronal activation in response to experience. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change the brain’s functional anatomy from top to bottom, if not also its physical anatomy…

Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge has called neuroplasticity “one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.”

That’s just one example. And please don’t trot out that happy horseshit about how nothing can exist until scientific method proves it. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, for example, was accepted as scientific fact even though we could not prove how it works until DNA was discovered…decades after Darwin’s death.

If they are not matter and they are not energy then they don’t exist, by definition.

Oh, please. :rolleyes: We already know that energy can exist w/o matter. Photons, for example, have zero mass, and are therefore pure energy.

It’s not just consciousness which is a problem, by the way, it’s also sensory perception, memory and locomotion. Can a ghost see and hear? If so, how can something with no material substance interact with light and soundwaves? Can a ghost remember things? If so, what does it remember with and how does it store those memories?

Consciousness pretty much IS sensory perception + memory and a ghost is physically incapable of either of those things.

You seem to know a lot about how consciousness works, despite the fact that neuroscience currently has no idea how the human brain creates consciousness. We know that consciousness exists, because we are self-aware mammalian creatures. But to assume that consciousness exists entirely within the brain, without any concrete, peer-reviewed proof is nearly as ridiculous as believing that 100 tons of pigeon shit caused the I-35 bridge to collapse.

What is it about the ghost hypothesis for spooky sounds or whatever that makes it a preferable explanation to the influence of telepathic Martian rocks? There is the same amount of evidence for both.

Rocks have consciousness. They just think verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwly. (Ok, that’s philosophy, not science.)

[Testy]

@KGS

If you’re uncomfortable with a topic, it shows that you are learning. That’s a good thing.

The only possible negative variable is whether you are willing to learn or not.

KGS

Well, that’s not exactly what I meant. These debates between the True Believers and the Skeptics are frequent in GD. The Skeptics ask for evidence and the believers don’t have any. They NEVER have anything except anecdotes about their great aunt Mabel who could tell fortunes or whatever. Their only recourse is dragging in some sort of philosophical BS to try and make a case that whatever they believe in could exist because no one can prove it doesn’t exist, as if that had any bearing on their case.
The next attempt to wiggle out of the requirement for evidence is to make the claim that people’s faith in science is the same as their own faith in whatever woo woo they happen to be touting. Therefore, a belief in science is effectively a religion. They conveniently disregard the fact that that science delivers and woo only makes promises. Besides, science doesn’t require faith. If something seemed unbelievable to me I could go back to the original experiments and re-do them myself. The man who first discovered something is required to tell you how he did it and generally more than happy to do so.
Another one I’ve seen is semantics where people continually define and redefine words until all meaning is finally lost.

Watching these antics over the last few years I’ve noticed that these debates are relatively pointless except to point out that the believers have nothing going for them except belief. Skeptics are on a much firmer foundation for their opinions.

Regards

Testy

[lekatt]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I don’t have to know everything that’s possible to know that some things are impossible and ghosts are impossible. Not only because they lack any medium which could generate consciousness but because they lack any matrial substance at all. If they are not matter and they are not energy then they don’t exist, by definition.

It’s not just consciousness which is a problem, by the way, it’s also sensory perception, memory and locomotion. Can a ghost see and hear? If so, how can something with no material substance interact with light and soundwaves? Can a ghost remember things? If so, what does it remember with and how does it store those memories?

Consciousness pretty much IS sensory perception + memory and a ghost is physically incapable of either of those things.

Incidentally, if a ghost can see and hear and remember, then why do people need brains and eyes and ears. Why the physical redundancy for stuff we can do with our “spirits?” Why can’t blind people just see with their ghosts?

Also, how does a ghost move around? Locomotion requires both energy and some kind of physical interaction with the environment. What does a ghost use for energy and how does it interact with the pysical universe in order to move around? If it can’t touch anything it can’t move, pure and simple.

The standard answer to these questions is the fatuous claim that we don’t know absolutely everything, therefore we can’t say anything is impossible. I call BS on that. If we can’t make any a priori assumptions at all about what is possible and what is not, then we can’t do science at all. There are literally an infinite number of prima facie impossible hypotheses – all with exactly the same amount of evidence as what exists for ghosts – for virtually any observed phenomenon, even the most mundane. Who left the toilet seat up? Was it a male living in the house or was it telepathically raised by a superintelligent rock on Mars? Can we rule out the latter possibility as patently absurd and nonsensical and dismiss it out of hand or do we have to seriously consider it because we don’t know everything there is to know about consciousness or whether rocks can be intelligent or whether telepathy can exist? Ghosts are actually LESS possible than intelligent rocks. At least rocks have material substance.

Imposing an irrationally absolutist standard upon what may reasonably be called “impossible” is specious and counterproductive and childish and scientifically impractical. Some things are so wildly, astronomically unlikely that it is perfectly reasonable and fair and indeed necessary to rukle them out a priori and give them no thought, especially since there are an infinite number of such hypotheses for virtually all of our life experiences.

I sometimes use the analogy of crime investigators. Should detectives puruing a serial killer entertain the idea that they may be chasing a werewolf or a reanimated mummy or a ghost, or is it safe for them to completely ignore any and all (of the infinite number of) hypothetical supernatural explanations and just pursue the natural?

What is it about the ghost hypothesis for spooky sounds or whatever that makes it a preferable explanation to the influence of telepathic Martian rocks? There is the same amount of evidence for both.

OK, Consciousness is energy, has to be, no scientist has ever found any material evidence of consciousness anywhere. We know that consciousness lives beyond the death of the brain and body through near death studies and research. We know that consciousness can think, remember, see, hear, and all the other things a consciousness does while it is outside the body through research on out of body experiences. So why would ghosts not be possible? They meet the conditions you have set. Not withstanding the millions of people who have seen them. Scientists are the blind ones, not the general public.

http://aleroy.com/albums/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=0

Now you have seen one looking over his car that he just died in.

[Contrapuntal]

@KGS

Oh, please. :rolleyes: We already know that energy can exist w/o matter. Photons, for example, have zero mass, and are therefore pure energy.

Did he claim that it couldn’t?

[Testy]

@lekatt

OK, Consciousness is energy, has to be, no scientist has ever found any material evidence of consciousness anywhere. We know that consciousness lives beyond the death of the brain and body through near death studies and research.

We know that consciousness can think, remember, see, hear, and all the other things a consciousness does while it is outside the body through research on out of body experiences. So why would ghosts not be possible? They meet the conditions you have set. Not withstanding the millions of people who have seen them. Scientists are the blind ones, not the general public.

http://aleroy.com/albums/displayimage.php?album=8&pos=0

Now you have seen one looking over his car that he just died in.

*Bolding mine.

Lekatt
You seem to use the term know pretty frequently but I disagree. We don’t know these things at all. All we actually know is that Lekatt asserts this. Sorry, but that’s not even close to being good enough.

Regards

Testy

[BlinkingDuck]

@KGS

Lemme guess…your numbers are 2.71828182845904523536…
and 5?

You are very close on the first one.

Way off on the second.

I actually use e (the first several digits anyway) on non-important passwords.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@KGS

That’s a bald assertion, Dio. You’re assuming certain things are impossible because our limited knowledge of Science hasn’t proven them yet.

No, I’m asserting that some things are impossible because science has already proven that the physical universe will not permit them.

But that’s not how Science works.

That’s exactly how science works. It works by eliminating hypotheses and ghosts can be eliminated a priori simply by the known laws of physics.

Many of our fundamental scientific beliefs are things that were believed to be impossible just a few centuries ago. For example, Neuroplasticity:

Who ever said this was physically impossible? Woo woos love to do this. They trot out discoveries or technological advances which overturn previous consensus or expectations about what was likely, but none of it ever amounts to a complete overturn of physical laws and none of it was ever thought to be physically impossible.

That’s just one example. And please don’t trot out that happy horseshit about how nothing can exist until scientific method proves it.

Who says that? Nothing can be KNOWN to exist until it is empirically demonstarted to a reasonable degree of certainty, but obviously things can exist – and have existed – before they came into the human field of vision. They all have one thing n common, though, they obey physical laws.

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, for example, was accepted as scientific fact even though we could not prove how it works until DNA was discovered…decades after Darwin’s death.

Evolution was provable without DNA. It’s an observed phenomenon. DNA just showed us the particulars of a mechanism which we already knew had to exist.

Oh, please. :rolleyes: We already know that energy can exist w/o matter. Photons, for example, have zero mass, and are therefore pure energy.

I never said energy can’t exist without matter. I was saying that ghosts don’t exist as either energy OR matter, therefore they can’t exist as phyical entities, period.

You seem to know a lot about how consciousness works, despite the fact that neuroscience currently has no idea how the human brain creates consciousness. We know that consciousness exists, because we are self-aware mammalian creatures. But to assume that consciousness exists entirely within the brain, without any concrete, peer-reviewed proof is nearly as ridiculous as believing that 100 tons of pigeon shit caused the I-35 bridge to collapse.

Actually, we DO know that consciousness is entirely caused by the brain. Sorry to disappoint you but that actually is a known fact. It’s also a known fact that light and sound cannot be apprehended without some kind of material interaction with photons and soundwaves (it wouldn’t even be possible to SEE something that light could not hit) and that nothing can move without touching something in the physical universe, even if it’s only the air.

Rocks have consciousness. They just think verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwly. (Ok, that’s philosophy, not science.)

That’s neither philosophy nor science. Both of those disciplines are supposed to have some kind of explanatory value.

[pbbth]

Originally Posted by Vinyl Turnip

*Likely reasons (without knowing the exact content of the dream):

1. Coincidence. People dream about friends and family members all the time whether things happen to them or not. Sometimes things happen to people after we dream about them.

2. The dream seems more specific in retrospect than at the time she actually dreamed it. Perhaps she dreamed of him, then he died, and she remembered dreaming about him, and her mind filled in some of the details (including the warning he would die and the date and time) afterward, all exacerbated by the trauma of his death. Memories of dreams (like memories in general) are very tenuous, fluid things subject to all kinds of alteration over time, and not static snapshots.

3. Some entity from the “spirit world” attempted to warn your mother by revealing to her the precise date and time her son would die a few short days later (a concept which, coincidentally, has been employed as a plot device in several major motion pictures over the past several years). To what purpose is uncertain, since she was sadly unable to use her foreknowledge to save him.

4. Your friends are fucking with you (maybe realizing that you’re prone to belief in the supernatural).

5. You’re hallucinating due to current or past drug use, brain injury, or other mental illness.

6. You are exaggerating or misrepresenting the event(s) somehow, whether intentionally or not.

7. There really is a mysterious nonhuman entity who hangs around outside the laundry room smoking cigarettes, and you’re the only one able to see him. He doesn’t know he’s dead and is waiting for you to come say hello. Oh, and the dark hair is a rug, and he’s a dead ringer for Bruce Willis.*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In regards to the dream my mother had,

2. It wasn’t a “retrospect” kind of thing. She had the dream, panicked, woke up my father, described it in detail and he convinced her it was just a dream and to try and go back to sleep. If she had kept it to herself I would say this was possible, but because she didn’t it can’t be a retrospective issue.

3. I don’t know that I would say anything about an entity from the spirit world, and I don’t want to get into the specifics of his death, but unfortunately all the forwarning in the world wouldn’t have saved him. It wasn’t possible. He was in the hospital at the time and she did speak with his doctors about her concern but they weren’t able to prevent his death.

4. This is the most likely scenario, and I would totally go for coincidence except this isn’t the only time she has had a dream like this. More than that, my grandmother has had clarivoyant dreams, my mother has them, and I have had more than a few myself. I don’t know how one would go about inheriting a coincidental thing.

As for the “ghost” I have seen, I am not saying he is without a doubt a ghost, I am just saying it is odd and I wouldn’t rule out the POSSIBILITY of ghostliness. I know my friends were not fucking with me about the situation, I have never used any kinds of drugs (hallucinogenic or otherwise) and I am of sound mind. I guess I could be unintentionally overexaggerating, but then that doesn’t explain the blonde woman no one else ever saw in the corridors of the Frito-Lay headquarters when I worked there. I only ever saw her reflection in glass and mirrors, so it wasn’t as if she were physically there. There are other situations where this kind of thing has happened too, far too numerous to post here. And if that smoking man is waiting for me to come talk to him he will have a hell of a wait since I moved across the country not long ago.

I am not going to say that these kinds of things exist without a doubt. There may be other explanations that I haven’t found or heck, maybe my family just happens to have a lot of coincidences in relation to dreams and I have an overactive imagination. That could be exactly what is happening, but I just won’t rule out the possibility that paranormal activity might exist based on my personal experiences. I love science and have nothing but the utmost respect for people who dedicate their lives to it. I just know that I can’t ignore the possibility even if it is very unlikely because of the things in my life that have led me to believe things like this could be real.

I know you will never be convinced to consider the possibility of the paranormal, and I am waiting to be presented with some evidence to bring my experiences into the realm of science. When that I happens I will let you know, but until then I am fine with the thought that there might be more to the universe than we have accepted or discovered.

[Contrapuntal]

@pbbth

This is the most likely scenario, and I would totally go for coincidence except this isn’t the only time she has had a dream like this. More than that, my grandmother has had clarivoyant dreams, my mother has them, and I have had more than a few myself. I don’t know how one would go about inheriting a coincidental thing.

Here’s a quick and easy way to investigate this further. The next time you have a clairvoyant dream, post the salient details here. This will put time stamp on it, so determining whether it is truly clairvoyant will be simple.

Proving that it is inherited will be a bit more difficult, but first things first.

[KGS]

@Testy

They NEVER have anything except anecdotes about their great aunt Mabel who could tell fortunes or whatever.

I’ll agree that anecdotal evidence is a poor way to prove anything. Especially on the Internet, because 90% of people on the Internet are totally full of shit. (Nobody knows you’re really a cat, etc.)

However, sometimes anecdotal evidence is all we have to go on. The Theory of Evolution, for example. While certain small parts of Evolution have indeed been proven by Scientific Method, the grand scheme of Evolution has not. That’s why Evolution is still a “Theory” and not a “Law”. (Yes, I know what the word Theory means in this context.) We still don’t know the mechanism that allowed Life to spontaneously appear on this planet. But we know it happened. We have overwhelming evidence that Evolution is a fact, not a belief. But nearly all of it is based on mere observation, NOT repeatable experiments in the lab. We simply don’t have the technology to create another planet with identical conditions to what Earth was like 4,500,000,000 years ago.

But that doesn’t mean Evolution isn’t fact. Because Science doesn’t always require repeatable experiments to be factual.

Besides, science doesn’t require faith.

Oh, yes it does! You probably don’t realize this because your childhood upbringing & educational background are so deeply rooted in scientific faith, you’ve come to accept it as reality. You’re lucky, in that regard.

But if you were told from childhood onward that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and dinosaur bones only exist because God is testing our faith, and if you believe in dinosaur bones more than you believe in the Bible THEN YOU WILL GO TO HELL AND BURN FOREVER…well, let’s just say that such ridiculous beliefs become your subjective reality. And like it or not, subjective reality has a massive impact on how every individual perceives the objective world.

That’s why most fundamentalist Christians never walk away from Christ. Putting your eternal soul at risk is the scariest thing you can ever do.

But I think I made the right choice.

[KGS]

@Contrapuntal

Here’s a quick and easy way to investigate this further. The next time you have a clairvoyant dream, post the salient details here.

Two problems:
(1) The mere act of observation can directly affect the results of the experiment. Heisenberg’s Principle, Chaos Theory and all that.
(2) If my clairvoyant dream comes true…what’s to stop you from saying it’s just a coincidence?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@KGS

I’ll agree that anecdotal evidence is a poor way to prove anything. Especially on the Internet, because 90% of people on the Internet are totally full of shit. (Nobody knows you’re really a cat, etc.)

However, sometimes anecdotal evidence is all we have to go on. The Theory of Evolution, for example. While certain small parts of Evolution have indeed been proven by Scientific Method, the grand scheme of Evolution has not. That’s why Evolution is still a “Theory” and not a “Law”.

No amount of proof can turn a theory into law. A theory is not a step on a ladder towards becoming law. They both describe certainties. A law is an observed, consistent property of the universe, a “what.” A theory is an explanation, “why.” The atom is a theory. There is no question that atoms exist. It’s still a theory and can never become a law. The Theory of Evolution is indeed a proven fact in its entirety, just like the atom is a proven fact. The word “theory” does not imply that there is anything unproven or uncertain about it .

(Yes, I know what the word Theory means in this context.)

Then why are you misusing it?

We still don’t know the mechanism that allowed Life to spontaneously appear on this planet. But we know it happened.

That has nothing to do with evolution. The ToE does not explain – or attempt to explain – how life got started. It only explains whta happened AFTER life got started. The origin of life is not part of the theory.

We have overwhelming evidence that Evolution is a fact, not a belief. But nearly all of it is based on mere observation, NOT repeatable experiments in the lab. We simply don’t have the technology to create another planet with identical conditions to what Earth was like 4,500,000,000 years ago.

Your statement that evolution is based only on observation is very odd, since all scientific method is based on observation, but your statement that we don’t have falsifiabl tests is erroneous. Evolution has passed millions of tests for more than a century. Every position of every fossil in the geologic layer is a falsifiable test of evolution. It’s also provable by genetics, by direct observation of speciation, by necessary inference from the existence of hereditary, beneficial mutation in conjunction with natural selection and by other things.

But that doesn’t mean Evolution isn’t fact. Because Science doesn’t always require repeatable experiments to be factual.

This sentence doesn’t parse very well, but if you’re trying to say that science doesn’t need repeatable experiments to confirm or falsify a hypothesis, you’re wrong.

Oh, yes it does! You probably don’t realize this because your childhood upbringing & educational background are so deeply rooted in scientific faith, you’ve come to accept it as reality. You’re lucky, in that regard.

There is no such thing as “scientific faith.” Those two words are mutually contradictory. Scientific methodology is all about trying to falsify hypotheses.