Ghosts and Logic (story too)

Alright, I’ve been wondering about this from some time, and although I cannot ever expect to get an answer while alive, I am curious about a course of logic here.

(this is a serious post)

Now first, I am agnostic/atheist and a firm believer in science (although I despise some forms of math) and have been since I made communion in the second grade (irony). When I was young though, and once in my adulthood, I have experienced strange phenomena. First time I was in a shared bedroom with my sister and I had seen an apparition. I had woke my sister up and pointed, and she saw the same thing, an approximately 40’s (of age) woman with short hair, and some blurry blouse. She thought it would be a good idea to throw pillows at it, I guess it was because it vanished. Now I was 7 and she was 16. Sure age could make sense, imagination and all, but we didn’t talk about what this thing looked like until much later, and basically completed each other’s description (said at same time). We mentioned it years later to our parents, we kind of brushed it off and while my parents were in a car with us, before we got to description, they told us what they had seen, and it was the exact same description! Still figuring there is an explanation, brushed it off. Older, in a different home when I was about 19-20 I then had objects fly off of counters, etc… No slopes, no fans, the objects had no way to move unless touched, I checked. My sister’s husband also had experienced similar situations, and he is a (devout :cool:) atheist, and very intelligent with no other explanation, although he states there has to be one, he just can’t think of it, but it’s not ghosts).

This happened on numerous occasions, but when I investigated it, there seemed to be no way it could happen, no wind, no vibration, no fans, no air pressure differential from opening doors (opening one causes another to slam, or to move something) NOTHING! I have in essence brushed it off, knowing there has to be some explanation (scientifically or otherwise) and it is not ghosts, but I still wonder.
On to the point. Would it be a logical theory to surmise that if there is a such thing as ghosts/supernatural, then it thus proves religion to be true, hence heaven/hell/afterlife? I know to some this question is a yes, but I mean when applying logic. Is it just a weak inductive argument or reasoning?

Sorry about the ghost story, just needed to elaborate on my confusion. It makes sense, but doesn’t. and any other theories would be welcome. Its just been bothering me for the better part of a decade trying to figure it out, I have no explanation. Any and all theories are welcome! Thanks!

No, it wouldn’t.

When something appears to us to be supernatural, it may well be that it is entirely natural, but our understanding of nature is not sufficient to discern this. Lightning, for example, was at one time regarded as a supernatural phenomenon, but we now know it to be entirely natural. No doubt other examples will spring to mind.

Right. On our current understanding of nature, the past presence of a person in a particular place can have enduring physical consequences. For example, your fingerprints on surfaces in the room show that you were there in the past, even if you’re not there now. But our current understanding of nature doesn’t explain how your past presence in the room could cause, e.g., objects previously handled by you, or associated with you, to fly off shelves now.

Suppose we observe that these objects are flying off the shelves. And suppose also that this is attributable to their association with you. (How can we know this? Never mind how. Assume for the purposes of this discussion that we do know this, and we are right.) One possible conclusion is that our current understanding of nature is wrong; our belief that your historic association with these objects cannot be causally connected to their behaviour now must give way to the observed evidence that it is so connected, and we must modify our understanding of nature to accommodate this just as, in the past, we had to look for a naturalistic explanation of lightning.

Of course, another possible explanation is that this is in fact a supernatural phenomenon. But there is no way of proving that this is so. If you are, by faith, an atheist materialist you will discount supernatural explanations as impossible, and you will be convinced (as your sister’s husband is) that there is a naturalistic explanation out there, waiting to be found. But even if you don’t adopt that position as a matter of faith, I don’t see how you can exclude the possibility that there is a naturalistic explanation out there, and that all that stops us perceiving it is our limited understanding of nature.

There’s a lot of different religions, and they say a lot of mutually incompatible stuff. Does your vanishing old lady demonstrate that there is only one God, and Jesus was his son? Does it prove that there’s only one God, and Mohammad was his prophet? Does it teach us that we’re all of us, mortal and gods alike, trapped on the wheel of Dharma until we can escape by accepting the teachings of the Buddha? Or is all of that a load of bullshit, and the lady you saw represents a spiritual truth entirely unguessed at by the great religious philosophers?

Put another way: the Bible teaches us that the rainbow was a sign of God’s promise not to drown the world in another flood. I saw a rainbow on the way to work yesterday. Does that prove that the flood really happened? No. The rainbow is a genuine phenomenon that exists outside human religious frameworks, and was incorporated into them because they didn’t have a better explanation for what they saw. If you genuinely encountered a spirit, that doesn’t justify any particular religious dogma - it just demonstrates yet another phenomenon (natural or otherwise) that was inexplicable to earlier humans, and who therefore incorporated it into their belief systems in an attempt to make sense of it.

You need to take a course in logic. Seriously.

Thanks for sharing your fascinating story. I have always been interested in paranormal events. I do realize that sane, sober people often report seeing things currently unexplainable by science. But no, I don’t think that any of these sightings would prove that any particular religion is true. Way too many contradictory beliefs flyin’ around out there!

If I tell you that ghosts are actually manifestations of the multiverse, and that each time you see a ghost it is actually a weak interaction of another timeline into your current universe, does that prove the multiverse theory?

This is exactly why its great to get different perspectives and explanations. Thanks everyone.
As far as religion in relation to it, what you’ve all explained makes perfect sense.

August West That’s a perfect way to put it!!!

I don’t always agree with what is taught in school, I do have an open mind and logic tends to follow that things are either one way or another, no gray area or albeit if there is, very finite, which cannot be reasonably applied in life. I like to understand it from a logical perspective just to cover all bases, thank you!

I suppose it’s one of those issues that will not have an answer until i’m dead, even then it’s a maybe.

One really good explanation for a lot of “supernatural” events is the hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucination. This is essentially a dream, but which is so incredibly vivid, it is easily mistaken for reality.

In that case I want one of those hypnopompic hallucinations with Keira Knightley in my bedroom. Why can’t that happen instead… life is unfair.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you’re met with what you can’t explain, what that proves is exactly this—you can’t explain it. Any other inference is, strictly speaking, unwarranted.

To take an example, think about a stage magician’s act. A good one can leave you absolutely flabbergasted, completely unable to come up with an explanation for the seemingly impossible feats performed (at least, that’s my experience). But, thanks to context, you know not to trust this intuition: all of it is just a cleverly concocted illusion to make you believe you experienced something impossible, but which has a perfectly natural explanation rooted in the skill of the performer.

What this demonstrates is that there are phenomena, occurrences, events, what have you, for which you can’t find any explanation at all, but which nevertheless don’t entail anything supernatural. Now, there’s no reason to believe such events only occur within the confines of a magic act. Nature is crafty, and chance may lead to the improbable conspiring to create the seemingly impossible. But if that occurs, you don’t have the comforting context of a stage act; rather, you tend to take your experience as basically veridical (as we always do, absent indications to the contrary), and from there, it’s only a small leap from ‘I can’t explain it’ to ‘it’s inexplicable’, and we’re knee deep in the apparently supernatural.

And there’s a huge difference between things that are currently unexplained by science, and things that may be ultimately unexplainable. I don’t believe that, in the long run, there’s anything that science cannot explain, but there certain are limits to our current understanding. That doesn’t logically warrant conclusions involving the paranormal.

The only weird inexplicable thing I’ve experienced in my life is what appeared to me to be a shared dream with a friend. He described his dream and it matched what I was just about to describe to him. This wasn’t a deja vu feeling, I had been planning to tell him from many hours beforehand.

Nowadays my memory of the incident is clouded by time passing and confirmation bias, but at the time I was convinced that something spooky had happened. And even then, as now, I chose to believe it has a natural explanation, one that hasn’t yet been determined, and that it wasn’t also proof of aliens, Gods, an afterlife, or the Loch Ness Monster.

Right! That’s why I really never liked the term “supernatural” – calling something that is like giving up.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m genuinely curious. What do you mean by “objects fly off of counters?”

What kind of objects? How many" How often? Did they really “fly,” or did you turn back to find them rolling off the counter? Was it like the film Poltergeist, where objects just jumped up and across the room?

I’ve had acquaintances tell me about (possibly) supernatural events they’ve witnessed, but they are always vague about details.

Yes, and just because you can’t explain it, doesn’t mean that someone else can’t. As an example, an anecdote from my own life. After my grandfather died, my grandmother hung a photo of him on the wall beside her bed and left it there for years. But one day she wakes up to see a bright light shining from the image. She took that as a sign that she needed to let him go, and took the photo down.

Years later, I thought about this event. Not long before my grandmother saw the light, there was a fire in the kitchen on the opposite side of the wall with the photo (grandmother came home from the grocery store to see smoke pouring from the house, it was really surprising that the fire department managed to save the house.) The photo on the wall wasn’t in a frame but in a semi-rigid plastic sleeve, much like is sometimes used to hold essays and reports. The heat from the fire on the other side of the wall caused the plastic sleeve to curl slightly (this isn’t speculation, I saw the curvature.) There is a window on the wall of the room at the head of the bed, and outside that window is a (small, rural, but not trafficked) road. The curved plastic sleeve became a lens to reflect headlights from passing cars back towards my grandmother in her bed. She didn’t see reflections before because the sleeve had been flat. She didn’t see reflections after that because she took the photo down. An unexplained “supernatural” event was perfectly explicable.

The supernatural is by nature illogical. That said, there’s nothing about the existence of ghosts that compels one to believe in God, or vice versa.

ZonexandScout

Not taking it the wrong way at all, I appreciate the skepticism to be honest.

Examples are as such:
Bathroom and kitchen articles, place on a leveled spot, not toward an edge, an angle or possible to tip on their own, even with fans, wind, vibration etc… (some in wire mesh holders), inexplicably jump and hit the walls opposite of where they were. (multiple times)

A fedora placed over the long strobe on top of a slot machine in the basement. Would wind up on the floor or in another room, when it is not possible (no vents, nobody else has ever gone down there. (multiple times)

a spot on the counter where a phone would light up and screen flashing. tested it with a different model phone, did the same thing (i assume some type of interference, but there was no wiring too close or anything else that could do this) (this happened any time a phone was placed there, in the exact spot only)

microwave that would randomly enter numbers on its own, usually 9’s. (many, many times) but probably a malfunctioning microwave, wasn’t damaged or old though.

strange distinctly heavy breathing sounds, no one else in the house, no animals etc. (2 times)
A few other incidences but those can be rationally explained, though maybe I’m just giving excuses for them, no idea. These were all in a single house. Well past the age of reason when these occurred, imagination is not a factor.

I know there is a plausible explanation, as others replies have said, just something I cannot understand at this time.

If it was something like the movie poltergeist, I would have lived in a refrigerator box in an alley instead.

Wow! Fascinating.

Thank you! That’s pretty weird. I wasn’t sure if it was a case of things just rolling off the counter or exhibiting some extreme behavior. I’m always skeptical, but remain very interested in hearing about these types of events. (For example, there’s a lot of difference between somebody “seeing a UFO” that is a moving light and somebody reporting a saucer-shaped vehicle with LGM piloting it.)

anomalous1– the concept of an immortal soul does not necessarily require a Divine Being.
It could just…be.