I doubt the existence of ghosts/God/supernatural things will ever be factually proved

Great Debates
1

I almost started this in GD but then I figured I didn’t want a huge debate about it. After all, I’m not here to debate it.
But I was thinking about this off and on for the past five or six years.

I’m positive that there will probably never be scientific proof that any sort of mythical or supernatural things exist, including: ghosts, God, actual aliens that drive UFOs, etc, and I’m someone who believes in God, too.
But I see people debate it all the time. People say “Oh, sure, there’s a God” and then someone else (in so many words or more) says: “Prove it. Where’s the proof?”

But that’s just it. There isn’t any proof. There will never be any proof. And why?
Because NOBODY will ever agree on what proof works.

Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know…people always say: “Well, first you have to give a definition to the term ‘ghost’”, but putting aside that for now, if a lamp suddenly rose up into the air right beside me, flew around the room and then started jumping rope (with a jump rope that also suddenly started floating in mid-air and rotating around the lamp), just to finally settle down again where it used to be…how could I prove that to anyone else but myself? There would be no way.

Suppose I told you all that it happened. That I saw it with my OWN EYES and it wasn’t a dream or hallucination. Nobody would believe me.
Okay, suppose I took PHOTOS of it as it was happening. Caught the lamp as it was doing dutch jump rope with the other lamp in mid-air and got full color photographs and posted them. Then what? Would anyone believe me then?
I can tell you right now, I bet you people wouldn’t. They’d say “Well, the photo was doctored”.

Okay, well, suppose I captured it all on videocamera! Then what? I got it all on tape and uploaded it to youtube and posted it here. Would people believe me? Of course not! It’s far too easy to create special effects and illusions. What’s to say I didn’t put invisible wires on them myself and make it look like they were floating?

Okay, okay, I got it…
What if I invited you into my actual apartment and you witnessed it for yourself? Would THAT be considered proof?

Uh huh…sure…at least until you got outside and later, in your own home, started convincing yourself that your mind was playing tricks on you and surely you couldn’t have seen what you thought you saw. Until you convince yourself that it HAD to have been some sort of illusion or bit of bad beef ingested on your part because things like that just don’t happen or exist.
Nothing would ever constitute as proof. That’s my point. Nothing would ever be agreed on as proof. Even things like the JFK assassination and the moon landing and 9/11 that were WITNESSED BY MANY MANY people have naysayers and doubters as to what actually happened.
For my final question, and I’m serious here…what would happen if God came down and, with trumpets blaring and bright robes shining, appeared before 10,000 people and said, in a HUGE VOICE: “I DO EXIST” and you read about it later in the papers. You know what I bet people who don’t believe’s first thought would be?
Mass hysteria.

It is of my opinion that things like God and ghosts and aliens will never be proven to factually exist. There will always be a way to explain away things that you see, even if it REALLY WERE true and real.

I guess the point of this thread is: What are your thoughts on it? Do you agree? Or do you think that someday there actually may be actual scientific proof that these things exist?
And for those of you people who don’t believe in God/ghosts/etc…I want to know this specifically: What WOULD work as proof to you, personally, that these things existed? Would anything? Anything that you couldn’t just explain?

2

Science is the process of quantifying the correctness of a cause-effect prediction in the natural world.

It is by definition not applicable to the supernatural.

3

I don’t know if I agree, but I think you might be right.

I was thinking just now "What if Jesus re-appeared and submitted to all sorts of tests. He could make matter appear, levitate, etc etc, and everything was testable and reproduce-able. Wouldn’t people think it was some sort of super-advanced alien trying to pull a fast one on us?

4

God could make us all believe in him.

Of course, aliens could make everyone without a tinfoil hat believe they were God and that he was real.

Thus, the existence of people who aren’t wearing tinfoil hats and who don’t believe in God is proof that if there is a god, he is not an alien.

Yessiree.

5

But if ghosts were real they wouldn’t be supernatural anymore. They’d be natural, like black holes and the duck-billed platypus. I think if ghosts were real there would be enough evidence so that it would be people who denied the existence of ghosts who would look silly.

6

If you could come up with a scientific hypothesis that explained exactly what ghosts are and the mechanics behind their creation and behavior, then they would be accepted. The problem is that ghosts seem to be afraid of scientists; they’d never agree to a controlled experiment and only prefer to harass random people alone in the house on dark and stormy nights.

7

Yes. And it’s interesting, we’ve never been able to get a Higgs boson to agree to participate in a controlled experiment that could prove its existence, either, but it seems we’re expecting one to show up in Europe sometime soon. To a modern scientist, this comparison is of course apple vs. orange. But to a scientist from a hundred years ago, I bet most descriptions of particle physics would sound about as supernatural as most theories about the paranormal. Science makes it real.

A full-on testable ghost hypothesis that explained all would be lovely, but it would be a really good start if someone could just find a way to measure a ghost. Light, temperature, radiation, Higgs boson…there’s gotta be something there if it’s for real, and some way to measure it. Then if you could find a ghost that manifested with any regularity at all, such that you could reproduce said measurements, this would open the door for meaningful science to be done on the subject.

8

The OP is incorrect about what people will believe; almost half of Americans believe in ghosts. Americans in general are quite scientifically ignorant and gullible.

Not really. The Higgs boson has a theory behind it, mathematics describing it, and fits into known physical laws. Ghosts and psychics and God don’t. The Higgs may or may not be real, but it’s plausible; the others aren’t.

The reason such things won’t ever be proven is because they aren’t real, and there’s no evidence for them, AND no evidence for them even being possible. Science can’t prove that which isn’t real.

9

Well, while we’re all opining:

That’s because there is no supernatural. There is the natural, and the things that don’t happen but some people wish they could. The entire (non)debate is really quite silly.

10

  1. Gravity is ‘invisible’, yet everyone in the World accepts it as true without any argument.
    If a God existed, it would be trivial for Him to prove His existence.

  2. We know the Natural World exists because we observe it either directly or indirectly.

  3. The Supernatural World is by definition things that have never been observed. Yes, people make claims. But there’s never any evidence.
    And contradictions are ignored (after 2000 years, Judaism and Christianity have never even debated the Divinity of Jesus, let alone agreed on it.)

11

Hang on a minute. Considering the universality of the ghost phenomenon, wouldn’t it make sense to at least investigate into the cause of such irrational behaviour in otherwise normal individuals? Recently it was found that areas with exceptionally high electromagnetic field levels can produce a lot of weird effects on human perception. Even if ghosts are nothing more than a combination of electrical fields, credulity, and a vitamin deficiency it would be good to know.

UFO’s are another field that deserve proper attention as they are mathematically the most likely to have some truth in them.

As for gods, demons, fairies, invisible pink unicorns, and the like; I agree with you.

12

Sure; you investigate such things; but you do it scientifically. True believers will investigate, but all they care about is confirming what they want to believe. They probably won’t even notice any real discoveries.

13

There is no supernatural.
If the God from the Christian bible exists, he’s just an alien with very, very good engineering skills.
2000 years ago, some of us called him God.
Now, we’d be more inclined to observe him and decide he was something Larry Niven dreamed up.

14

Are we as a species, emotionally mature enough to deal with such a breakthrough in understanding yet? It’s been said we’d all go back to being savages again, within a month of all our power supplies disappearing.

15

Humanity has discarded and forgotten innumerable superstitions over the millennia; I doubt losing a few more would drive us collectively insane.

16

Maybe some atheists would get hysterical but I don’t think that I would. Unless god was tossing fire and brimstone around I would find it fascinating because all of a sudden my understanding of the world would be rocked off it’s foundation and I would have to (get to) revisit everything that I believe and don’t believe. I wouldn’t mind being wrong and having all of those new concepts to think about.

17

…right now. But a hundred years ago? We hadn’t done a lot of the math. And what we know about particle physics today would have flown directly in the face of known classical physical laws (in fact, it kinda did). Besides, ideas like quantum superposition or the uncertainty principle are just wild, wacky, crazy stuff. Makes the idea of “dead people you can see but not poke” sound positively mundane.

God…well, OK, God was never really plausible. But one could form a hypothesis about ghosts that one could actually test…if we had a way to measure a ghost. For example, one could hypothesize that where ever ghosts are found (assuming we could find them), one will also find unusually high levels of infrasound. We could test this, possibly disprove it quickly, or possibly gather evidence that leads us to a theory about a natural, physical explanation for the phenomenon.

18

But in time, all those scientific examples could be explained to them. And it wouldn’t be hard at all to convince them that it’s a scientific theory even before they understood it or agreed with it. Ghosts and God and such ? They aren’t like that at all. They aren’t scientific theories, not even incomprehensible ones, and they have no evidence at all.

19

I would suppose that the word “supernatural” requires something to be unproved.

20

Aliens would be very easy, they’d just have to land at Time Square in front of the TV cameras and do some Very Advanced™ measurable stuff.

Ghosts would be a little easier, if they were a little more reliable. Maybe like this: Have a person think of a number between 1 and a billion. Have him write it down, seal the envelope, so nobody but him knows it. Kill him. Let a medium communicate with his ghost, predict the number, check with the envelope. If it’s correct, you have a good chance that there really was information carried over from death. Do this a few time with different mediums (and different ghosts, obviously ;)) in a rigid scientific environment, and that should be it.

God is more complicated. By design, god is beside or over the rules - but he should be able to do impossible (very very unlikely) things - change the speed of light or the value of pi just in a single room, read minds, violate the laws of conservation of energy or thermodynamics. But you could never be sure it’s not just a very very very advanced alien playing a trick. I’d say god is unprovable by design.