It’s just not every day you run into someone so fervent that they are in contact and communion with a dead person. On a strictly psychological level, it’s interesting as hell as to what’s going on in her mind. It’s one thing to believe in life-after-death because you saw bright lights when you were half-dead, it’s another thing entirely to have an ongoing hallucination for over 8 years where you’re having conversations and intimate contact with something that isn’t even there.
It’s an opinion that happens to be backed up by everything we know of the laws of physics. If I claimed that I could summon Nyarlathotep by drawing the right symbols and muttering the right words, and Diogenes the Cynic said I was either lying or deluded, would you say that he was “being a dick” and that his attitude was only his opinion ?
Hallucinations, misinterpretations and false memories come to mind. None of those are all that rare. And all are more likely than something violating so many laws of physics, and that makes so little sense in other ways; such as, why do they never appear in front of skeptics ?
Is someone a bigot for insisting on the validity of gravity ?
I know you think you’re kidding around, but Der Trihs could probably start a thread about helping old ladies across the street and be called a dick. The hive mind around here really makes this place a joke sometimes.
Myself I’d say I think he doesn’t have the ability to back up such an accusation, and that in making it he’s spitting in the eye of rational thought. Your claim that you can summon Nyarlathotep is a positive claim and thus requires proof before we accept it, but his (in-scenario) claim of your being lying or deluded is also a positive claim and thus also requires proof before we accept it. He doesn’t get a Get Out Of False Dichotomy card just because the third option that he’s trying to dismiss is exceedingly unlikely. He’d have to prove it’s not the case.
Do I believe in Marcus? No. I’ve seen no proof; at this point he’s at the level of “harmless, entertaining anecdote.” But I can’t prove he’s not real any more than you can. Actually proving things is harder than repeating assertions about them over and over and over, you see.
But then I don’t verbally assault people for telling their kids fairy tails without prefacing them with explicit disclaimers either, so maybe I’m just horribly tolerant and permissive of lies and delusion. :rolleyes:
How lucky it is for me and Diogenes the Cynic then that generations of scientists have already done the work of disproof for us. The known laws of physics say it can’t happen, therefore the rational assumption is that it can’t happen. Unless the person saying otherwise comes up with some evidence - not even proof, but at least SOME evidence that can call the validity of those laws into question.
The generations of scientists would disagree with you, as would you if you were being intellectually honest about this.
This isn’t the same deal as with the Christian God thingy, which is associated with myriad verifiable claims that have been shown to be false in every provable case. This is a single particular claimed ghost that has not been tested. The known laws of physics are silent on the subject of ghosts - they’ve never seen one, they don’t beleive in one, but if they came across one by god they’d study it, not claim it doesn’t exist because they’d never seen it before. Your approach would have rejected everything from einsteinein physics on forward, because that’s what you get if you categorically reject without testing.
I’m not telling you to believe in the damned thing. I’m telling you that in hooting and shouting that it can’t possibly exist and no we don’t care to wait for the facts to come in, you have become the looney fanatic group in this matter. The generations of scientists don’t want anything to do with that kind of hooey.
So are there NO claims that are so absurd that, to scientists, they don’t need to be tested? Or that even if a claim violates every known law of physics and thousands of years of tested, firmly established experimentation, they still have to try it out? I mildly disagree with Dio’s and Der Trihs’ approaches to this issue, but that doesn’t seem right to me somehow. I can see where it’s coming from, but it still doesn’t seem right.
PS: It’s somewhat amusing that it’s the atheists who’re now claiming oppression by “SDMB groupthink”; I thought it was the Christians who were being shouted down by it.
Wrong, in multiple ways. The laws of physics DO speak on the subject of ghosts; there’s no room for them. There’s no way within the known laws of physics they could exist. And yes, they would study one if one came along; but none ever has, so your point is moot.
And, my approach wouldn’t have me reject “everything from einsteinian physics on forward”. Einstein’s theories explained observed phenomenon that didn’t have conventional explanations, and made predictions that could and were tested. And, neither his theories nor his predictions cared if you were sceptical or not. As he pointed out when some physicists who didn’t like his theories published a pamphlet called “100 Physicists Against Einstein”, “If I was wrong it would take only one.” Rather the opposite of the claims in favor of things like ghosts and gods, where the first defense of the claim is not to provide evidence, but to forbid criticism or skepticism.
Hey, I’m an atheist too. I’m just not a raging atheist - or rather I discriminate in where I spread my froth.
There are NO claims that are so absurd that science can just assert that it knows they’re false without testing them. There are claims that are absurd enough that we don’t bother with them, though - we sometimes leave it to the claimant to get up the energy to bring themselves and their test to the table. Until they do, we can believe that it’s false, but to claim that you know it is false is unscientific at its core. You don’t know it is false until you falsify it via testing.
If the attitude of Der Trihs and Dio was decent science, the Randi challenge would consist of the Randi people running up to the claimants, yelling “Nya nyah!” in their faces, mooning them, and then running off screaming into the sunset. That’s not the scientific approach to outragous silly claims, though, so instead, they test. Every damn claimant who can convince them they’re serious enough in their claim.
As I’ve said, I don’t believe in Marcus. And I don’t care enough about the issue to hunt down meenie7 and try to badger or bribe her into subjecting herself to testing. But nonetheless I don’t know she’s lying or delusional - and neither does anybody else here. Regardless of whatever ad hominem and false dichotomy fallacies they passionately proclaim.
