Originally Posted by LindaLou
What about natural phenomena which are currently unexplained?

You seem to be suggesting that you will not accept the existence of something unless you experience it yourself.


Hi, LindaLou. Simply for the sake of argument, and with no disrespect to you in the asking, how can one accept the existence of something if they haven't experienced it? If someone has a near death experience and claims they've seen God how can I fully accept this? It isn't an outright denial of what the person has experienced (or says they have experienced, or think they have), it's simply that I'm not in their shoes, I wasn't witness to these things. So I cannot, logically, say I believe in God because of what someone else experiences.

From where I stand -- and this is a slight branching off of the subject here, I realize -- I cannot fully accept that (a) God exists until (S)He proves it to me. And the key word here is me. If someone else has experienced a revelation I do envy them for their enlightenment but it hasn't happened to me, so how can I? To anyone who may say otherwise, yes I have tried looking and not with the expectation to fail while trying. At my age, if it were going to happen (that is, 'finding God') I think I would have by now (though I wouldn't oppose it if it did). The world needs it's skeptics and non-believers as much as it needs its believers and devotees.

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Yet we both have said here that while some things cannot be directly experienced, we can study the clues that point to their existence. There is an enormous anecdotal body of evidence, stretching back thousands of years, that ghosts exist. What they actually are, we don't really know, but how can you be so sure that all of these people are simply mistaken or deluded?


I obviously can't answer on Russell's behalf and though this question isn't directed at me I'd still like to throw out my own two cent's worth. Arguably, no, I can't be sure that all of these people are simply mistaken or deluded. But having never experienced anything supernatural myself, how can I (or anyone in my shoes) fully embrace the concept of ghosts? I don't consider myself a skeptic in the classical sense, whereby I deny the existence of all things mysterious and mystical. But I do consider myself a skeptic. I am a skeptic even of skepticism (if that makes sense) - I question everything (the 'skeptic-skeptics' don't, IMO: they question the existence of God but do they question the possibility? Where they say no, no, no I tend to say maybe but I doubt it). I'll go along with the idea that ghosts may possibly exist. But I have no current reason to believe in them. As of this post, as of this point in my life, I have high doubts that they exist. But for what it's worth, yes I do think they are a possible phenomenon in this world.

I think the concept of ghosts is more plausible than, say, Big Foot or the Lochness Monster. But that has nothing to do with evidence (personal, non-anecdotal evidence) and everything to do with logic and feasibility.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

Carl Sagan