Round And Round In Circles

[poliphilo]

You saw the White Lady?  No you didn't. You glimpsed a barn-owl out of the corner of your eye.

A notoriously haunted room? Just dig these magnotometer readings.

Feel you're being watched? Well you would with all these old portraits on the wall.

Fact is, nothing is ever going to convince a convinced sceptic that s/he's wrong. 

So we go round and round in circles. The believer puts evidence on the table. The sceptic explains it away. 

But are the sceptics really being scientific? Isn't this materialism of theirs just another belief-system? 

A Victorian belief system.

Surely  modern physics- with its dark matter and multiple dimensions and weirdly behaving particles- not only accomodates but predicts the paranormal.  

Comments

[saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com]

One of my writing group recently had a character explain that, 'if you can explain it or prove it - then its not faith.' Faith is what leads us through the dark alleys where no light shines, it can't be proven - it can only be earned.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's a nice definition.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

I'm a skeptic. Not, I hope, a close-minded one.

Maybe what I doubt is not the phenomenon so much as our interpretation of it (conditioned as it is by culture and circumstance). We used to ascribe mental illness to demon possession. Bog gas used to be will o' the wisp. Things attributed to the paranormal are explained by science, but I fully expect our knowledge to keep evolving, and perhaps reveal that in some things the mystics and dreamers were closer to the truth than any scientist could have been.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm a sceptic too.

But I seem to have made up my mind about ghosts and stuff

For the time being, anyway....

[mokie]

I saw a little girl with no eyes. If she was really a barn owl, I want to know how it got into my hallway.

Skeptics are a necessity, but it'd be nice if the position of skeptical friends sounded more like "What are the possible explanations?" and less like "You're wrong, and possibly crazy."

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

And if there's one thing barn owls are noted for it's their big googly eyes.

I believe you. I think spirits are all around. I had a friend once who was a ghost seer and he got so he just ignored them most of the time because there were so many of them.