Originally Posted by Interesting Ian :
That's just the way human beings are. It certainly doesn't apply exclusively to just one group of people. "Woo woos" think it simply must be paranormal, so called "skeptics" think it simply cannot be paranormal.
askolnick
Skeptics say that no paranormal claim should ever be regarded as true without compelling evidence to support the claim.
Originally Posted by Interesting Ian :
Of course -- this is obviously so and must be so from the scientific perspective. You'll have no arguments from me about this. Science is necessarily conservative. That's the way science works; that's the way it must work. Before we admit the existence of extraordinary claims it is required that, at least in principle, there is some prospect that it can be subsumed under some overarching inclusive scientific theory. Is this a realistic possibility?? Ummm . .nope . . I rather doubt it.
Nevertheless a complete non-sequitur I'm afraid
askolnick
I have to disagree with this too.
Science does not require new phenomena to be subsumable under some scientific theory.
Nor did I say it did. I said extraordinary claims do. That's using "skeptic" language since I certainly do not regard many paranormal "claims" as extraordinary. I prefer to say putative phenomena which contravene the contemporary western metaphysic.
It requires convincing evidence that the phenomena is real.
What does that mean? Who is it supposed to convince? A typical skeptic? A typical believer? Someone in between those extremes? Your sentence is meaningless without further clarification.
When Bayer invented and marketed Aspirin 110 years ago, no one had a clue how it works. It took nearly a century to establish theories to explain it.
Yes, but what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?
When Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and all the other scientists who studied the sun and the stars before the 20th century, the energy that these bodies emitted contradicted all known theories. Yet the phenomenon was real and was scientifically studied.
Well I think there was a tension with the received wisdom about how old the Earth was and therefore the length of time the sun and stars must have been emitting such a colossal amount of energy. There was no physical process known whereby stars could emit such energy over such a long timescale.
Not that this has anything to do with the paranormal. For this reason I wasn't going to respond to you post but someone thought it was good so I thought I'd respond anyway to put them right.
And today, scientists are struggling to come up with a theory to explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. This observation a few years ago shook the world of science because it contradicted all existing theories.
Perhaps you could kindly name these theories which it contradicts? No existing theories are contradicted, they merely need to be supplemented.
So science, as it's supposed to work, is continuing to gather new facts that hopefully will lead to a new confirmable theory. Facts don't have to fit existing theories to gather and study them. That's not how science works. That's how pseudoscience works.
Of course they don't. They do sometimes, but not always. It's a two way process. Sometimes facts are gathered and a theory is generated -- sometimes we have a theory and any apparent facts which appear to contravene theory are assumed to be a mistake. But of course sometimes they are not mistakes eg the orbit of Mercury at the beginning of the 20th Century and arguably parapsychological phenomena.
It is true that when facts contradict existing theory, then they must be measured carefully and confirmed by compelling evidence. More often than not, facts that contradict well-established theories, are not facts but mistakes -- or in the case of the paranormal, they are often delusions and outright fabrications.
They are often, but not always? Sure. Mistakes? Maybe. You are not however in a position to justifiably assert that they are always either mistakes, delusions, or fabrications. We have the collective experience of humankind throughout history and across all cultures which testifies against you. I regard the dismissal of
all paranormal phenomena to be comparable to the rejection of lucid dreams, obe's, nde's, meteorites, hypnosis etc which were also contemptuously dismissed by "skeptics" until recently. None of these are mistakes, delusions, or fabrications and they are now universally acknowledged as such (nde's might be a hallucinatory experience, but they are not a delusion i.e they definitely happen). If something is experienced throughout human history and across all cultures then it seems to me that something interesting is going on.
That's why we need to especially careful in examining hypotheses that contradict established facts or confirmed theories.
Of course.
The difference we're seeing here is that true science demands compelling evidence (especially when a claim contradicts firmly established theory). Pseudoscientists seem to think that the more a claim violates existing theories, the more likely it is true and that the requirement for compelling evidence is a niceity being imposed upon them by the closed-minded policemen of orthodoxy.
Perhaps you could provide a reference to a "pseudoscientist" who states this?
