Merged The razor of Hitchens and the Spirits!

JayUtah said:
Testable evidence is by far the best proven way to establish the truth or falsity of a proposition, including the proposition that certain phenomena exist. Begging people to accept a lower standard of proof does not establish that you have a credible proposition.
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Knowledge can also be derived from non-empirical sources, such as intuition, tradition, and rational deduction.
 
An unusual phenomenon happens to me, when I have bad thoughts, I sneeze twice!I think the spirit hears my bad thoughts and causes these two sneezes! When I have only good thoughts, the sneezes don't happen
 
Any chance of a response to #740?

Or are we just to get more wibble about something inconsequential?

The claim about suicide rates is one of the more serious, if not most serious, made so far, so can we have something to support it?

Or will we have an anecdote about how a spirit made you belch three and a half times exactly when a dog looked at you sideways?
 
Calderaro said:
Knowledge can also be derived from non-empirical sources, such as intuition, tradition, and rational deduction.
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Why should I trust your intuition?
Why should I trust a belief which is only tradition, so nobody remembers if there's a worthwhile reason why anyone believes it?
 
Calderaro said:
Knowledge can also be derived from non-empirical sources, such as intuition,
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Intuition has proved to be a very poor guide to the nature of the universe. Most of modern physics is counterintuitive

Calderaro said:
tradition,
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Tradition is also a poor guide to what is and is not true. Traditional medical treatments, for example, include bleeding and purging, both of which are actually harmful.

Calderaro said:
and rational deduction.
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Rational deduction from what? The only reliable starting point for a chain of rational deduction is empirically verified facts.
 
Calderaro said:
Knowledge can also be derived from non-empirical sources, such as intuition, tradition, and rational deduction.
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Mostly no, and even when yes, not the kind of knowledge that reflects factual truth.

Intuition generates belief, not knowledge. The scientific method aims precisely to correct the errors produced by incorrect belief. Someone's intuitive belief in spiritism is not proof of its factual truth.

Tradition generates repetition, not knowledge. The best example is cargo-cult behavior. Where that repetition is accidentally rewarded, there may be belief in the correctness of the tradition but that does not equate to reliable understanding or useful knowledge. A tradition of belief in spirits does not serve as evidence of factual correctness. However, it may make the belief more socially normalized and thereby make participants in that tradition more predisposed to accept it.

Rational deduction is part of the hypothetic-deductive method most often used in science, but only to generate propositions to be tested. The deductive strength couples the measurable variable to the interesting variable. An example would be, "I feel cold when I think there's a spirit around." From that we deduce that the air temperature would be measurably colder when a spirit is present. We objectively measure the air temperature and attempt to correlate it to the claimed presence of a spirit. In fringe theories, the term "deduction" is often misused to indicate mere attribution: the attribution of some otherwise unexplained observation to a predetermined belief is often wrongly labeled a deduction. Speculation is not deduction.

The most reliable method of determining factual correctness of a proposition has been the collection and testing of empirical evidence according to reproducible, systematic methods designed to correct for known errors. Constantly begging your critics to abandon proven methods in favor of known bad reasoning does not advance your cause.

Calderaro said:
Limitations of Testability
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Gibberish. Try harder.
 
Calderaro said:
An unusual phenomenon happens to me, when I have bad thoughts, I sneeze twice!I think the spirit hears my bad thoughts and causes these two sneezes!
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Sometimes I sneeze and fart at the same time, while in a thoughtless state of Zen vacuity. Does that mean the spirits are having a spat in my body over whose turn it is to take out the trash?
 
Appeal to ignorance: Arguing that spirits do not exist because there is no conclusive evidence of their existence, ignoring that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
 
Calderaro said:
Appeal to ignorance: Arguing that spirits do not exist because there is no conclusive evidence of their existence, ignoring that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
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No, a presumption in the form of a null hypothesis is not the same as a conclusion wrongly held according to an argument from silence. You still have the burden of proof.
 
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