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The razor of Hitchens and the Spirits!

What do you think you're going to achieve here? Do you actually know anything about the history of this site?
 
P.J. Denyer said:
What do you think you're going to achieve here? Do you actually know anything about the history of this site?
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Hey, hey, hey. He has stumbled upon this one weird trick that will rock skepticism to its core. And *checks notes* apparently Mesmerism. You wanna go? Huh? I said Mesmerism, man.
 
Calderaro said:
why do you only accept empirical evidence?
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I accept only testable evidence for certain propositions, because it can be tested and thereby avoid exactly the kinds of attributional errors you advocate. Existential propositions must be supported affirmatively by testable evidence. Otherwise it's just vigorously advocated pretense.
 
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Calderaro said:
Although there is no concrete evidence for the existence of spirits, this does not mean that they cannot exist.
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Irrelevant straw man. We do not have to prove they cannot exist in order to conclude that there is no credible evidence that they do.
Calderaro said:
This line of reasoning challenges the idea that science should have all the answers.
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Irrelevant straw man. Science does not claim to have all the answers. You may choose to believe what you wish according to what evidence you wish. However, if you want to convince skeptics that your belief is factual, you will need to provide testable evidence.
 
Calderaro said:
empirical evidence is not the sole arbiter of truth in discussions about the existence of spirits.
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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.
 
arthwollipot said:
Allan Kardec's books are empirical evidence of the existence of Allan Kardec's books.

Can J.R.R. Tolkien's books be empirical evidence of the existence of balrogs?
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Challenge to the spiritualists : prove one way or the other if Balrogs did or did not have literal wings. If you can then I might consider believing.
 
Norman Alexander said:
I hope posters here realise they are not in a discussion with a human. This is a Turing test.
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I'm still not sure. He says he's in Brazil, where spiritism is well established and popular thanks to a supposed medium named Chico Xavier, who he's mentioned several times. Someone growing up there could easily have been unlucky enough to have been immersed in this particular woo since birth.

en.wikipedia.org

Chico Xavier - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

His appearances on TV talk shows in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to establish Spiritism as one of the major religions professed in Brazil with more than 5 million followers. Despite his health problems he kept working up to his death, on June 30, 2002, in Uberaba. In 2010, a movie biography entitled Chico Xavier was released in Brazil. Directed by Daniel Filho, the film dramatized Xavier's life.

On October 3, 2012, the SBT television TV show O Maior Brasileiro de Todos os Tempos named Chico Xavier "The Greatest Brazilian of all time", based on a viewer-supported survey.
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Pixel42 said:
I'm still not sure. He says he's in Brazil, where spiritism is well established and popular thanks to a supposed medium named Chico Xavier, who he's mentioned several times. Someone growing up there could easily have been unlucky enough to have been immersed in this particular woo since birth.

en.wikipedia.org

Chico Xavier - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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He is feeding our answers into an AI which is seeded with spiritist and Xavier data, then posting the outcome.
 
Calderaro said:
Belief in spiritism reduced the suicide rate!
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I'll be requiring some very good evidence on that one, as I am very familiar with suicidology literature, that being an area of especial interest in my former professional life.

And when I say very good I really do mean it, not some blanket assertion: good stats that I can actually look at, psychological autopsy style studies, epidemiology, y'know, the full works. Go look up the Oxford team's work to give you an idea.

Anything less than that and I know you are spouting bovine manure.

On you go then.
 
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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