Your Silly Beliefs Survey

[Deep Dish]

My paranormal essay currently stands at 2,000 words and I have barely begun my argument! It’s an argument pyramid, building arguments atop arguments from the bottom up. (If I may make a totally irrelevant observation, I always find humorous that when we were in high school, writing a 750 word essay was torture; when in college, writing 1,500 word essays were tough; but, beyond college, anything less than 5,000 words skimps on brevity. )

Today I bought Carl Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World, Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, and Mary Roach’s Spook. Three awesome reads. Notably, I went through rows and rows of New Age books ranging from tarot cards to numerology to James Van Praagh, and finally after much frustration found the small "science" section which was one small shelf, miniscule towards the massive sections on religion, new age, and astrology. It was a Barnes & Noble bookstore. Nothing against the chain but apparently it demonstrates what are the public demands.

Anyway...

Don Ronny:
People should challenge and question everything they are taught to believe. But at some point we all have to believe in something...silly as it may seem.

Yes, I agree. I would add that skepticism is a method, not a position.

Most people, especially skeptics, claim not to be religious. But if you really pay attention, you will see that they are stoutly devoted to what they believe in and terribly defensive once you question that. In all these cases, what has happened to the skeptic?

Since we are on the topic, religious folk often love to take that observation and falsely proclaim “Science is a religion.” Both science and religion are philosophies but, as methods of thinking merit, science and religion are diametrically opposed. Yes, skeptics hold strong beliefs and often vigorously defend their beliefs. As Michael Shermer explains in his aforementioned book, the proper method of skeptical thinking is not to investigate claims bent on debunking some phenonema but to investigate it with an open mind and then decide either to be skeptical or skeptical of the skeptics. To put it in the words of Carl Sagan:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.)

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity, then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

“The Burden of Skepticism”, Pasadena lecture, 1987.

We can all agree.

Sazuki:
But Deep Dish answer me this: do you believe in Darwin's evolution, that is: Natural Selection + Randomly Generated Mutations(chance mutations)?

I accept evolution as true. While arguably perhaps not perfect, to wit, it certainly gives the most satisfactory explanation than any other theory, to wit. To apply the aforementioned method of skepticism, there is a massive body of evidence in support of evolution, to me, and I am skeptical of the skeptics.

STR8UP:
Seriously though, I THOUGHT I saw a huge saucer pass over me that night. It was either real, and I was abducted for 20 minutes whereupon they erased part of my memory, or......

More than likely it was the sleep deprivation that caused me to hallucinate. The world may never know.

Whilst I certainly cannot authoritatively prove that you didn’t see an UFO, more plausible explanations abound.

October:
Interesting thread...

Out of curiosity, do you believe in free will? I noticed that "fate" was one of your silly beliefs.

Hold on, time for dinner...

 

[Bonhomme]

I'm skeptical of the belief of some "skeptics'" that we can detect or test all phenomena that exist. Such Newtonian beliefs are simply unfounded.

300 years ago anyone who said rocks fall from the sky was thought to be mad.

I don't believe any of the stuff exists, but rather the evidence strongly supports psychic phenomena and some sorts of "extrasensory perception."

It's just that such phenomena are just not as "tidy" as those so-called "skeptics" who would dismiss such notions straightaway would have it. They would expect people to read zener cards on cue or some such, whereas anytime I've experienced any such phenomenon it was a very spontaneous sort of thing, completely unpredictable.

Expecting people to produce such phenomena in a "controlled testing environment" is nothing less than a vain attempt to stuff them in a neat little Newtonian box. Even our current physics acknowledges that the observer affects that which is observed.

After all, matter has particle and wave characteristics, and I see no reason why people can't pick up on some "thought waves."

In the days when people made phone calls on land lines, there were a number of occasions when I picked up the phone to call someone and that particular person was on the line before I started to dial the number, without either of us having made prior plans to call around that particular time. I did a calculation of the odds of such a simultaneous phone call happening purely by chance, and the odds were very, very remote, especially for it happening several times. Like winning the lottery grand prize several times. Transmisson of some sort of "thought waves" -- the nature of which we cannot yet understand -- is a far more reasonable explanation than astronomically remote coincidence, especially considering I've known many people who have independently experienced the very same thing.

Sure, there's a lot of sensationalist junk out there that gives parapsychology a bad name. But many formerly accepted scientific theories are now looked back upon with amusement. I personally think science has barely scratched the surface about what makes the world tick...

 

[Deep Dish]

October:
Out of curiosity, do you believe in free will? I noticed that "fate" was one of your silly beliefs.

Yes and no.

Whilst I categorically reject the notion of everything happens for some future “reason”, that everything happens for some divinely conceived master plan, I do strongly accept the notion of limited free will; genetics and previous environmental experiences strongly influence, sometimes overwhelmingly and almost irresistably, our behaviors and thought processes. I had no free will in not being born with a neurological disability, which overwhelmingly influences the way I am, but I do have the free will to cope with the disability and minimize its deterministic affects. I also strongly accept the notion of cause & effect, that for someone to expose themselves to too much solar radiation over too long of time will, deterministically, get cancer or at the very least crappy looking skin but, of course, to face such a fate is subject to free will. Also, I accept, in the laws of physics, that several billion years from now the sun will run out of fuel and expand to devour the Earth; it’s an inevitability. (Well, amost. It’s theoretically possible to guide a huge asteroid or comet within 20,000 miles of this planet and slightly nudge this planet back a few miles, and have the asteroid or comet return every 6,000 years to repeat. But, y’know, beyond that, our demise is certain. )