Natalie Hensley
Member
Hi Skepticos! I'm Natalie and I'm a long time listener and I want to add some ideas out on the forum. and I'm a big fan of the show and Alex for providing evidence based reasoning for some of the things I beleive but couldn't get into mindset to argue for!
I have this one argument I want to try out, because it's something I've asked to a lot of people who are skeptical of the paranormal and I never felt I got a satisfactory answer out of them. It concerns the experience of the paranormal and the supernatural. There is this belief that we can't trust anecdotal evidence for the paranormal, because there are problems with memory/sight and senses/mirages ect.
But this seems like a rather odd thing to assume to me, because our memories and senses are still right most of the time, if they weren't we wouldn't live very long or live successfully if they were so untrustworthy. But since skeptics tend to believe the supernatural or anything like that as inherently false and untrue, it seems that they assume those things are just by their very nature unlikely, despite what they might have seen or heard.
I remeber someone I had an argument with claimed that a supernatural explination should never be used when a more mundane explination could account for it. But that seemed like a biased explination to me, why are supernatural explinations by their very nature less true then what we consider mundane? If someone saw a bigfoot in the woods, why assume it must be someother kind of mundane animal or mirage, when the memory implies they've seen something out of the ordinary? Senses and memory can be false sometimes, though why must it always be false when someone has sighted something out of the ordinary?
He went on the explain to me that the supernatural was by default, unscientific. Like reports of alien activity went against the natural laws of science, so regardless of what someone saw, it couldn't have happened because the existance of the supernatural is impossible because it goes against all known laws of nature. Though that argument seemed false to me as well, since scientists can only know what they've studied and tested, they certainly don't know everything. Hypothetically there still could be some way for the supernatural to exist, just in unconventional ways.
Just like the claim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rests on a preconceived bias against the supernatural, it seems to me that the bias against anecdotal evidence is based on assumption. Especially considering it's based on the very reality of something existing, not some general assumption about how the world works or anything like that.
I grew up Atheistic, though I eventually realized that mainstream skeptics based their ideas on faith just as much as most religions were. There were assumptions about how the universe was, with it's own version of myths and moral values to go along with them. It turned into an all encompassing belief system that tried to explain everything.
At this point of time, I certainly can't claim to know all the answers though I feel there's a lot of mystery around us. Odd things sometimes happen to us and we really don't know what their all about, but it seems to indicate that there's a lot more to reality then our initial immpressions imply. Like there's this undercurrent of mystery and magic quietly flowing through the fabric of reality. Which sounds like a lot fun to me!
:D
I have this one argument I want to try out, because it's something I've asked to a lot of people who are skeptical of the paranormal and I never felt I got a satisfactory answer out of them. It concerns the experience of the paranormal and the supernatural. There is this belief that we can't trust anecdotal evidence for the paranormal, because there are problems with memory/sight and senses/mirages ect.
But this seems like a rather odd thing to assume to me, because our memories and senses are still right most of the time, if they weren't we wouldn't live very long or live successfully if they were so untrustworthy. But since skeptics tend to believe the supernatural or anything like that as inherently false and untrue, it seems that they assume those things are just by their very nature unlikely, despite what they might have seen or heard.
I remeber someone I had an argument with claimed that a supernatural explination should never be used when a more mundane explination could account for it. But that seemed like a biased explination to me, why are supernatural explinations by their very nature less true then what we consider mundane? If someone saw a bigfoot in the woods, why assume it must be someother kind of mundane animal or mirage, when the memory implies they've seen something out of the ordinary? Senses and memory can be false sometimes, though why must it always be false when someone has sighted something out of the ordinary?
He went on the explain to me that the supernatural was by default, unscientific. Like reports of alien activity went against the natural laws of science, so regardless of what someone saw, it couldn't have happened because the existance of the supernatural is impossible because it goes against all known laws of nature. Though that argument seemed false to me as well, since scientists can only know what they've studied and tested, they certainly don't know everything. Hypothetically there still could be some way for the supernatural to exist, just in unconventional ways.
Just like the claim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" rests on a preconceived bias against the supernatural, it seems to me that the bias against anecdotal evidence is based on assumption. Especially considering it's based on the very reality of something existing, not some general assumption about how the world works or anything like that.
I grew up Atheistic, though I eventually realized that mainstream skeptics based their ideas on faith just as much as most religions were. There were assumptions about how the universe was, with it's own version of myths and moral values to go along with them. It turned into an all encompassing belief system that tried to explain everything.
At this point of time, I certainly can't claim to know all the answers though I feel there's a lot of mystery around us. Odd things sometimes happen to us and we really don't know what their all about, but it seems to indicate that there's a lot more to reality then our initial immpressions imply. Like there's this undercurrent of mystery and magic quietly flowing through the fabric of reality. Which sounds like a lot fun to me!
:D