@Arkandel said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
Everything is a 'belief' until proven otherwise
I...
@Arkandel said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:
What were the results of your decades of research? What were your methods? Show me.
I...
You know, Ark, I know you really like playing Devil's Advocate (to a point where I suspect that you need some psychological help), but this takes the cake. You're all over the place, similar to the people who want to "disprove" global warming. I'd believe this was beneath you, but here you are.
We have methods for this determining what is true and what is not. Scientific Method is not a stick we measure things by. It's a way we discover those measurements. The basis of Scientific Method relies on disproving its discoveries. Without it, it would be a belief system. But it's not. Scientific Method does not have an enemy in the Bible, against Flat Earthers, against ghosts, against magic, against even Intelligent fucking Design.
And that's where I go from reading this thread with a modicum of interest to enough salt to attract all the deer in Ohio. (hint: there are a lot of deer in Ohio.) "Well, you don't really know-know, therefore what you're doing is belief" is the attack that the Discovery Institute has been doing to sell their snake oil as "science" to indoctrinate school children for the last decade or so.
Science is self-correcting. This isn't a belief. At best it's a philosophy.
We accept that it reveals truth because it's based in self-doubt. It works. If we can't accept this, then we might as well flip the table over the last three thousand years of trying to understand the world and just herp-derp our way into extinction.
Regarding Terry Pratchett and others:
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Oo, wait, I just found this one which is more appropriate to my above rant:
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?"
— Douglas Adams, paraphrase of a parable spoofing modern creationism that Adams often told, as retold by Richard Dawkins in "Lament for Douglas" (14 May 2001)
Crap, one more. I forgot how much I enjoyed Douglas' writing:
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
— Douglas Adams, from Last Chance To See