Today I recieved an angry email from an Atheist who said she believed in ghosts, yet is still an Atheist. This writer was adamant that I should stop making blanket statements that Atheists don’t believe in ANYthing paranormal (like this one: we don’t). My first take was that the writer must be a bit whacky, but hey, sounds like a good blog topic. Please take a moment to look around. See any spooks?
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Attention David Silverman!
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/03/30/prayer.study.ap/index.html
Perhaps the next blog?
Weighing in on the supernatural thing…
I don’t believe in the supernatural- magic, spirits, ghosts, ghouls, goblins… gods… all the same thing to me.
I think most things assumed as supernatural are actually just things that are very natural, but have yet to be scientificly explained.
Bigfoot, for example- a yet-to-be documented animal. But not a monster or a creature from space or something.
I do enjoy watching Most Haunted… but not because I believe in the ghosts; more because I find Derek Acorah’s antics entertaining… comical…
I think that’s why I like fantasy and sci-fi stories… I believe that aliens- life on other planets- are a highly likely probability. But, as portrayed in fiction it is pure escapism fun.
And for me if I actually believed in things like The Force of Star Wars, it wouldn’t be as much fun.
Ghosts are, in my opinion, just another fanciful imagining that help those who believe in them hold onto a belief in there being something after death.
Just like the concept of heaven and an afterlife… but how sad is that, really- for someone who has lost a loved one to pine away the rest of their days waiting until the afterlife…
Sad…
pmswift-
That study is awesome. Thank you science. It might change my normal resonse when people say they will pray for me. Now I can say that there really is no empirical evidence that it works, in fact, it may work against me. LOL indeed
I haven’t been around this part of the net for awhile, but decided to peek in today to see what’s new. Since we’ve been invited to tell ghost stories, I’ll tell mine. BTW, I’m an avowed atheist and have been for almost forty years.
A couple of years ago, while watching a DVD in our family room, I turned my swivel chair to see a man walk through our dimly lit living room. There was nothing startling about it but I had a view of both the living room and the hall. As he walked through the door into the hallway, he disappeared – he never entered the hall. As I sat looking, my daughter asked me what I was looking at and I told her I had just seen a man and she said “I saw it, too. Are the doors locked?” She had only seen a figure, she said. My son-in-law was the only man in the house at the time and was in another room playing computer games. I am not completely convinced that it wasn’t him, although he swears it wasn’t.
In the middle of the night, I remembered that a tall sixteen-year-old boy had died in a car accident while living with his family in the house. That kind of unnerved me. But since we’ve had no further “apparitions” and there was nothing threatening about the incident, I’m leaning more and more to thinking my son-in-law was playing a prank. But that doesn’t explain why he couldn’t be seen in the well-lit hallway.
Do I believe in the supernatural? Absolutely not. I firmly believe that there is a natural explanation. If it wasn’t my son-in-law, what could it have been? Well, cameras leave images of people who aren’t here. So does television and I sure as heck can’t explain that. Is it possible that there is some form of energy that can form visual images? Was my mind influenced by something in the movie I was watching? But my daughter, who is a scientist, saw something too. Will I ever figure it out? Not likely, unless my son-in-law confesses.
I apologize for the length, I study cosmology and the standard model in physics. This sort of silly-ness bugs me.
Ok, it there is some “invisible” world out there then it MUST be detectable somehow. If the “real” part of the universe in any way interacts with the “invisible” part then it is detectable. It?s called equal and opposite reaction. Something cannot interact with something without also in turn being interacted with itself. i.e. it can be detected.
I don?t want people to get the idea that there are not ?invisible? objects in the universe. One example of a literally invisible object is a neutrino. It CANNOT interact with light, i.e. its invisible. However the neutrino has been detected though other interactions. Also science has PROVEN that there are things out there we cannot detect yet (dark energy, and some of the dark matter.) But that does not mean we just make things up and say there are magic god-pixies dancing around us.
If there were some sort of other invisible world along side ours in the universe the consequences would be huge. For one, most people never comprehend that the Earth is moving very fast. Any world that wants to move along with us would need to have one of the following: a powerful interaction with the Earth through some yet unknown particle interaction (strong enough not to be thrown off as the Earth goes around its orbit), or it would have to interact via gravity (so it is gravitationally bound to, and contributes to, the Earth?s mass).
If this other world wants to interact with things on the surface of the Earth it needs a way to stay on the surface. If it interacts with the ground like we do then it interacts with the electromagnetic force (that?s what stops us from moving through solids). Light is an electromagnetic wave (light) so it would be visible in some spectrum of light. In case you were wondering; science has looked at the world over a vast range of light and it does not see another world riding along with us on the surface. Alternately the other world would need its own ?surface? that changes accurately with ours (and they would need another new interaction to not fall through their own world?s surface).
Now if this invisible world has invisible people like things then those things would need to be held together through some sort of complex system (just like normal life is a complex thermodynamic/chemical/physical system contained in a nice environmental system that stops us from spontaneously dying).
In other words, these ?invisible? things are NOT simpler ways of looking at the world. They would require a large and complex addition to what we know exists.
The world is not made up of very large miraculous non-composite objects. All things on the same size scale as humans (meaning from a grain of salt all the way up to the size of the galaxy) are made up of an unimaginably large number of smaller detectable things. If anyone wants me to believe that ghosts, gods, fairies, or any other undetectable intelligent objects are real they need to reason out how all the above is not a problem and introduce a physics that tries to explain it as well as explain how it interacts with known physics. Anyone who believes in this ?undetectable world? stuff is at best vastly uninformed about the nature of the world we KNOW exists, or at worst they are vastly stupid, be they atheist or otherwise.
kudos, schnivelbiv, nice post.
Have UFO’s been here? I don’t know. Just because I have not seen them, does not mean they do not exist. Nor have I seen real proof that they have been here.
This is the same argument that the godsters make.You can’t see god, but you know that he exists. Blind faith!However, your belief that there is life elsewhere in the universe is based on a more rational basis , as newly-found evidence seems to point in that direction.
I agree with my fellow athiests that ghosts, gods, goddesses, etc. do not exist. I do not believe in life after death (although I LOVE zombie movies [and Rob Zombie for that matter]); however, in my life I’ve had several strange experiences that I could not explain. I won’t bore with details. My take on these happenings is thus: as humans we are electrical beings. Electric currents flow around us and through us. This is very natural. Do some people conduct more electric than others? You bet! I have no scientific data on this, but I’m a highly electrical person. I can touch you and shock the shit out of you (arc and all!) on the warmest, most humid of summer days. I do not enjoy this as it causes me a considerable amount of pain, not to mention the fact that my fiance and pets often shrink away from my kisses until I am well grounded (can you believe my pets have learned this?). I feel that some people can permanently alter the electrical environment that surrounds them, and that this permanant alteration can survive that person’s death (at least for some time). Therefore, if a living person feels that he/she detects a ghostly presence, they may be picking up on residual (or vestigial) electrical markers left there by someone (now dead) who resided in that space long enough to have a permanant (or semi-permanant) impact on the surrounding electrical environment. Hey scientists, does this make sense?
Yes, it makes perfect sense to me. I also think that that can explain the “aura phenomenon” which I fully believe in.
Believers (many of them) are slimy and sleazy and liars; they will impersonate to make a lie believable. Example: automobiles pollute, I know, because I own one; in this case: ghosts are real, they must be because I’m an atheist and even I believe in them.
They do this stuff in other areas too. An atheist doesn’t believe in ghosts – that’s a fact.
They come here, wanting the reader to believe they are atheist, while they distort the atheist view.
cry4turtles,
Your ?electrical nature? is probably because of wearing rubber-soled shoes (and possibly the type of clothing you wear). I used to wear Rockports because they were so comfortable, but I always built up a large static charge like what you reported. But when I switched to doing research on latest-technology transistors I found I could not get within ten feet without destroying them. I switched to leather-soled shoes and the problem went away.
From what I have read, our electrical nature is very small and localized. External electrical and magnetic fields can affect us, but we do not have any significant effect on things outside ourselves. For example, to look at brain activity, a person usually has to be in a shielded enclosure to be able to measure anything.
Dear Tom,
Thanx for the advice. I didn’t know they made leather soled shoes. I will look for them. I must confess the phonemenon I described has only been affecting me these past 4 to 5 years (I’m 41). I know certain fabrics could esclate the issue such as wool or nylons. However, with my newfound compatibility with elecricity, so am I now way to sensitive to wear these materials. I have to wear 100% cotton (lest I break out in hives)–tshirts, sweatshirts, and jeans are my wardrobe. Perhaps I’m just getting older–they say things change…
I agree that this belief in the supernatural is both irrational and conflicting with atheism.
It reminds me of another angry atheist who was plagued with irrational beliefs who called himself a jew and preached tenets of judaim while demonizing and attacking anyone who disagreed with him with ad hominem attacks, calling them nazis, anti-semites, holocaust deniers, etc.
This angry, irrational and outright whacky so-called atheist also abused his position as moderator of a blog and censored and deleted posts that did not agree with his religious beliefs.
This irrational bigot is now poking fun at another person for also having beliefs in the supernatural.
Thanks for showing everyone that you are also a hypocrite Dave!
This is just my take,and I may be wrong but a belief in ghosts is thusly a belief in the afterlife. While a person may deny the existence of a god they can still be spiritual, and I believe this falls more readily into the category of an agnostic. Atheism, the way I regard it, is based in a denial of spirit/god/afterlife and subscribes more to the materialism picture of reality. Matter, energy, laws of nature and such are what govern the universe and this is existence is all we get.
But hey maybe a wider interpretation of Atheism is out there. I know that it was a concious decision to change from being an Agnostic to an Atheist, and that I see a difference in the two, or am I just splitting hairs.
I’m new here and I would love to jump in on this discussion as it is absolutely captivating me.
Let me preface this by saying that I’m firm in my belief that there is no God, because there is no proof. God is Santa Claus for grown-ups and I stopped believing in Santa Claus years ago. I find myself shaking my head in disbelief in God lasts beyond seven-the age of reason.
“The supernatural is bunk. Live with it. There are no ghosts, no psychic powers, no astral projection, and no astrology.”
I agree and disagree, respectively
I don’t believe in the Supernatural, especially not in the Mystical Sense that New Agers do. I do however believe that there are situations that seem beyond what Science can explain-and that is okay. I am not about to, nor do I want to pretend that Science has discovered everything.
Even in my skepticism, I am careful not to impose upon myself the conservative thinking that anything that has to do with ghosts or the
so-called supernatural is wrong because it means that there is a life after death and therefore a God. To me that is just faulty a perspective as religiosity saying that ghosts and anything supernatural is real and that proves there is a God. It is my opinion that both are close minded views.
Take Alex’s Daniel Boone Character for example (hope you don’t mind Alex). I have rarely met a person who hasn’t seen such a thing in their lifetime, and I hesitate to say that such large numbers of the populous just randomly hallucinate.
Enough people see “ghosts” for it to have a reasonable explanation that is not supernatural. I’d prefer to just say,”Fine, it’s not explained, but not mystical-it’s supernormal. Perfectly explainable, but not explained yet.”
I believe that Quantum Mechanics is on the verge of explaining how some of these things could come to be. Take Holographic Universe, or Hyperspace for example. Time is an amazing thing. I dont believe that we as humans (or scientists) fully grasp it. The implications that time is not linear, perhaps spiral, or a series of interlocking circles is very probable. The area of the Universe that we are capable of veiwing, experiencing and measuring, is just a small part of a complicated system that can only be understood when we can interact with the universe as a whole. I think that Supertring or M-Theory will prove that alot of things that people see are just two 4 dimensional universes with a region in common, like switching the channel on the remote for a moment. Perfectly natural and unexplainable.
Let’s just say that I have a special place in my heart for Quantum Foam, lol. I suppose my whole point Don’t overlook the supernatural as being purely mystical. The magic of yesteryear is certainly the science of tomorrow, and it shall continue to be that way, I hope throughout my life.
Maven
“I feel that some people can permanently alter the electrical environment that surrounds them, and that this permanant alteration can survive that person’s death (at least for some time). Therefore, if a living person feels that he/she detects a ghostly presence, they may be picking up on residual (or vestigial) electrical markers left there by someone (now dead) who resided in that space long enough to have a permanant (or semi-permanant) impact on the surrounding electrical environment. Hey scientists, does this make sense?”
I agree with that, or a similar idea at least. Well put!