Can we be emphatically sure ghosts do not exist and if so how?
Regards,
Den
Can we be emphatically sure there isn't a china teapot orbitting the sun and if so how?Originally Posted by British Sceptic
Can we be emphatically sure ghosts do not exist and if so how?
Regards,
Den
No, we cannot - for a given value of "emphatically sure", anyway. We can, however, make hypotheses justified on the strength of evidence already gathered. One of those hypotheses is that it is at this stage quite unlikely that ghosts - as popularly conceived - exist. This has far more probability behind it than the opposing hypothesis which would require the existence of a non-corporeal element to life which has yet to be even suggested by the evidence.
Occam's Razor don'tya know.
By detonating the Sun? It's my hypothesis that this would remove the possibility of there being a china teapot in orbit around it.
Next stage: testing.
I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.
I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.
Kudos for your t-shirt. It's very, very good.
All the china teapots on Earth are orbitting the sun...
Woohoo! Semantics!
I still say detonating the Sun will make sure there are none there.
Ah! Russell's teapot.
You know, I don't really like this one as an argument. The reason being that it is actually a scientific argument because it is potentially falsifiable.
It's really an illustration of the impracticality of testing some claims rather than its intended purpose of illustrating that you can't disprove a universal negative.
If we could build a powerful 'teapot detector' we could actually prove that one isn't there.
Regarding the OP: if something doesn't exist it's impossible to prove that it doesn't as, by definition, there could never be any evidence to test.
.
Well yeah, fair enough, Russell's proposition is somewhat anachronisitic, and perhaps logically flawed in absolute terms. I simply take it as an illustration of the principal of proving something empirically, rather than demanding that something should be disproven.
Perhaps I should sustitute 'invisible, intangible, undetectable unicorns living on the dark side of the moon', or something similar, for 'teapot'. I do, however, think that Russell's statement illustrates the point rather more elegantly.
eta - I also thought that, in the context of the O/P, Russell's Teapot was a reasonably succinct way of getting to the point.
Last edited by SimonC; 20th September 2008 at 02:07 PM.
Pedant.
And so is Alister McGrath for trying to one-up Richard Dawkins with the same point!
Last edited by SimonC; 20th September 2008 at 02:08 PM.
What is a ghost?
Precisely, having not defined the problem how can one propose a solution?
If you define a 'ghost' as someone experiencing a human or animal 'presence' (whether felt, seen, heard, etc) that they cannot physically account for (ie. that person should not be present because they are physically elsewhere, dead or don't actually exist) then I think we can emphatically say that ghosts DO exist! There are many such experiences recorded with many different causes (misperception and hallucination being prominent ones).
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