Hawkeye said:
Blessed are they that have never seen, but beleive.
I don't automatically think that everything I have seen or heard over the years deals with the paranormal. If I see something strange in the night sky, I don't leap to conclusions an immediately thinking its little grey men in a space ship coming to pay us a visit. I look for other logical explanations before saying that there is a good chance that it is some form of UFO. If those don't pan out, then it must be unknown and needs to be investigated.
But "unknown" measn only "unknown at the present moment". To say "I don't know what this is therefore I must accept the possibility that it is something that would go against all previous evidence and require all of our current scientific understanding to be tossed out the window" seems a bit of a leap to me. When weighted in the balance with "... or it could be a natural item that I don't understand" and/or " .. perhaps I/the witness made an error in thinking, or in interpreting the event", I think the choice is obvious.
I would agree that 99% of the strange stuff in this world has a real world answer,...
Ah, so we are only 1% apart!
... but enough things that don't fit our current understanding of the universe happen on a regular basis, that something is going on. Not everyone who sees a UFO, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Ghosts, etc... is lying, hallucinating, being tricked by light or someone else.
That does not track.
Everyone who sees a UFO sees something in the sky that they do not understand. That does not mean that there is any reasonable chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
This is not a case of probabilities. If 10,000 people roll a 10,000-sided die, there is a 63% chance that someone will roll a one. This does not work for paranormal explanations for experiences, each case must be evaluated separately. If 10,000 people each say they had an experience, and if their prefered explanation for that experience is consodered to be 99.99% likely to be false (I am being quite generous here as to the odds), then the reasonable conclusion is that all of them were mistaken at soe point in their reasoning of processing of sense information.
Despite all of our scientific knowledge, there is still much about the universe we don't understand. There is much about our planet we don't understand.
By the very nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible to attain all knowledge about the universe. This actually makes me happy. It is not that I think there are "things man was not meant to know", but that we will never reach a point where we are done and where there is nothing left to know. This pusuit has rules, however, and the rules are fairly strict, and it requires a lot of effort to play. Still, this has resulted in vast gains and benefits.
It is quite possible that we don't have the technology to properly measure such things as Psychic abilites or ghosts. At one time we didn't know about Quasars, Pulsars, Black holes etc.. until we had the right tools to find them.
We have sufficient tools to measure the *results* of psychic powers, easily. Such tests have simply never been successful with standard lab protocols in place.
Atoms were a theory before they could be proven.
Atoms are *still* a theory, or rather our current description of atoms is an important and well-tested part of our model of matter.
Theory does not mean guess. A theory is an explantion for observed phenomena; a scientific theory is a natural explanation for an observed phenomenon.
Additionally, nothing - absolutely nothing - in science is "proven", there are scientific theories that have earned more confidence than others, but no amount of confidence allows them to "graduate" from a theory to anything else, as there is no certainty to graduate to.
After all, in an infinite universe, isn't anything possible?
Not necessarily, no. All of the universe that we can observe shows evidence of following the same rules of physics universally. We would need some place that had different rules. Also, the observable universe is vast, but not infinite. Some things are too unlikely to be expected.
I would prefer "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
BTW: I beleive the Philip Klass was on the government payroll to debunk anything that related to UFOs. The government did this for National Security reasons to keep the public from panicking that there were strange aircraft in USA airspace that the Air Force couldn't account for. This was during the Cold War. It makes sense from that perspective. (And let me tell you some time about my conversations with Kevin J Randle, famed writer of books about the Roswell indicent and a couple of Playboy playmates at a con a few years ago on UFOS.
) He wasn't for balanced investigations, but outright debunking. If a UFO landed on the Whitehouse lawn, he probably would be among the first to say that it didn't happen.
Hawkeye
You can believe what you want, and make whatever personal insinuations about him that you want, but that does not affect at all the strength of his reasoning. A much better source for exposing Randle's sloppy, sensationalistic approach would be Kal Korff's book "The Roswell UFO Crash"
Also, during the Cold War, the USSR did commonly use aircraft to test US air defense, flying at US territory until discovered and ordered out. Some of these flights got embarrasingly deep; it would be in the US government's best interests to have these seen as "UFO's - mebbe aliens" than air defense holes. In fact, some of the most famous UFO cases were Soviet planes. (I can only assume the US was doing the same thing.)
Please examine this page for the largest scientific study on UFO's:
http://ncas.sawco.com/condon/index.html
simmias said:
...from McAllen, Texas—where I teach philosophy...
Hey, I'm a physics professor in Kingsville.
I have come to think that many skeptics claim to know more than they actually do. Science is not complete, and it has not yet come to grips with the fact that certain events are unrepeatable. Perhaps it is best not to view such events as supernatural but as unexplained parts of the natural world.
As to your first sentence, skeptics are human too, but it is test is in the argument and evidence, not the person.
As to your second sentence, please refer back to comments on the limits of the scientific method of my previous posts.
As to your third sentence, that should leave those events as accessible to science. So far, there has not been an event that has passed that muster.
In all this, I would not choose to address individual stories, especially those who say that the internal support for their stories is rooted in their religion. I do have a backgroundin astronomy and observational astronomy, so I'd be willing to help people curious about UFO they have seen - if and only if they were interested.
