The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by dhw, Saturday, January 17, 2009, 09:19 (5575 days ago) @ George Jelliss

John Clinch, George and I are discussing "paranormal" cases in which information is obtained that could not have been known beforehand. George quotes my contention that: "If three eyewitnesses identify X as the bank robber, I doubt if even the Counsel for the Defence will object that they can't prove scientifically that X was there." George thinks I am claiming that eyewitness accounts constitute scientific evidence. - This is a complete misunderstanding. The above quote means that scientific evidence is not the only method of arriving at the truth. Nowhere have I called the conclusion "scientific"! - However, the misunderstanding goes further back. When I responded to John Clinch in my post of 9 January 2009 at 10.12, I offered a dictionary definition of "paranormal", which was: "unable to be explained or understood in terms of scientific knowledge". I then asked John for his "scientific" explanation of four instances (two BBella and two David Turell) in which unknowable information had been conveyed to various people. I asked how he thought the information had been obtained, but it then transpired that neither you nor he believed the information was obtained/unknowable in the first place. You dismissed the BBella examples as being vague in one case, and "deaths are seldom unexpected" in the other. John did not comment specifically on any of the four. There are therefore no scientific conclusions of any kind by any of us. We are simply left with your scepticism in relation to the claims made by BBella and David Turell.