The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 09:14 (5764 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George prefers "to be tied to science, in the sense of scientific method, because I'm convinced that that is the only way we have of finding out reliable answers. What are the alternatives? Divine revelation?" - "Science, in the sense of scientific method" leaves a lot of leeway. Some might say that qualified medical practitioners such as David Turell and Pim van Lommel have applied scientific methods to their study of NDEs and OBEs, but you have already rejected such claims. Your interpretation of science and scientific method is no more (and no less) valid than theirs. Perhaps, though, if you could forget God for now ("divine revelation"), we might look at this from another angle. What constitutes reality? Are you sure that science is capable of covering all realities? I don't see, for instance, how science can give us "reliable answers" about the nature of love, the impact of music, the origin of ideas, and yet I don't think you would deny the reality of love, musical appreciation, or original ideas. You may be "convinced" that one day science will come up with a material explanation, and you may be right, but your conviction has no scientific foundation. It's a belief. I would put NDEs and OBEs and various other apparently "paranormal" experiences in a similar category. I don't understand them, but I can't be sure they are not real, and so I must face the possibility that there may be levels of existence, communication, experience which cannot be accounted for in terms of the material world as we know it. The problem with materialism is that it refuses to countenance that possibility, which brings us to the second point in your post of 8 February. - "New discoveries must be viewed through the prism of past views. This is because scientific knowledge is cumulative etc." You are absolutely right: we have to build on what has already been discovered. But in my amendment to David Turell's "aphorism", I went out of my way to remove precisely the meaning you have attributed to it by adding the crucial defining relative, which you quoted but then omitted: "(past views) that find excuses to ignore whatever is disturbing to them". Neither David nor I was talking about past views en bloc. My own point here is that anyone who is convinced that his beliefs are right and others are wrong, whether theist or atheist, has already ignored whatever is disturbing to those beliefs. That is the nature of conviction. "Convinced" is your own word, and it is the nub of the whole argument. In most of the contexts discussed and disputed on this website, what you call "the existing paradigm" in fact does not have a paradigmatic existence outside your convictions (though of course these are shared by many others, as is the theist paradigm). You ask for the alternatives to what you call the scientific method. In my view, it is not a matter of alternatives. Science is central to the quest, but we should not ignore all those areas of human experience that have not yet been explained, and possibly may never be explained, in materialistic terms.