The Paranormal (Where is it now?)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 11:21 (5552 days ago) @ George Jelliss

This is Part 2 of my reply to DHW. - DHW: ... 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. - GPJ: I'm glad we agree on something! - DHW: 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. - GPJ: No good scientist ignores facts that don't fit into the scheme. I thought I had made that point. It is all part of the scientific method. Darwin incidentally was exemplary in this regard: he had a whole chapter in the "Origins" about the problems with his theory at the time (such as the lack of an adequate understanding of genetics). - DHW: 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. - GPJ: I have ignored nothing. If I am convinced, it is by the weight of evidence. My beliefs are based on evidence. If you can come up with adequate evidence to support your wish for there to be a paranormal reality out there, I will readily go along with you. However the poor anecdotal evidence presented so far is quite inadequate. - DHW: 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). - GPJ: A scientific paradigm very certainly does exist. Do you deny, say, the atomic theory of chemical structure? - DHW: 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. - GPJ: I have already responded to this point above. I am not ignoring any areas of human experience. Your use of the term "materialistic" also indicates, I am inclined to think, an outdated attitude. Would you accuse me of being "energistic" if I tried to explain the universe, as I do, in terms of energy rather than matter?

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GPJ