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So prove somehow) that spirit does exist.
Possibility isn't a good enough standard. There are many things that are possible, but false.
So it is unreasonable to use it as a property of something you are trying to prove exists.
Again, this is all hypotheticals assuming that a God exists. Why should one even believe that to be the case? These are exactly the type of 'just so' stories that make the existence *less* likely.
Yes. That is how belief works, at least if you actually investigate the matter.
No, it is pretty much the case with all beliefs.
That is certainly one possibility. Or they may believe because that is what they were taught and they never really looked into the alternatives (which is what I have often found to be the case).
I see a lot of people that *claim* there is evidence, but when it comes to actually producing it, they never do. Usually, what they offer is irrleevant to demonstrating existence.
He asked, "What empirical, objective evidence do you have, that we could all perceive?" Is that your way of answering that you have no such evidence to produce?
He wrote, "Lack of belief in the not-objectively-evidenced is the epitome of reason." He has described the fundamental tenet of skepticism - no idea should be believed without justification by valid reasoning applied to relevant evidence. I can't think of an idea that has done more to improve the human condition than that one. It was the downfall of kings, priests, and charlatans everywhere.
Yes, but that's not what skeptics do.
Agreed. But unless it impacts our reality in some manner, its possible existence is irrelevant. Unless the idea is needed to explain some observable phenomenon, which is what detectable means, it has no utility. It explains and predicts nothing. Such ideas should be discarded, not accumulated. No god belief has any value except in those who find comfort there. For those comfortable without a god belief or a religion, the idea is useless, and for some, notwithstanding Pascal and his wager, costly.
Your rules of reason are not those of academia and philosophy and do contradict the rules of reason. It is not reasonable by that system of reckoning to believe anything on the basis of something not being known to be impossible.
Not if the belief isn't a sound conclusion derived from that evidence using the rules of reasoning (inference). People use the word reasonable to mean that some belief feels right to them, but that's not what a logician means by reason.
I don't doubt that people have experiences that they interpret as communicating with spirits, but I have no reason to believe that they are correct and a very good one to think that they aren't. I was fooled that way once myself, misunderstanding what was later revealed to be the euphoria generated by a charismatic initial preacher following my conversion to Christianity in the early seventies, which I understood as the Holy Spirit. I left this congregation following discharge from the Army, returned to California, and tried about a half-dozen lifeless congregations, which was the evidence I needed to see that there was no Holy Spirit involved, who would have followed me to California - just a gifted religious orator.
Not inferior people, but rather, people relying on an inferior method for deciding what is true about the world. I went through that myself when I rejected faith, meaning considered it an inferior epistemology, and returned to skepticism and empiricism. I doubted my faith-based beliefs and considered the skeptics, to whose ranks I had just returned, correct.
Faith is unevidenced or poorly evidenced belief. It's truth value is nil.
Faith is not rational. Faith is the excuse that people use when they lack good evidence. We were discussing a rational belief and now you have just admitted that your beliefs are irrational.
It is now thought that the heaviest elements are produced by mergers between neutron stars rather than by supernovae.
My garden constantly springs from dirt every year. Dirt did not exist 3.5 billion years ago.
Says you.
Lot of elements in earth or another word is dirt I suppose.
Ok haha. Don't get too earthy please.
Making that irresponsibility into a highest
That's one of the saddest things I've heard on rf
You call pity "sadness talking"?