A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.
I am the friend OP is referring to and I am also an atheist
Aaah the plot thickens
Don’t you just need to believe in a soul? And haven’t philosophers been pondering that in various ways for a long time?
I think this post on another thread nails the core of the issue for me and it’s pretty independent of religion (since I think potential mechanisms could be independent of religion):
https://fedia.io/m/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world/t/3507873/-/comment/14195254
Its wierd to me when someone does not believe in god because of no evidence but will believe in ghosts, spirits, elves, fairies, aliens, magic, etc with no evidence. To me atheism is not believing in the supernatural at all be it god or the philosphers stone.
It doesn’t need to be supernatural though - just something we don’t yet understand. Aliens aren’t supernatural - they’re just life from a different planet. It’s not just lack of evidence why I don’t believe in God. The whole concept collapses under scrutiny.
Aliens at least seem like something that could conceivably be real. We already know there’s life in the universe. Claiming we’re alone is already a kind of a crazy position in itself.
Ah, I see.
I’d argue we all believe in a thing or two that we don’t have great evidence for when confronted. And I’d argue the size of the collection of things we could believe is mind bogglingly large. So then you end up with combinations like this.
But yeah, agreed from the framing in your comment that believing both is pretty logically inconsistent.
Thinking through this idea a bit more, I think there are a lot of people that would describe themselves as atheists that believe that certain things will improve their health in a way that others would describe as lacking evidence and should be included on that list. If you push on that idea then I think you’d start getting tension and pushback from a lot of atheists. I’m sure there are other categories you could do this with but I’m not thinking of others quickly now.