Can you still be an atheist if you believe in the paranormal?

[vorlon13]

And there is some crypto-biology crap out there that is singularly stupid.

Rods for starters.

And as for weird critters running around America, sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to hit whatever it is with their car. There is no way around it. If it has never turned up as roadkill in the US, it doesn't fucking exist.

Another thing about weird lifeforms; the way the universe is set up, if you can see an object or creature (barring holograms which take equipment) it is because it has electrons in atoms on it's surface reflecting photons into your eyes, and since it is a solid object made of atoms with electrons, it cannot dematerialize if hit by another object and 'pass' through it and you can still see it. Matter doesn't work that way.

[SteelCurtain]

Yeah, me too. It's usually one of the dogs farting. Eventually the smell wafts over and the mystery is clear.

It is never a mystery for long...

[vorlon13]

The cat let loose with a 'silent but deadly' yesterday. He must have snuck a treat of some kind, his regular kibble has never had that effect on his plumbing. I thought there was a stalker in the house when I got a whiff, looked around, and the only one around was the fur ball.

No idea what he snagged, he doesn't jump up on the counters or tables, and he doesn't knock over the trash can either. We have untriggered mouse traps all over the house, so i don't think he has done the predator thing.

?????

[robvalue]

I forever get people saying "There was this noise, and no one was in the house, it was a ghost! What else could it have been?"

Please. They want me to analyse a situation filtered through their faded memory and innate bias, to magically discover the actual natural explanation (which there almost certainly was) and if I can't do that, it's a ghost and they win.

The argument from ignorance. It's too popular. People need to learn some logicz skillsz.

[wiploc]

I forever get people saying "There was this noise, and no one was in the house, it was a ghost! What else could it have been?"

Reminds me of an incident. Back when I was in junior high school, one of my classmates told me that she had heard a flying saucer.

Turned out, we had a new police car in town, with a new kind of siren, somewhat reminiscent of spooky sci-fi noises that might accompany shots of flying saucers in a TV show. So she heard the weird siren, and became convinced she'd heard a flying saucer.

[robvalue]

Haha. Yeah, people experience what they want to experience.

I mean, if there really were ghosts and aliens going around doing all this stuff, you'd be tripping over the bastards. Can you imagine how many ghosts there would be even if only 1 in a million people got ghosted? Oh yeah, people see them too. When on their own.

[Homeless Nutter]

Most of what people perceive as paranormal events are simply our brains f-ing up.

Our brains can re-create pretty much anything they can experience. All of our senses are connected to the brain and their input is automatically processed, filtered and given at least partial meaning by it, before we're even aware of anything. When you see a horse, you don't have to look it up and down, checking its features against your definition of a horse, before you determine what it is (provided you've seen one before). A vaguely horse-like shape automatically makes you think "horse" and you consciously take it from there.

That's why most of the time we don't know, we're dreaming, while we're dreaming, even though the difference in reality perception becomes obvious after awakening. Some part of the brain creates "virtual" sensory inputs, that can fool the "conscious" part, although it's probably just simple signals, like "I'm seeing a horse", or "I'm flying" rather than a full-blown detailed sensual experience. The part of the brain that receives those signals - interprets them just as it does when we're consciously imagining, or remembering something we've experienced. Now, when we're awake - some "circuit" keeps what we perceive and what we imagine separately. When we're sleeping that reality-checking "circuit" is "switched off", or at least impaired, so we can't tell the difference.

According to modern science brain is modular - certain parts are responsible for certain faculties and functions. Ideally - all the modules work perfectly together, but it's possible for one, or more parts to "glitch" - including the one responsible for "reality checks" - sometimes permanently, like when part of a brain is physically damaged, sometimes briefly, because of chemical intoxication, for example (which doesn't have to mean "drugs"- it can be caused by hormonal imbalance, or other chemicals present in our bodies) - without the consciousness being any the wiser.
Schizophrenia sufferers can't tell the difference between things, that are real and things, that are imaginary (there's a theist joke in here somewhere...), because the "reality checking" center in their brains is impaired, even though they're awake. Similar, but momentary effect can be observed in sleep-deprived people. People with Tourette's syndrome are often unaware of their - even very pronounced - verbal outbursts and ticks. Their brains filters those out - even though intuitively it may seem impossible to bystanders.

A good pseudo-paranormal example of healthy brains f-ing up is the experience of "deja vu" - some center in the brain is supposed to detect and inform you - through a feeling of "familiarity" - whenever you're experiencing something you've experienced before (so that you can make use of what you learned the last time, instead of starting from scratch). If that module briefly malfunctions, it gives you the "familiarity" feeling for no reason, which leads to contradicting information from different parts of the brain, that is interpreted as "uncanny" and "inexplicable".

Another good example is sleep paralysis - a well known and documented phenomenon, where a person wakes up, but can not move, because the parts of the brain responsible for controlling the body are still "asleep". It used to happen to me (also - sleepwalking) and it was a pretty unsettling experience, especially that it can be accompanied by hallucinations. I used to wake up in the middle of the night, or early morning with an overwhelming and unexplained sense of fear, able to see my darkened bedroom, but unable to move or wake myself up properly. It would last - in my perception - a few minutes, during which I would sometimes see strangers walking around my room or sitting on my bed. Then I'd fall back asleep, or wake up completely. If I was an irrational person I'd totally believe I was visited by ghosts and NOBODY could tell me I didn't experience what I thought I did.

Brains - like any other living thing - are "imperfect" and prone to malfunctions and mistakes. They've also evolved to err on the side of caution, when detecting entities and patterns - "skeptical" and overly curious cavemen were more likely to be killed by predators, or hostile humanoids, than the ones, who assumed every strange noise or other inexplicable event to be a real threat and fled. That's why we only need two symmetrically placed dots, circles, or blotches and a line, to be able to instinctively "see" a face - ( o_o ) Our survival depended on being able to spot another humanoid at a glance and consequences of missing one were way more dangerous than those of a false positive. Hence, it takes very little for us - especially at night - to interpret an inanimate object outside our window as a face of a stranger, a ghost or an alien, and a weird noise as speech, or other meaningful signal. Our brain really doesn't want to miss anything important, so it makes us look for - and often find - meaning, even where objectively there is none.

Of course - none of that categorically proves there are no truly "paranormal" phenomena. However - we have no proof of those and plenty of proof that human perception and experience are fallible. And Occam's Razor easily deals with this sort of situation.

[Dystopia]

I sometimes wonder if I should classify myself as a asupernaturalist rather than as an atheist. After all, rejecting god leads to rejecting all the supernatural since the arguments are very similar

[robvalue]

God is only supernatural according to the people who presume to define him. They do this because they know how absurd it is to suggest such a being could exist naturally, and so that they can hide him from any sort of scientific evaluation.

But I agree, scepticism logically leads to rejecting anything supernatural, including God nonsense.