Massimo on Ghosts

Atheists like to conflate non-material things like ghosts and the first cause with material effects having material causes and therefore providing material evidence. Massimo Pigliucci does so, and manages to completely misuse fallacy theory in the defense of his Philosophical Materialism.

Massimo’s claim that the negative defense is not proper logic goes like this: believing in something because there is no evidence against it does not have the same logical weight as believing in not-something because there is no evidence.

The idea of weighting one irrational belief more than another irrational belief is something new to logic theory as far as I know; I doubt that it will catch on.

The remaining problem with that position is that it doesn’t reflect the issue. The issue is as follows:

If a non-material effect is observed as a temporary material effect by person A, is person A justified in believing that it happened as observed?

And if person B was not there when the non-material effect is observed as a temporary material effect, is person B justified in instructing person C that the event could not have happened, due to lack of evidence?

And is person C justified in claiming that lack of evidence does not indicate evidence of non-existence of the non-material event? And that agnosticism is justified?

Massimo has run into a situation where his daughter, age 13, is more correctly skeptical than he is. Massimo is not skeptical; he is dogmatic. He insists on physical evidence for non-physical phenomena. And he insists in a belief, without positive evidence to defend the belief, that there is no non-physical reality.

He wraps up with the following amazing piece of justification:

”The job of the skeptical critical thinker is to convince people that these seemingly different situations are logically equivalent, and that it is therefore not rational to believe in ghosts without evidence at the same time that one wouldn’t dream of convicting a person of a crime just on the basis that she cannot prove her innocence. But as is often the case, human psychology gets in the way of rational thinking.

Actually the job of a critical thinker is not to be skeptical as an a priori defense against non-material reality. Skepticism in modern terms is a belief system that represents itself to be the repository of rationality. Yet there are certain things that cannot be argued for, and certain things that cannot be argued against in this Skeptical society, or cult, if you will. These dogmas make Skepticism more religious than rational, and contradict the entire concept of Skeptics as rational priests, bringing truth to the masses. They are dogmatic priests bringing Philosophical Materialism and Consequentialist Humanism.

A critical thinker is not tasked with convincing anyone of anything, except convincing himself that he has followed a valid, rational path with available evidence to a rational conclusion, which can include agnosticism regarding the subject. The idea of a skeptical critical thinker, when taken in Massimo’s meaning, is an oxymoron.

The comparison of material evidence of a material crime event in a court situation with evidence of an evanescent, non-material event, is ludicrous. But it is necessary for Materialist, Atheist, dogmatists to represent evidence without qualifiers such as non-material. This is because their logical defects are easier to cover up that way.

And finally, human psychology does get in the way of rational thought; Massimo’s illogic proves that, consistently.

I hope his daughter grows up to think straight anyway, it would be interesting to follow this case. She should know that a burden of proof is always accompanied by a burden of rebuttal, which carries the same evidentiary burden. Someone please tell her.