Where I get my space and science news

Ordinary media (whether news papers, magazines, or news networks) are very unreliable when it comes to reporting new findings in science. They often distort the facts or give misleading information. A good example of that is the false or misleading information they put out about advances in fusion technology. Unfortunately, there are even some popular scientists who distort the facts when they're hungry for media attention. Sometimes I think the reason is just a desire to be sensational because sensationalism sells. Sometimes it's because the people reporting science news just don't understand the science.

Thankfully, we are not at the mercy of these sources anymore. There are actually competent people on YouTube who do a much better job of reporting space and science news than what you can get on TV, magazines, or news papers. I'm going to direct you to four of my favourites.

Fraser Cain (not to be confused with Frasier Crane)
This guy is not a scientist, but he is an unusually competent and knowledgable science journalist, so I recommend him.
https://www.youtube.com/@frasercain/videos

Anton Petrov
This guy is also not a scientist, but I think he used to be a science teacher.
https://www.youtube.com/@whatdamath/videos

Sabine Hossenfelder
Sabine is an actual physicist. She used to mostly talk about topics in physics, but lately she's become more of a science news channel. Besides being interesting and informative, she's also entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/videos

Dr. Becky
Becky is an astrophysicist. Most of her stuff is about stars, galaxies, and astronomy. Her specialty is black holes. Becky is fun to watch becasue of how enthusiastic she is about the topics she discusses.
https://www.youtube.com/@DrBecky/videos

If you're interested in physics, cosmology, astrophysics, or astronomy, you should subscribe to all four of these people. But they do sometimes talk about other things, like other fields of science as well as technology. I highly recommend all four of them.

Crazy times and reductio ad absurdum arguments

There are things people readily believe today there were thought of not merely as incorrect in the past, but as so utterly absurd that they were used in reductio ad absurdum arguments. If you held a point of view that, when taken to its logical conclusion, led in an absurdity, then that cast doubt on the truth of that point of view. That's how ad absurdum arguments used to work.

I can't remember the context, but I remember using an ad absurdum argument in which the absurity was that I claimed to be a black woman even though I'm obviously a white man. The argument probably had to do with whether claiming to be something meant that you were that thing, like claiming to be a Christian even though you denied the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus. That reductio probably wouldn't work today because the absurdity is no longer considered absurd.

About 24 years ago or so when I first started reading pro-life literature, I came across a reductio ad absurdum argument meant to show that the fetus was a distinct organism rather than being a part of its mother. The argument was that if the fetus were a part of the mother (like an organ or an appendage), then you could have a woman with two heads, and in the case of a male fetus, a woman with a penis. If you tried to use that argument today, people would say, "But women can have penises."

We live in crazy times, and it's getting crazier. I wonder if some day reductio ad absurdum argument will no longer be considered a valid way of reasoning. Maybe they will be moved to the "logical fallacies" part of the logic text books since nothing is absurd.

Honest and productive debate and discussion

I become increasingly frustrated listening to panel discussions, interviews, cross examinations, debates, and even just regular conversation between average every day people. It seems like nobody is really interested in what anybody else has to say. Everybody wants to interrupt and talk over the other people. One person will ask a question of another person, but they won't let them answer. Often they will interrupt just to say, "You're not answering my question." Everybody wants to steer the conversation in a certain direction, but nobody else will let them, so nothing really ever gets fleshed out in a conversation. It's all surface level jumping from one topic to another in kind of a multi-directional tug-of-war.

I got into a rabbit hole of binge watching police interrogations on YouTube a few months ago. I noticed a huge difference between the way these interrogations take place and the way TV interviews, debate cross examination, and Congressional testimony goes down. The difference is that the police give the suspects as much room to talk as they can. They do everything they can to keep them talking, hoping all the while that they don't invoke their right to remain silent. The reason is because they know that the more the person talks, the more likely they are to give up a piece of information the police can use. So they don't interrupt the suspect even when they know the suspect is lying or being evasive. If the suspect has a story to tell, the cops will let them go on and on, and the cops listen to everything they say.

Why the difference? Well, I think it's because in most cases, we aren't actually interested in what other people have to say. We're just interested in what we have to say. We want to be heard, but we don't want others to be heard, especially when they disagree with us. We're not actually interested in learning anything from anybody. We just want others to learn from us. Often we don't think others have anything to teach us, but we think we have something to teach them. There is a general lack of respect we have toward people who see things differently than we do.

The police are trying to find out the truth. They know they're going to be lied to if the person is guilty, but even lies can be useful information. If somebody is in a debate, interview, or cross examination, the object isn't to find out the truth, but to win the conversation. In the case of Congressional testimony, it's often just posturing.

Of course the police can be very manipulative. I'm not claiming they're more honest than the rest of us. I'm just attributing their tactics to the difference in goals. I think that we should be more like the police in these interrogations, not in the sense of being manipulative, but in the sense of letting others speak and listening to them with the goal of eventually revealing the truth. The police, more than politicians, the media, apologists, or just your friends, family, and neighbors, are very interested in what the other person has to say. They make it their goal to draw them out as much as possible, to get them to say as much as possible, and to think carefully about what they are saying.

That is what we should do. Sometimes, we'll ask a question that's based on our assumptions or frame of reference, but if the other person doesn't share those assumptions or frame of references, and they try to respond, it's going to sound at first like they're not asnwering our question, and we're going to be tempted to interrupt them and say, "Just answer the question!" But we shouldn't do that. Instead, we should hear them out. Let them talk. Maybe it'll turn out that we had a misunderstanding. Maybe they'll make some necessary clarification we hadn't anticipated. Maybe they'll say something that doesn't directly answer the question we're asking but still contributes meaningfully to the conversation. Maybe it will reveal more clearly where the misunderstanding lies or why it seems like you're talking past each other. At the very least, it will give us more information about what's going on in the other person's head.

And besides that, it's the polite thing to do. As I said before, we all want to be heard. That's why we interrupt and talk over people. With that being the case, you should strive to be the one that's listening. It's an act of kindness and a show of respect to hear somebody out, show curiosity, listen to them, and think about what they are saying. One of the best compliments I've ever recieved was when somebody said, "I thought about what you said."

If you're an apologist (whether for theism, atheism, capitalism, socialism, or whatever), and you really want to advance your point of view, it still behooves you to hear the other person out and let them speak as much as possible. Just as in the case of the police, that will give you information to work with. You are in a better position to reason with somebody if you know how their mind works, what they already believe, and how they think. So you should make an effort to draw people out and not get flustered when they aren't directly answering your questions the way you'd like. You should still let them finish because they might say something else you didn't know but can use. Or it might be that they just have a round-about-way of communicating, in which case you just need to be patient.

In my own case, I can tell you that I often interrupt people because they are throwing too much information at me at once, and I can't process all of it. I need it in smaller doses so I can think about it and ask questions. If somebody monologues for ten minutes, and I have all kinds of things to say while they're talking, I'm not going to remember any of it when their ten minutes is up, and they want me to respond. Sometimes straining my brain to keep track of something somebody says so I can respond to it when they're done makes it difficult for me to pay attention to the rest of what they have to say. That's not as big of a problem in a classroom setting because I expect the lecturer to monologue, and I take notes so I can ask questions about something they may have said fifteen minutes earlier. Of course conventional wisdom is that you should listen to understand rather than listening to respond, but in reality, we do both. One does not simply give up the urge to respond, and one shouldn't give up the urge to ask follow-up questions.

I suspect I'm not alone and that some of you might interrupt people for a similar reason. While this post is mainly geared toward encouraging you to be a good listener, and not to be the obnoxious interrupter, I don't want to end this post without also saying that you should strive to be patient with those who interrupt you and who seem like they aren't listening to you. Maybe they aren't, but not all interrupting is a sign of disrespect or disinterest. The case of interrupting to keep your train of thought is just one example. Another is interrupting on accident because you thought the other person was done when they were just pausing for dramatic effect.

But even when people interrupt for bad reasons, we should be patient with those people, too. Dealing with people in general requires patience because none of us are perfect. We're all sinners, we can all be selfish, and we're all a little bit self-absorbed. If you can't be patient with people, you're going to grow to dislike people more and more as you get old, and then you're going to be all alone.

Here's a link to another post I made that's related to this subject: Just Answer: Yes or No?

David Grusch is probably lying, and other thoughts on aliens and UFO's

As much as I would like to find out there are aliens among us, I don't think there are. But I'm hopeful enough that I watched the interview with David Grusch. Before watching the interview, I was suspicious of the story because of my general skepticism toward alien visitation. I didn't know whether he was deceiving or was himself deceived, though. In clips I saw before the full interview, I got the impression that he hadn't seen any evidence of aliens himself. He was getting all his information from other people. But now, having seen the full interview, I think it's more likely that he's lying than that he believes what he's saying and is just duped.

First, there's just a vibe I get from his manerisms and the way he talks that gives me a subjective feeling that he's lying. I used to put no confidence in this sort of thing until experience taught me that when my gut tells me something about somebody, it's usually right. Of course it's a stronger impression with some people than with others, and in his case, my gut wasn't screaming that he's lying. It was just elbowing me that he's lying.

Second, he engaged in a little psuedoscientific non-sense during the interview. At the 7:50 mark, he appeals to his physics background to raise the possibility that they could be interdimensional beings. He says, "I couch it as somebody who studied physics where maybe they're coming from a different physical dimension as described in quantum mechanics. We know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions, etc., and there's a theoretical framework to explain that, yeah." The theoretical framework he's probably referring to is string theory (or M theory) because that's the only viable theory in physics that involves extra dimensions. In the most current version of string theory, there are ten spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. We only see three spatial dimensions because the others are all compactified. Individual strings can vibrate within the extra dimensions, which is what gives particles their properties, but you couldn't have a whole civilizations living in them with living beings that could travel back and forth between those dimensions and ours. That makes no sense within string theory. It treats these extra dimensions as if they are different three dimensional realms like ours that a being could living in and be separate from our three dimensions. That is the stuff of science fiction, but it has no relationship to real physics, not even string theory. But worse than that, his claim that we know there's extra dimensions due to high energy particle collisions is flat out false. There's no evidence at all that string theory is true other than its internal consistency and its prediction of gravity, and there have been no studies at CERN or any other collider showing anything at all about extra dimensions. This is all psuedoscientific nonsense, and I think the fact that he appeals to his own study of physics to make these claims shows that he's lying.

Third, he used words (or tried to use words) that are obviously not part of his usual vocabulary. This shows that he's pretentious. He's trying to come across as more intelligent, professional, and authoritative than he really is. I'm always a little suspicious when people behave that way. For example, he said, ". . .true nonprosaic UAP situation could be constrived as, you know, a provocation. . ." (32:00) Constrived isn't a word. He probably meant to say "construed," but he got it mixed up with "contrived." He came across as pretentious in his word choices throughout the interview, and the whole thing just raised my suspicions about his honesty.

Pretentiousness is something I've noticed with some Christian apologists, too. I noticed it a lot with Ravi Zacharias. It isn't just speaking intelligently or with a good vocabulary. William Lane Craig speaks intelligently, but he rarely strikes me as pretentious. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I recognize it when I hear it. It comes in unnecessary word flourishes or obscure word choices when more common words work just as well or better. People sometimes say things like "constrived" when they're trying too hard.

Pretentiousness has its place, though. If you're writing poetry or some literary masterpiece or you're trying to get published or noticed, it makes sense to be a little pretentious. In those cases, you're trying to dazzle or impress. But if you're just trying to communicate information, the object should be clarity over other considerations, and too many times I've seen people sacrifice clarity in an effort to appear intelligent, sophisticated, or authoritative. It's especially noticeable when somebody tries too hard and doesn't fully understand the words they're using.

To be fair, though, there's at least one thing that counts in favour of Grusch's honesty. Allegedly, he testified under oath about these things. So, he put himself at risk of some kind of prosecution if he's caught lying. That does count in his favour. It's not enough to convince me, though, because I don't know what he actually said under oath. I just saw the interview. He wasn't under oath during the interview. For that matter, I'm not certain he testified under oath. I only heard that he did. I suspect he probably did because he does seem eager to have Congress or somebody look into these things. At the very least, you'd think he'd be willing to testify under oath.

I'm not saying that I know, am uttelry convinced, or that I'm absolutely sure that Grusch is lying. I think he's probably lying, but I could be wrong. That's all I'm saying.

Let me say something about my skepticism that aliens are visiting us. First, I don't claim that it's impossible. I just think it's highly unlikely for a few reasons.

I used to think it was nearly impossible that aliens have visited us becasue of an argument I used to have. The only reason a civilization would go to the enormous trouble of singling out another solar system among the billions that exist in our galaxy is if there were something that set it apart, and about the only thing that would set one apart is if it had life (especially intelligent or advanced life) on it. The only way aliens could know there was intelligent life on our planet was through our radio waves. The farthest our radio transmissions could possibly have traveled by now is 100 light years. The fastest anybody could possibly travel is near light speed. So the farthest any aliens who visit us could be is 50 light years away. That gives 50 years for our radio signals to alert them that we were here, and another 50 years to travel here. But realistically, our early radio waves are too weak to be detected 50 light years away, and realistically there's probably no aliens near us that could travel at nearly the speed of light. So realistically, any aliens visiting us are probably no more than 20 light years away, which is still generous. A civilization capable of traveling that distance would surely have more radio signals than we have, and since we've searched the skies for decades and haven't detected any alien radio signals, they're probably not within 20 light years of us.

This argument isn't nearly as strong as I originally thought because there are other ways for aliens to detect us than radio waves. They could detect life on our planet through spectroscopy. We are developing telescopes that can take the light that shines from a distance star, through the atmosphere of one of its planet, to a prism or something, breaking that light into its separate wavelengths. By looking at the spectrum, we can figure out what the atmosphere of that planet is made of since different chemicals absorb specific wavelengths of light. This could, potentially, allow us to detect life on other planets since organic life can release chemicals into the atmosphere that aren't produced any other way than by organic processes. With a more powerful telescope, we could do these observations for more and more distant stars. So it's possible life was discovered on our planet as much as a billion years ago by a civilization as much as a thousand light years away. Any aliens living closer than that might have time to reach us. It could be that aliens have been visiting our planet for millions of years.

But I'm still very skeptical. I think my argument was right that aliens wouldn't attempt to come here unless they had some really compelling reason to do so and that the knowledge of life here (or at least the high probability of life here) is about the only thing that could single us out. Well, there's that and proximity. If there were life in the Proxima Centauri system, they might send probes here just because we're nearby.

One reason I'm skeptical is because I think life is probably rare in the galaxy, and intelligent advanced life comparable to our own is vanishingly rare. The reason I suspect life in general is rare is because of the difficulty scientists have had in figuring out how we got from simple organic compounds, to self-replicating RNA, to fully formed cells. I suspect the difficulty is because it was a fluke, unlikely, extremely rare series of events. Besides that, it seems to have only happened once on our planet. Or if it did happen more than once, none of the other lines of transmission have survived.

Some people say the fact that it happened so early on our planet shows that it's not an unlikely event. I used to think that was a good argument, but I don't anymore. The fact that life started very early on our planet might be an observer selection effect. It took four billion years to go from single celled organisms to intelligent human beings. If it's normal for intelligent life to take that long to develop, then life would have to start early on any planet that has intelligent life. If life started too late, then there wouldn't be enough time for intelligent beings to evolve. At the very most, we've only got about a billion more years before all life ceases to exist on this planet because our sun is getting hotter and brighter all the time. So if life started three billion years ago instead of four billion years ago, intelligent life would never have evolved on our planet. So any planet with intelligent life comparable to our own might have to be a planet where life happened to start early. The fact that life started early on our planet, then, might be due to an observer selection effect rather than because it's easy or likely for life to arise from simple compounds.

So I suspect that life in general is rare in the galaxy. If there is life all over the galaxy, the vast majority of it is probably just single celled life. It took three billion years on our planet to go from single celled life to multicellular life. The jump to multicellular life must have been an extremely unlikely event. The unlikelihood of it is bolstered by an argument I've heard from Paul Scott Pruett and others about how rare functional sequences of amino acids are compared to non-functional sequences of a given length, like the average size of a protein molecule. So I suspect that the jump from single celled organisms to multicellular life is also rare on other planets.

There are a long series of unlikely events that happened on our planet that resulted in our being here. I don't want to go into those details because this post would be too long if I did. I just want to say that given hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, it might not be impossible that it's happened more than once. Even so, I still think exo-planets containing intelligent life would be few and far between. So it is highly unlikely that there's another advanced civilization near enough to make traveling here feasible.

But let's suppose there is or has been an intelligent species within 10 light years of us. There are still a lot of filters that might prevent them from ever coming here. One is the question of how long intelligent civilizations usually last. It seems like the longer ours lasts, the more likely it starts looking like we're going to destroy ourselves through nuclear war or destroying the planet through exploitation. There's also natural disasters that cause mass extinctions. We've had several mass extinctions on our planet. So it's hard to say how long intelligent species last on average and whether any would last long enough to develop the technology needed for interstellar travel. Even if a species isn't wiped out, they could be seriously set back. Our civilization becomes more and more fragile the more we rely on electricity and satelites. If we had a coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event today, it would cause far more damage to society than it caused in the 1850's, and it seems like it's just a matter of time before that happens.

Distance is a huge obstacle to any species wanting to travel to other solar systems. Unless they can travel near the speed of light, there's not much hope of getting anywhere within one lifetime. You can imagine intergenerational ships to overcome this problem, but that has problems of its own since energy, food, and resources have to come from somewhere. Plus, it has to be worth it to the passengers, and they better hope their ship doesn't break down on the way. The technology needed for something like that isn't just a few years away. It's probably thousands of years away. It's a major undertaking.

There are obstacles in space, too. Two of the biggest are radiation and rocks. The James Webb Space Telescope was hit by a grain of sand or something shortly after it deployed. Space debris is everywhere, and it's traveling super fast. You would have to travel super fast to get to another solar system in a reasonable amount of time. A small pebble could destroy your ship at that speed. Any ship that hopes to overcome the radiation and particulate matter on a long space voyage would have to have some massive and very powerful shielding.

It is theoretically possible to overcome all these obstacles, of course, but each obstacle makes it less and less likely that aliens have ever visited earth. I'm open to the possibility of aliens being here, and a part of me really hopes they are and that we'll find out for sure because that would be extremely cool. But I'm just very skeptical.

As far as the videos and things about aliens that have come out in the last few years, I've seen Mick West's attempts at explaining them, and I find all his explanations so convincing that it's safe to say in most case he proved that they are not aliens or highly advanced aerial spaceships of some kind. I'm not a UFO junky, so I haven't looked at everything that's out there, but I suspect what I haven't seen is probably just more of the same. Maybe some of it still defies explanation, but that doesn't mean it's aliens. It just means we don't know what it is.

I want to say one more thing just to be fair. There's this argument I've been hearing from other skeptics that goes something like this: It is unbelievable that an alien civilization so advanced that they could visit our planet would crash as much as David Grusch and others say they have. I think that's a poor argument for a couple of reasons.

First, the more difficult it is to complete a mission, then more failures we should expect there to be. When we advanced to the point of being able to drive cars instead of using horses and buggies, we starting having more accidents, not fewer. Traveling to Mars requires the most advanced technology we are capable of, yet half of all Mars missions end in failure. So the failure rate seems to go up as technology advances and as we attempt more and more difficult missions. A mission to another solar system is agreed by all to be extremely difficult, so why shouldn't we expect failures on the part of anybody who tries it? If we sent a thousand probes using solar sails to Proxima Centauri, should we expect that just because we were able to get there that we should also be able to land them all safely? Of course not. We shouldn't expect to land any of them at all. We should rather be lucky that a fraction make it there just to take some pictures before crashing or ending up in orbit somewhere.

A second reason I don't think the too-advanced-to-crash argument is a good argument is because without knowing how many aliens visitors we actually have, we have no idea what the crash rate is. 12 out of 50 is a much higher crash rate than 12 out of a million. If we grant that aliens are here, then we also have to grant that they have some kind of cloaking capabilities since they are so elusive. If they have some way of hiding, there could be millions for all we know, and 12 crashes is an extremely low crash rate. I see no reason to think any degree of technological advancement would give a species an infallible flying record.

Another bad argument I've heard from more than one skeptic is that a species advanced enough to travel here would be uninterested in visiting because we are so primitive that we are like ants to them. That's a terrible argument. We are planning to send probes to Europa and Enceledus in the desperate hope to find mere microbial life. Finding anything comparable to ant life would be wildly exciting. So even if we were like ants to another species, that doesn't mean we would be uninteresting to them. Also, the fact that they were more technologically advanced than us wouldn't mean they were any more intelligent than us. If we discovered something like cave men in the Proxima Centauri system, you can bet that we'd be pouring all our scientific and engineering efforts into sending a probe there to have a closer look.

I guess that's about all I have to say about alien stuff. I also think the incident in Las Vegas was a hoax that got out of hand.

Are there philosophical zombies among us?

I sometimes wonder, jokingly, whether there are really philosophical zombies among us. A philosophical zombie is a human being that behaves like any other human being except that it's all mechanical. There's no mind behind the behavior, no consciousness, etc. Philosophical zombies are just machines.

One reason I've wondered about this is because there are some serious philosophers who deny the existence of consciousness. I talked about that in this post. Or some people seemed to be confused about what consciousness even is. Anybody who is conscious knows they are conscious and what it means to be conscious, so anybody who denies these things or behaves as if they are confused about it might be a philosophical zombie.

There's another point of view out there--I think it's called analytical behaviorism--that tries to explain things like pain and desire purely in terms of behavior. For example, they might say that pain is just the tendency to say, "Ouch!" in certain situations. These people try to get away from using mental language at all. It's all just behavior. To me, that sounds exactly like what's going on with philosophical zombies. They just behave, but there's no felt experience of pain behind their expressions. There's no desire or motive behind anything they do; it's just mechanical action.

If there are really people who say that (I shy away from saying, "think that,"), then maybe it's because they really are philosophical zombies. Because otherwise, they'd know it wasn't true.

I suppose the one exception might be in the case of epiphenomenalists. These are people who believe in minds and consciousness, but they don't believe minds and consciousness have any influence over our behavior. Mental states are just the inert byproducts of processes in the brain. The brain gives rise to mental states, but the mental states don't give rise to behavior. The direction of causation (or entailment) only goes one way.

For all practical purposes, if epiphenomenalism were true (at least in the case of some people), then people are as good as philosophical zombies. We shouldn't expect that their behavior is indicative of anything that's going on in their minds. They could be saying and behaving one way while thinking and feelings something completely different. There's no reason in the world for evolution to have produced brains that generate minds and behaviors that correspond to each other since minds don't do anything. Smashing somebody's finger might actually feel good to them in spite of their crying out as if they were in pain. Their behavior is purely mechanical and can be accounted for purely in the language of physics and chemistry without reference to anything like desire, motive, belief, sensation, or feeling.

I don't actually believe there are philosophical zombies among us, but sometimes it seems like the only explanation for how people seem to seriously embrace these obviously false ideas. I say, "seem" because, of course, they don't really believe these things if they really are philosophical zombies. They're just behaving.

Did first century Jews believe in ghosts?

I recently saw a discussion/debate between Bart Ehrman and Justin Bass on YouTube. During the discussion, Ehrman made an interesting argument. He believes that Peter, Paul, James (the Lord's brother), and Mary Magdeline all saw something they took to be the risen Jesus. His explanation for why they interpreted it as the risen Jesus was because first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts, so any seeing of Jesus would've been interpreted as a bodily resurrected Jesus.

If Bart's argument is sound, it would undermine an argument I've been making for a long time. My argument is that grief hallucinations and things like that never lead to belief in resurrections, and given the emphasis in some of the Biblical accounts on the physicality of Jesus (e.g. touching him and him eating), it makes more sense to say their experience was different than a mere hallucination. They must've touched him and/or witnessed him eating or something that would cause them to think he had really risen from the dead because otherwise, they would've interpreted it as just a halluciation, vision, ghost, mistaken identity, dream, Jesus didn't die, etc. There were lots of other ways they'd be more likely to interpret what they saw if it were just a hallucination. Resurrection is the very last thing anybody would think if they saw somebody who appeared to be alive but who they knew had died. The fact that they came to that conclusion probably means they had some real convincing physical interaction with Jesus, just as the New Testament reports they did.

Given the way I've argued for Jesus' resurrection in the past, I found Bart's argument really interesting. But I have two problems with it. First, I don't think Bart is right that first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts. There are a few things that came to mind. First, I remember N.T. Wright going into some detail in his book on Jesus' resurrection about ancient beliefs about the afterlife, and although it's been a long time, I vaguely remember him saying first century Jews did believe in ghosts. My copy of his book is in storage right now, so I can't look it up to be sure.

Second, there are at least a couple of times in the New Testament when it says the disciples thought they were seeing or hearing a ghost. The first time was in Luke 24 when the disciples saw Jesus and thought at first that he was a ghost. The second time was in Acts 12 when Peter escaped from prison and knocked on the door where the disciples were hanging out. They assumed Peter had been killed, and it must be his ghost. Bart could answer that by saying Luke wasn't a Jew, and this represents a later belief of gentile Christians, not Jews. On the other hand, when Jesus walked on water, Mark 6 and Matthew 14 both say the disciples thought they were seeing a ghost at first. Mark's gospel certainly wasn't written by a gentile, and Matthew's probalby wasn't either.

Third, there's that passage in 1 Samuel 28 when Saul has the witch of Endor raise Samuel's ghost. It may have been unusual, but surely any Jew familiar with the story would believe there can be ghosts.

Fourth, Bart may be talking about the official Jewish beliefs held by professional Jewish teachers, not the popular beliefs of every day Jews. Sadduccees probably didn't believe in ghosts, but they didn't believe in resurrections either. I don't know about Pharisees. But considering how there were Jews living all over the Roman empire, and not just in Judea, and the fact that Greeks and most other cultures believed in ghosts, it seems very likely to me that ordinary Jews probably believed in ghosts. At least some of them did.

Fifth, a quick google search found multiple web pages claiming that ancient Jews did believe in ghosts.

Sixth, it at least appears in a few passages written by Paul (like 2 Corinthians 5:1-5 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14) that Paul believed in ghosts or at least a disembodied existence between death and resurrection. Since Paul was a well-educated first century Jew, that surely counts for something.

I will have to look into this subject a little more, but I strongly suspect Bart was just wrong to say first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts. I guess a seventh point might be that if someboddy saw a person they knew to be dead, that very experience could cause them to believe in ghosts even if they didn't believe in ghosts up to then.

The second problem I have with Bart's argument is that even if Bart is right that first century Jews didn't believe in ghosts, we still have to face the fact that grief hallucinations are fairly common, yet they never lead to belief that somebody has risen from the dead. If, as Bart says, the only way the disciples could have interpreted their experience was that Jesus had risen from the dead, and also, as Bart said, hallucinations of dead loved ones is fairly common, then we should expect first century Jews to believe people rose from the dead all the time. Yet that is not what we find. We find, instead, that they believed in a final general resurrection on the last day. So my original point would still stand even if Bart were right about Jews not believing in ghosts. There would still have to be something that was different in the case of the appearances of Jesus that would lead them to believe he had risen from the dead.

While Bart makes an interesting argument that I will probably look into and think about some more, right now I don't think it's a sound explanation for why Peter, James, Paul, and Mary Magdeline thought Jesus rose from the dead.

Schizophrenia and the problem of the external world

This morning I was thinking about that post I made a couple of days on schizophrenia and prophecy. There, I was talking specifically about how you might be able to tell whether some experience you had was a hallucination or not. It seems easier to rule visions, prophecies, etc. out than to rule them in. This morning, I was thinking about the problem more generally.

A person with schizophrenia might have all kinds of delusions and hallucinations. They're not limited to spiritual things. How might a person with schizophrenia tell whether they are seeing something that's really there or not? I'm not a psychiatrist or anything, but having read a lot about psychosis and schizophrenia, including testimonies from people who have it, I get the impression that for them, the hallucinations seem every bit as real as what the rest of us see on a daily basis. How do we know any of it is real? Maybe we all have schizophrenia, and none of this is real.

The problem of the external world comes from the fact that while it seems like we are more than reasonable in thinking that what our senses are telling us about what appears to be a world that exists outside of our minds is basically accurate, there's no way to prove it. It could all just be perception in our minds. I remember putting this problem to somebody one time, and him telling me, "Well, if I see a goat, and you tell me you see it, too, then I know there's a goat out there." But how does he know I'm out there? He's assuming the very thing that's under dispute. He only knows I'm out there telling him about the goat because he already trusts his sensory perception of me.

I've wrestled with that problem a lot and have come down on the side of weak foundationalism. There are just some items of knowledge that are built in. We don't infer them from anything else. They are a priori. We should assume things are basically like they appear to be unless we have really good reason to think otherwise. I've written about this in a few places.

Working Out an Epistemology
Knowledge By Sensory Perception
It's always more reasonable to affirm the obvious than to deny the obvious.

This epistemology doesn't depend on our sensory perceptions be infallible. Even the most mentally healthy among us see mirages and illusions from time to time, and we have dreams that at least seem real while we're having them. Our senses can and do deceive us. My epistemology only depends on our senses being generally reliable.

But it would seem my epistemology could be problematic for somebody with schizophrenia. If they saw an elephant floating in the air in front of them all of a sudden, that elephant may seem every bit as real as the tree just off to the left that's really there. If they apply my thumb rule, they will assume the elephant is real until they have good reason to think otherwise.

If somebody with schizophrenia sees something strange, and the person next to them doesn't see it, that might provide them with good reason to think it's not really there. But then how can they be sure the person next to them is really there? Does this undermine my whole epistemology, or do we just have to make an exception in the case of people with schizophrenia? Can people with schizophrenia have a justified belief in what their senses are telling them? Does epistemology work differently for them?

This seems even more problematic when it comes to the subject of visions. According to the Bible, some people really do see visions that are inspired by God. It is likely that had anybody been with Daniel or Ezekiel when they had their visions, nobody else would've seen what they saw. Should they have concluded it was a hallucination if the person with them couldn't verify it? Or should they continue to affirm what seems obvious to them until an even better reason comes along that disconfirms it, like I talked about in my last post? If they are justified in believing the visions even if nobody else saw them, then are people with schizophrenia justified in believing their hallucinations until something comes along to disconfirm it?

I'm enclined to think a person with schizophrenia who doesn't know they have schizophrenia is justified in believing their hallucinations. It is possible to be justified in believing something that is false. But it also seems to me there are lots of ways a person with schizophrenia can discover that what they are seeing isn't real.

Plantinga has this thought experiment in which you see what appears to be a dog in a field, so you conclude it's a dog. But then you find out there's a pill that can make you think you're seeing a dog every time you look at a sheep. Moreover, you know you just took that pill, and your host just told you there's a sheep in the field. That would destroy any warrant for trusting your senses about what appears to be a dog. Well, finding out you have schizophrenia could be just like that scenario. You've discovered that your belief-producing cognitive faulties aren't working right, so you have reason to doubt them. But without that information, it seems to me you would've been justified in believing it was a dog you were seeing. In the same way, I think a person suffering from psychosis can be justified in believing what they are seeing if they don't know they have psychosis.

There are lots of good reasons a person with psychosis might have to doubt what they are seeing. They might doubt it because (1) the person with them doesn't see it, (2) it's very strange or unusual, or (3) they know they have psychosis. Unless I have psychosis and just don't know it yet, I don't know what it's like. While some of them say their hallucinations seem just as real as everything else, it makes me wonder how they can ever be sure of anything. But presumably they are. A lot of them are functioning okay by using their sensory perceptions. They're just seeing a lot of extra stuff. Some of them learn to distinguish between the real and the hallucination. It would be interesting to meet a weak foundationalist who knew they had schizophrenia to see what they would say about all these things.

Are prophets just people with schizophrenia?

Prophets are people who receive communication from God and relay it to other people. That's the most general definition I can give. In the Bible, prophets recieve these communications in different ways. They might hear an audible voice from God, see a vision, have a dream, or are just given some insight that they couldn't have otherwise known. Sometimes we aren't told how they acquired the information. The prophecies may concern the future, or it may concern the present. It can contains warnings, commands, explanations, or any number of things.

There are people in our present day who claim to receive communications from God, the dead, or other spiritual entities. Maybe you are one of those people. How can we know whether these things really come from God or whether they are just hallucinations, delusions, or misinterpreted dreams? How could anybody have ever known that? How do we know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aren't all ultimately rooted in false prophets or people with some sort of psychosis, like schizophrenia?

If you're an atheist, no doubt you'll think they are all rooted either in liars or in people with some kind of psychosis. If you're a naturalist, then you wouldn't think any sort of prophecy can take place. It must all be lies, delusions, and hallucinations.

If you're a Christian, then you can take the apologetic route. Historically, Jesus claimed to be sent from God, then rose from the dead, vindicating his claim. Then Jesus becomes a credible source. He endorsed the Old Testament prophets, so we should, too.

But what about those ancient Jews who pre-dated Jesus? How could they have known? The Bible gives two tests. The first test makes a lot of sense. If somebody claims to speak from God, and what they say doesn't happen, then they have spoken presumptuously. This test only applies to prophecies that make falsifiable claims, though. If they predict the future, for example, and things don't happen the way they said, then we know that didn't come from God. But not all prophecies can be checked out in that way.

This first test is a negative test--it can tell you if a prophecy does not come from God, but it can't tell you if a prophecy does come from God. It is possible for a false prophet to make accurate predictions about the future or to give accurate information about the world. This can happen because a person got lucky, or because a person can just see the trajectory of history, or because of some nefarious spiritual entity. So while making false prophecies does disprove that it came from God, making accurate prophecies is not sufficient to prove that a prophecy did come from God.

There's a second test in those cases. The second test is that if in the course of portraying oneself as a prophet, they attempt to lure you away from the one true God of Israel and toward some other god, then that person is also a false prophet. A test like that could be valuable if it has already been established that YHWH is the one true God, but it wouldn't be helpful in telling you which god is the one true God. How could Abraham have known that God was communicating with him? The fact that Sarah got pregnant might be a good sign, but it's not a guarantee.

There's a third way to test prophets in the Old Testament, and it involves signs and wonders. Moses parted the sea, and Elijah caused fire to come down from the sky. Only a mass hallucination could've faked those events.

I don't think people have changed all that much, physically and mentally, over the last three thousand years. I suspect that just as a certain fraction of the population today suffers from schizophrenia, the same was probably true in the past. So there likely were people in the past who had hallucinations, dreams, visions, and all sorts of things that they interpreted as being messages from God. They didn't have medication for it either. How might they have known (or their family and friends have known) whether they were mentally ill or were really receiving divine communication?

We have a couple of advantages today that they didn't have. First, we know more about mental illnesses today than they did then. Second, we have medication that can treat psychosis. Both of these can provide us with further tests.

If you or somebody you know experiences what appears to be visions, audible voices, impressions, or anything of a spiritual nature or that might have a supernatural source, one way to test that is to see whether medication makes any difference. For example, some Christians claim that demons are harrassing them. If you take medication for psychosis, this shouldn't do anything to prevent a demon from engaging in the same behavior. So if it really is a demon, then you shouldn't expect medication to make a difference. But if the medication does make a difference, then it probably wasn't demons. It was all in your head. The same is true for voices, visions, or anything.

People who suffer from schizophrenia often have multiple symptoms besides just hallucinations. People with schizophrenia often suffer depression and anxiety, have a tendency to withdraw from social interaction, are sometimes paranoid, irritable, and have a hard time getting along with others. If your exeriences are accompanied by all the other symptoms of schizophrenia, then it's more likely to be psychosis than real spiritual activity.

Concerning that last test, this is something ancient people would've noticed as well. One doesn't have to be a trained psychologist to recognize when somebody might have mental problems. So it may be than ancient people could distinguish between somebody in their right mind who claimed to have supernatural visions or receive messages, and somebody who wasn't in their right mind making the same claims.

There's always going to be some people who seem to be mentally healthy, still claim to receive prophecies or have other spiritual experiences, but who are either lying or delusional. If they don't make claims about the future, or reveal hidden things that can be checked out, or urge you to follow other gods, it can be hard to know what to make of it. If you're a cessationist, then you can dismiss it, but what if you're a non-cessationist?

In most cases, you can just ignore it. You don't need to know whether it's from God or not. The Bible is sufficient for theology, wisdom, and moral living. While some overt word from God might be useful to us, it isn't necessary to lead a full Christian life. So if somebody claims to be a prophet or to have a word from God on something, you don't need to stress out about whether it's from God or not. If you have no way to verify whether it's from God or not, you can take the advice on its own merits. If it's good advice, then do it. If it's bad advice, then don't do it. Most of these messages from God I hear from other Christians sound like something out of a fortune cookie. It's possible it's from God, but it doesn't really matter because it doesn't affect the decisions I make. In general, I tend to be skeptical. If God wants to get a message through to me, I think he will, so I don't wring my hands over whether somebody else's message from God really is from God or not even though I'm a non-cessationist.