ghosts

what do evolutionists make out of ghosts? where did they come from?

They don't exist.Pretty simple explanation, huh?

they don't? how about the millions of people who've had an encounter with them? you mean all of them are lying? all of them were hallucinating? ::i myself don't have any experience with ghosts, but there are so many witnesses. it wouldn't be fair to judge them as "Liars" and such, so i thought that probably they exist.

Firstly, there's nowhere near a million people who have had encounters with ghosts. Are they lying? Some of them. Are some hallucinating? Sure. Still others wanted to tell a good story. Others saw or heard something they couldn't explain. Others saw nothing but have very active imaginations.Whith as much weirdness as our brains are capable of doing to us, I don't see any reason to believe that so-called "ghosts" are anything more than imagination, coincidence, or outright fabrication. Not all of them are. Many are just mistaken. Many people are convinced that Walt Disney has been cryogenically frozen but I don't blame them for being wrong.

And if ghosts do exist, what then? Why would you expect a particular evolutionary line on ghosts?Evolution is about the origin of biodiversity. It is not about supernatural questions like the existence of ghosts, spirits or gods.

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Firstly, there's nowhere near a million people who have had encounters with ghosts.

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i bet the number who had encounter with ghosts reached a million. just in one university here in our country(philippines) almost all students had encounter with one. that's no joke.

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Are they lying? Some of them. Are some hallucinating? Sure. Still others wanted to tell a good story. Others saw or heard something they couldn't explain. Others saw nothing but have very active imaginations.

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some of them are lying. that's accepted. some are hallucinating, that's fine. but how come groups of people would have the same hallucination? like the story of Jesus' resurrection. Peter said they saw Jesus, Thomas doubted and said they're imagining things. how can they imagine the same things?

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Whith as much weirdness as our brains are capable of doing to us, I don't see any reason to believe that so-called "ghosts" are anything more than imagination, coincidence, or outright fabrication.

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many of the ghost encounters aren't just one-second thing. there are even pictures(ok, maybe most of them are fabricated) and video footages. we don't have like that on aliens, nor on mermaids.

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And if ghosts do exist, what then? Why would you expect a particular evolutionary line on ghosts?

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Evolution is about the origin of biodiversity. It is not about supernatural questions like the existence of ghosts, spirits or gods.

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ah, ok. i just thought they have an explanation which traces back to the bigbang theory.

For the same reason that people's reports of alien abductions tend to be the same, or sightings of the Loch Ness Monster - it's such a part of our culture, everybody knows what they're "supposed" to see. In a sense, by absorbing human culture, people "agree" on what their ghost stories will be like beforehand.Let me ask you this - if every single ghost story can be explained by deception, hallucination, equipment malfunction, or plain and simple mistake or gullibility, why assume there's any such thing as ghosts? What about that alien autopsy video? Did you know P.T. Barnum had a stuffed mermaid in his show?For what reasons do you reject that evidence that you think don't apply to "evidence" of ghosts? If by that you mean "an explanation commensurate with naturalist philosophy of science", then the explanation is "people see things that simply aren't there, sometimes." Or "some people are way too credulous." There's nothing about the big bang theory itself that has anything at all to do with ghosts. (Or evolution, for that matter.)If ghosts really existed, don't you think somebody would be out there making huge amounts of money on them? They could use the ghost to pass through walls and steal corporate secrets. Governments would employ them as spies. You'd be able to hire them to follow your cheating spouse. Everyone would know there were ghosts because everybody would have access to them. There may be 6 billion people on earth today but the amount of dead people throughout history is astronomically larger. There's easily ten potential ghosts for every person alive today. With those odds, don't you think there should be a lot more ghosts?If the paranormal really existed it would be big business, not the province of corner charlitans.

Just so you don't get me wrong entirely I am not saying
that ghosts definitely do exist.However, without proper investigation we cannot say that
they do not either.What they are is another matter entirely.There is legitemate research that goes on in supposed haunted
locations, and they ocasionally turn up some anomalies
that cannot be convincingly explained away ... so there is
likely 'something' going on in these locales.Perhaps one day, when people stop discounting things out-of-hand,
we may have an answer.

Do these 'anomalies' ever include transparent human figures walking through walls, or headless horsemen? I'd wager they don't, yet those are the very ghosts that so many people believe in.Ghosts are either witnessed by millions of people each year - something that could easily be verified with basic video recording equipment - or they are nothing more than stories embelished by those who don't wish to admit they get spooked by creaky floorboards in old houses.

One should however, have a healthy fear of the movie Ghost due to the fact that Patrick Swayze is such a crap actor it is frightening...in fact placing Swayze and actor in the same sentence should be punishable by being forced to listen to his music which is at about the same level of other musical thespians such as say...Don Johnson.

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Do these 'anomalies' ever include transparent human figures walking through walls, or headless horsemen? I'd wager they don't, yet those are the very ghosts that so many people believe in.

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Well ... no, but few 'eye-witness' accounts of 'ghosts' describe
such things either. Usually when walking through walls is involved
(or above/below ground level) the general description of the
sighting corresponds to times when the walls/floors were at
different levels/locations. 'Eye-witness' testimony is rarely
accepted even in paranormal investigations (anecdotal and all that).I'll stress now ... I'm not saying there are ghosts, what I am
saying is that the phenomena that are reported at supposedly
haunted locations have not been sufficiently investigated to
rule out ghosts (whatever they may be).One feature of hauntings is unexpected, transient electro-magnetic
fields, and such fields have been shown to affect people's moods
(make them axious, elated, etc.). Maybe ghostly apparitions
are just induced hallucinations ... we don't know enough about
them to say one way or the other.There are sufficient reports to be curious, and sufficient
unexplainable anomalies to warrant further investigation.Comes back to my pet-peeve of ruling something out because it
is hard to believe rather than because it has been investigated
sufficiently to rule-out certain explanations.

It is a matter of allocating resources. There are lots of things to be studied and understood better. However, there are limits to the resources available to do so.So judgement calls are made as to where some research my prove to be fruitful in some way.There has, after all, been research into ghosts. It hasn't been very fruitful. Additional research in psychology tells us something about how easily fooled people are. I have, myself, seen things which were not there.
If it was my research career I wounldn't pick that area.

Hi NosyWhat is/was the testable or (falsifiable hypothesis for that matter) in studying ghosts?

Saying that such-and-such is of low priority (though
possibly interesting) so we cannot allocate funds to
its research is one thing ... and perfectly reasonable
in my opinion.What I object to is refusing to consider investigations on
the grounds that 'well that's hardly likely is it.'

I'd be more interested in studying 'haunted locations'.There are numerous locations throughout the world, and especially
the UK, where over the last 100-150 years people have reported
unusual encounters/feelings/sightings etc. The majority of these
defy natural explanation, and 'psychological' factors accounted
for, there appears to be 'something' occurring in these locations.I would like to know what.Many ghostly apparitions have been reported in the same sites
over a number of years by independent observers (some from
ifferent locations on the same occurrance). The reports have
far more correlations than
one would expect by 'being spooked by a sudden noise'.It is not sufficient to prove anything, but seems to me adequate
grounds for considering further investigation.Part of that investigation must include how likely it is for the
observers to have heard the tales or be aware of the 'haunting'.I'm not suggesting that 'ghosts' are the spirits of the departed,
but that 'huanted locations' exhibit phenomena that we do not
as yet understand ... but that might be useful for us to understand.