A colleague of mine sent me this video on how those who tend to believe in more pseudoscientific phenomena tend to also call upon others to be more open-minded!?? When in fact, from a philosophical stand point, that seems to be a very weak position. There is also a lot to be digested for the Church as well in this video – Turn your brains on and watch this:

There has sense been informal discussions among some Bethel faculty concerning this video, and so I just wanted to let you in on some of that – if your brain doesn’t hurt too much already

“I’m afraid that I detect some biases in these arguments that seem to be at the root of the issue.

Take a look, for instance, at 2:16.  There is a claim that a lack of (natural) explanation giving rise to a conclusion that an event is supernatural is a contradiction.  To quote the video, “In effect, it is saying that ‘I can’t explain something; therefore, I can explain it.’”  I’m afraid this is false.  What’s being claimed is not that a phenomenon cannot be explained, but that it cannot be explained using natural processes.  Thus, the argument is really, “This process cannot be explained through natural processes; therefore, supernatural processes must be employed.”  There are actually arguments like this made in mathematics:  that a particular system (in our case, an axiomatic system) is not sufficient to answer a particular question, so something outside of that system must be brought in to explain it.

While I can appreciate the argument by the person on the left side (at 0:52), the crux of their argument seems to be bashing the “non-scientific person” because they are not open to natural explanations.  At the same time, isn’t the person on the left falling into the same trap by denying (for instance, at 0:17) the possibility of any supernatural explanations for phenomena, thereby also excluding certain conclusions?  I can accept a scathing rebuke of the group on the right that attributes everything to ghosts (though I think a straw man argument has been set up here), but I think there are more than just the two sides.  We appear to have an excluded middle.  Can we not be open to both natural and supernatural explanations?

In fact, this leads down a very interesting road.  How far does one need to go to exhaust natural explanation before it can no longer be invoked?  The analogous questions in math (in terms of axiomatic systems) have answers.  A lot of work was done in these areas since the 1930s and Goedel’s incompleteness theorem.  I am surprised this is not being asked in the scientific community.  The issue I have is, are these questions even being allowed to be asked?  If not, why not?”

Here is another video about how science and religion can work together (not nearly as heavy!), and fight some of the criticisms of Christianinty hating science:

 http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/video/video.php?v=48261586648