The difficulty there will be in quantifying the quality of evidence and in deciding what quantity/quality level constitutes "sufficient evidence". That's typically going to be a very individual matter, since the 'sufficiency' here typically means 'sufficient to persuade me'.
Actually, for the most part, there is widespread agreement in the scientific and rational-thinking communities about what kinds of evidence constitute sufficient evidence for the existence of something, or more generally for the truth of a proposition. After all, we've had literally thousands of years as an intelligent species to work some of this stuff out.
What's a little strange here is
your willingness to throw out the sort of critical thinking you claim to pride yourself on, just as soon as something comes along that you really
want to believe is true, presumably for emotional or social reasons.
And since that in turn is a personal/subjective matter, it will usually be a function of what our beliefs were going in.
Is that a door we see in front of us? How are we to decide? Maybe we could look at it, or touch it, or try knocking on it, or trying opening it and walking through it.
Or maybe we should just step back and carefully evaluate our prior beliefs. Are doors something we
ought to believe in? Have we ever seen anything like a door before? What are the chances that doors have evolved, somewhere in the universe? What are the chances that doors are visiting Earth? I hear some people took some photos of doors; maybe we should look at those, although some of them are admittedly a bit out of focus. Let us ask ourselves: are we emotionally and intellectually
ready to discover whether this is a door? Have we, perhaps, concluded before any investigation that doors can't possibly exit? Surely not! That would be so closed-minded, although I've heard some people say that there are dogmatic skeptics who won't admit there are doors, no matter what. But me and you (especially you) are much more open to the weird other-worldly possibility that doors might exist.
We haven't dismissed the possibility out of hand.
Look, let's just walk away, but bear in mind the possibility that this
could be an actual, true-to-life door in front of us. If only there was some way we could be more confident about whether
this one is actually a door. Oh well. Let's leave.
It will take a lot more to persuade somebody to accept the reality of something whose existence he/she doesn't already accept (for me, ghosts) than it will to persuade somebody of the reality of something that they already accept and perhaps expect.
Generally, I find that it doesn't take very much persuading at all to talk somebody into believing in the reality of something they already believe is real. Funny, that.
In other words, our worldview going in will inevitably bias our perception of the "sufficiency" of any evidence that challenges those preexisting assumptions.
Coming back to earth for a moment, consider the fact that
you - Yazata - don't actually currently believe that alien spaceships are visiting Earth. That's right, isn't it?
I guess you don't believe because your perceptions are biased. Is that a fair statement? It seems to be what you're saying.
In some cases the bar is set impossibly high, such that all possibility of error must first be eliminated, before we are willing to even entertain the possibility that what we are faced with might conceivably be something challenging.
Really? Some cases, eh?
Which cases?
Can you give
one example of where a reasonable skeptic has set the bar impossibly high, such that
all possibility of error must first be eliminated, etc. etc.?
Has anyody
here, on sciforums, set such an impossibly high bar, in any conversation you have participated in? Got an example?
There will be tremendous resistance even to exploring the possibility hypothetically, until the impossible conditions are met.
That all sounds very speculative and hypothetical, to me. Tremendous resistance to
even exploring the possibility hypothetically?
Do you have
any real-world examples of that sort of thing going on? Any from your own experience here on
sciforums?
It's an interesting question whether a suitably advanced science would be capable, even in principle, of eventually answering all questions. I'm inclined to think 'no'.
Yes, it's an interesting question. Also a more or less irrelevant one to a question like "Was the tic tac reported by Commander Fravor an alien spaceship?" That's a much more down-to-earth question than one that inquires as to the epistemological limits of science.
Science is very good at describing and correlating various perceived regularities in our empirical sense experience.
That makes it useful for analysing UFO reports.
But it seems (to me anyway, others are free to disagree) that science is getting out of its depth when it is asked to justify its own most basic assumptions.
A topic for another thread, perhaps. I don't see what this has to do with "dogmatic skepticism".
But that doesn't seem to me to apply to the most extraordinary UAP reports. They are mysteries of a lesser nature I guess. So even if we assume that the reports of anomalous aerospace performance (thousands of Gs accelerations, no aerodynamic shocks or turbulence) are accurate (we don't know that, but can entertain it as a possibility without all the rude "skeptical" dismissiveness) the possibility certainly remains that more advanced physics and engineering could explain them. That means that even if no scientific explanation is available to us, today, it doesn't imply that a scientific explanation isn't out there somewhere, waiting to be found. It's a problem of a different nature than that of providing ultimate foundations.
So, after all that, we again find ourselves in agreement, more or less.
What was your complaint, again?
