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On resisting mythological consciousness : Comments
By Peter Sellick, published 25/6/2015The function of these narratives is not to diffuse the alienation between humanity and nature, but to carry theological weight.
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I definitely think that you're committing the Shifting of the Burden of Proof fallacy now. As david f pointed out, ConservativeHippie is the one who made the positive claim.
I haven't failed to understand anything. You are simply tacking on more assumptions to my scepticism than is necessary for me to justify it. My acknowledgment of the fact that such occurrences are likely to happen, with so many pathways crossing in a world as populated as ours, was simply the icing on my sceptical cake. Would you actually refute that that was the case?
All that is needed to justify a scepticism of ConservativeHippie’s brand of mysticism is the fact that he hasn't yet provided sufficient justification for that belief (proportionate to the extra-ordinariness of the claim). An acknowledgement that everything that has ever been thought to have had mystical origins was eventually shown to have rational/naturalistic origins, and that nothing that was thought to have had rational/naturalistic origins has been found to have mystical origins, only serves to further justify my scepticism. Your introduction of the stochastic is just a red herring.
It is for the reasons stated above that your suggestion, that there is a 50/50 chance of ConservativeHippie’s explanation being right, is simply nonsense. Your assumption that my position necessitates a positive belief in the stochastic is just another way of saying, “Well, haha, you can’t prove I’m wrong.” Which treads dangerously close to the Argument from Ignorance fallacy.
One of the defining attributes of the mystical and the supernatural is that they are mysterious and beyond the understanding of the laws of nature, so how could the probability of "CH's explanation [be] just as plausible as [mine], mathematically speaking"? Two unknowns do not necessarily become equally probable - even if the likelihood of a rational explanation were entirely unknown.