well, we just don’t really know anything for sure do we?
Ah, I hate the "Storm" defense (named for Tim Minchin's
Storm).
Of course it does. We experience effect; we assign cause. Description and explanation.
You misunderstood basically everything I said. And I hate to break it to you, but you're never going to out-logic me until you start using actual logic. You are trying to conflate actual, useful analysis with simply making things up. Yes, you do "assign cause". In fact, that's exactly what I was saying. However, that's not what people are doing when they are critically analyzing something. They are "determining cause" by using "data" collected. "Assigning cause" is what you do when you are choosing the cause based on what you want to believe.
What I am saying is that there is no path from “lights in the sky” straight to “alien visitation” with no other evidence. And no, “eyewitness accounts” are not “evidence”. Believing because of eyewitness accounts is exactly equivalent to believing “because they said it was true”. I’ll say it again, there is ZERO evidence for alien visitation. No DNA, no body, no downed craft, no communications, we haven’t so much as definitively detected a single microbe anyplace but this planet yet. Think about that. Science currently has zero evidence that life exists anywhere off this planet. But you do? Come on. I know what these people wanted to believe before their experience using a method very similar to what YOU just advocated for, except I do it correctly. I see the effect of the claim of alien visitation, I look at the evidence at hand, I examine that evidence for a path from “lights in the sky” to “alien visitation”, I see that the only step in between is to demand that it could not be any alternative I might suggest, I note the resistance to even entertain any other possible explanation and I conclude logically that, given that the explanation is not evidence based, the explanation is “assigned” based on a desire to hold that belief.
I’m sorry, but your “logical evaluation” of what I was saying is way off. You misinterpreted or reinterpreted pretty much all of it. You use “experience” where I used “conclusion”. The two are independent. I have had “experiences” with UFOs, and I have drawn “conclusions” from those experiences, but the experience and conclusion were different things. The experience is a thing that happened, the conclusion is the belief, sometimes fact based, sometimes based on assumptions, which I form based on that experience.
And my premise that they wanted to believe is also a logical conclusion and, again, you swapped out terms on me. You want from “wanted to believe”, a desire, to “actually did believe”, a belief. Those are not the same thing. I have a desire to believe in alien visitation. Who doesn’t? How cool would that be? But I don’t have a belief in alien visitation. So once again you are using terms which are not equivalents interchangeably. This is why your logic is so messed up and unreliable. If you can’t even properly define what you are saying, muddling it altogether to shoehorn in the outcome you like (in this case that my logic is flawed) then you cannot hope to develop a sound logical analysis.
And no, I would not have to reverse my assertion if I were to find that a person did not hold a belief before an experience. I said that they “wanted to believe”. That is a desire. And I said that the “conclusion” was based on this desire, not the experience. So let me walk you through the logic from some real-world examples I have seen.
I heard the claim that there is evidence for “UFOs” (what they really meant here was “alien visitation” because the “U” means “Unidentified”, which means you cannot use the term to describe something which you are “Identifying”, but this lot just loves to use incompatible terms interchangeably). When I chatted with them I found that they were actually claiming proof for <insert personal belief system>. Some claimed alien visitation. Some claimed demons. Some claimed creatures from the center of the Earth. Interestingly all of these conclusions were drawn from the same reported “experience”. That was my first clue that people were making shit up. In fact, there simply could not be evidence that all 3 things were true, so right off the bat I can logically conclude that a minimum of 2 out of 3 UFO enthusiasts are not great at critical thinking.
So, from there I start to question them. I try to determine what “evidence” went between the experience “lights in the sky” and “conclusion”. You saw lights in the sky, what lead to the conclusion that those lights were aliens, demons or reptile mantis mole people? In every case I found that there was no evidence of any sort to lead to the conclusion. I also found that in every case these people rejected any and all alternative explanations. In every single case, without anything even remotely resembling an exception, if you could not prove definitively, with no doubt, absolutely what a thing was then the believer was not swayed. Ever. Not once in a couple of years at this. This lead me to a logical conclusion. If the person holds this belief from which they cannot be dissuaded, and there was no actual reason I could discern to hold that belief, the belief can only be based on a desire to hold that belief, or, in some cases, the person may have been convinced by someone else, but this isn’t the type that hangs out in such forums. The people who go online to chat about these things, you had better believe there’s a desire to believe. This interests them. That’s why they’re in the forums. Hell, that’s why I was in the forums. I just have a higher standard for holding a belief than most of them did.
Keep in mind that the experience here is completely irrelevant. A belief can come from an experience, but it can also exist without a supporting experience. And I never actually said anything about an experience anyway. The belief comes from a desire to believe. This desire may exist before an experience or it may be caused by an experience. A person may have never considered something before, then have an experience which they cannot explain by facts, which creates a desire to explain it in any way possible, sometimes becoming a desire to explain it in a certain way, which in turn allows the formation of a belief. Or they may just here about someone else’s experience, real or imagined, like the idea, and desire to believe it’s true. And this isn’t some hocus pocus I’m making up just for you. This is actually how many beliefs are formed. This is how intelligent people join cults or pyramid schemes. It is much, much easier to believe something that we want to believe. This is especially true for beliefs such as the belief that you, personally, have more evidence for something than all of science in every field over the entire planet.