I don’t blame your disbelief. This sort of event doesn’t usually happen. And yes, if I had not experienced it myself, I probably would not believe it either. What would you think if you experienced something like this? Would you ignore it, not tell anyone? forget it? Wouldn’t it make you wonder how that could have been possible?
Can confirm. I also emptied my coin purse on some homeless people and it was full again within an hour.
Sort of related, though not coins or pockets. I know people that are full of shit. They spread their shit around until they feel empty. Then, soon after, they are full of shit again. It must be a miracle.
3 Likes
That is of course a perfectly reasonable rational approach. Unlike appeals to mystery, and argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacies, which are ubiquitous to all religions.
Like what? Use the quote function else I’ll have to go back and figure out what you’re referring to. Given there are multiple threads and I’m being lashed in work, this is infeasible.
Look above, as @mordant said, if I can’t explain something then I dont make assumptions. Either sufficient objective evidence exists to justify belief, or it does not. Beware logical fallacies, learn them all, and avoid using or accepting them.
I went out to the pub, and when I awoke the following morning, all my money had magically disappeared, along with the Indian takeaway I bought on the way home…
It must be a miracle then?
1 Like
I wasn’t saying you invoked the divine. I was saying that the ONLY thing unique to an atheist’s perspective would be that an atheist definitionally doesn’t have the option to attribute it to a deity. So really asking what an atheist (or most atheists) uniquely thinks on any topic is not really understanding atheism.
If what you meant was “I’d like to get as many opinions as possible from the members here” – perhaps because you trust the thinkers here – then do carry on. But just don’t attribute any consensus of these members as some sort of atheist dogma, apart from “well it wasn’t some god”. There is no such dogma.
Don’t know how many times in life I have rummaged in my coat pocket and found change I didn’t remember leaving there. It’s started happening again now that the economy is tanking and I’m transitioning more to using cash, which I’ve used very little for many years.
I have a fireproof box with emergency cash in it in my office closet too … in case of an unscheduled bank holiday we can eat at least. I added a bit to it and counted it up and there was more in there than I remember putting in several months back. I’m sure that in my initial stocking of that box, I put more in than I remember. That’s the likely explanation. Unlikely explanation is that Jesus is sneaking twenty dollar bills in there while I sleep, or that Joel Osteen has been praying for my personal prosperity.
1 Like
That is the definition of atheism. Atheism is not necessarily a permanent point of view.
I never mentioned Jesus, Allah, Vishnu or even ‘god’ or actually any conscious spiritual entity in connection to what I experienced. I am recalling a video which suggested quantum mechanics could spontaneously produce a Steinway. That probably has extremely low probability. The reappearance of coins I am sure also has extremely low probability. But what are the chances? probably pretty close to zero, maybe even effectively zero, but there must be some very extremely low probability.
I gave all the money at had at the moment, and did not visit an ATM or make any purchase to obtain any change. This did not occur over weeks, or months, and no could not be accounted for by forgetting or miscount.
1 Like
Okay. I don’t know you but am willing to grant for the sake of argument that you’re very certain this happened and you’re convinced it is not misperception, forgetfulness, etc.
As you suggest, money spontaneously appearing in your purse is highly unlikely. Less likely than several more prosaic explanations, including the ones you reject out of hand. But whatever the explanation … you are not claiming to know what it is. And that is okay. Does there need to be a problem here? You seem to think so, because you’re asking us how we explain things we don’t have explanations for, as if unknowns are intolerable. We don’t bother to explain things we don’t have explanations for. We remain open to eventually finding an explanation. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t.
Personally, if this happened to me, it would just be an interesting experience. I would be curious about it … but my curiosity would not extend to, for lack of a better term, woo or woo-adjacent explanations. I’d be looking for a naturalistic one.
Many years ago, my stepson found it entertaining to watch ghost hunter programs on TV. It was an odd interest, given that he’s always been a strict empiricist and atheist. I don’t think even he knows where it came from, though if I had to guess, it may arise from the fact that he has mild synesthesia. He sees weird things at times. Musical notes and words are colorized in his perception based on content for example.
At any rate, as a high school graduation gift, his mother and I arranged to visit a town about a hundred miles south of us where they had ghost hunts. We stayed up all night in musty old buildings with probably about 20 other people who had paid for the experience.
At one point, my wife was given divining rods that you would hold by wooden handles in your hands and these would rotate very easily. You would ask any spirit present to point to some person or object or to move it right or left to signifiy yes or no. My wife, a former investigative reporter, tried it. She held these things stock still in her hands and yet they moved in response to questions, in coherent-seeming ways.
I was aware of the Ideomotor Effect (which is, for example, the way Ouija Boards work) and think that is the most likely explanation. My wife is too sure of herself and refuses to believe that she could be subconsciously moving these rods. I held them myself and they are almost impossible NOT to move. They fit very loosely in the handles and the slightest shift in your hands will move them. As far as I’m concerned, I have an explanation for the experience. My wife, while not a god-believer herself, and not credulous in general, swears she DID NOT MOVE HER HANDS and so “something” outside of normal experience happened. Whatever. I know what battles to pick, lol.
I think something like that is going on here. There’s a likely explanation and you are motivated to reject it. People do this all the time. At the aforementioned “ghost hunt” I noticed there were Christians, spiritualists, and people of no particular religious belief but open to “spirits” or “ghosts”. I noticed that everything that happened, they tended to apply their preexisting belief-system to it. Christians thought it was angels or demons, spiritualists thought it was the dead communicating, people who were just curious and had fewer preconceptions thought it could be, say, telepathic aliens or interdimensional beings messing with us or something. I was, so far as I could tell, the only person who either saw a naturalistic explanation or, if I didn’t see one, was content to admit I didn’t know without having to resort to fanciful explanations [shrug].
None of this is a criticism or a dig at you, by the way. It’s just an observation. You’re human, and behaving in a very human way. And while it seems like you sort of want there to be some extraordinary explanation, you’re not really staking claims you can’t prove, either. So … I have no malfuntion with any of this. I would just suggest that you trust your memory and perception a little bit less than you seem to. The mind can play really strange tricks. Memory can be really deceptive. But if you go to your grave insisting that somehow those coins appeared out of nowhere, it’s no skin off my back, either.
How do any of us know that what you say happened actually happened?
If you mean inexplicable things, assuming I haven’t found an explanation by the usual means, I’d just shelve them pending a rational explanation. Although I might speculate, the one thing I don’t do is assume I know the answer.
UK Atheist
2 Likes
For me it is simple: the Law of Large Numbers. 
2 Likes
You don’t know. There are a lot of claims made which no one can know, unless one experienced it or observed it. I would be interesting if this could be repeated and demonstrated.
There was a spirit medium from ‘The aquarian Foundation’ which tried to prove a number of things, by demonstration to skeptics, scientist etc. One of them was demonstrating apportation.
I have no idea of the organization has anyone demonstrate such things anymore to the curious or the skeptical. The link of above is rather disappointing as it is very scant in detail, and the claimed events are quite a number of years ago.
I do not know if any other reported psychics or mediums are claiming any such gifts, and are demonstrating any such gifts.
1 Like
Oh I think the first is a certainty, and the latter demonstrably dubious. You can check any major global news network to see the latter hasn’t happened. If that’s not good enough, you can note the absence of Nobel prizes in the newly created field of magic, and that no one has claimed the Templeton prize in the same field. 
1 Like
Nor me but, if you get the chance, look up Derren Brown where he shows how these mediums do cold readings.
UK Atheist
1 Like
Speaking of mediums, cold readings, and telepaths . . . I wrote a satirical short story about alien telepaths that was published in the December, 2004 issue of Analog (see below).
I have been angry about such charlatans for a long time, as I have seen (when I was a paramedic) such people charge money for doing readings to put lonely, grieving widows in touch with their dead spouses, or peddling fake cures for cancer to desperate people.
I even witnessed this during nursing clinicals when a cancer patient spent money on a device that put out a “healing sound” (which seemed like a monotonous repitition of some low-key electronic techno music) in the hopes of curing her aggressive form of liver cancer.
People ask: “If it gives them comfort, then what’s the harm?”
The harm is that it distracts and takes away from the little time that they have left . . . which is time that should be focused on closure, resolution of long term conflicts, and having fun with parties, ice cream, and adventures done as a family.
These types of charlatans are the worst kind of parasites.
3 Likes
He (Derren Brown) also exposed how easy it is to convert people to Christianity, even using a single touch, as some preachers claim they can do. Of course it is an entirely natural phenomenon, and he exposed it as such. I think there’s a YouTube video about it if anyone were interested.
1 Like
I don’t pay them any mind. If there’s no evidence for things that are unexplained, I often dismiss them until scientific evidence tells us what they are. I don’t make assumptions on it.
Hitchens’s razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”.[1][2][3][a]
The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.[4] It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.
1 Like
What you are providing is an anedoctal thesis, wich is fallacious for three reasons:
- We have no evidences that what you are saying happened, now i don’t want to call you a liar, but with 0 proofs in support of what you are claiming your argument already starts badly.
- What you claim is simply absurd: “These are objects wich have arrived via teleportation”, no offense, but it’s just absurd to think that objects teleport through wind to you.
- There is certainly a logical explanation to this, every single anedoctal paranormal story has one: for the first case we can simply make the hypothesis you simply had more change in your pocket and didn’t realise, you thought that you had emptied your pockets, but had more and this entire story is simply the result of a completely normal and human mistake; in the case of the scar it might be that it was a simple bruise that just healed like every other bruise after some time. Please keep in mind, i am not saying that these hypothesis are true and the only correct one, i am just saying that are more plausible than magical coin teleportation or magic healing.
1 Like