Undetectable by any known means

I was just perusing an article entitled “The Art of Being Skeptical.” Personally, I think a much more beautiful and important art is “Not Letting Being Skeptical Ruin a Potentially Good Time.” Some time I’ll write about how people who consider themselves “professionally skeptic” piss me off, but right now I wanted to comment on one particular line from this essay:

    Why are airy-fairy claims always being made and believed? Some fraudulent claims seem to address real human needs that are not being properly met by our society. People might feel they have a reason to try out various belief systems to see if they help. But a good deal of the reason is that, even in our modern society, people are brought up to believe in mysterious forces that have never been detected by any means known to mankind.

This is an argument which has plagued me for some time; when people say how all these different things are “undetectable by any known means.” Things like soul or spirit or psychic abilities or ghosts, or whatever. The thing that people who think this way are completely missing out on is that all these phenomenon ARE detectable by known means. In fact, the tool which we use to detect them is one of our most powerful tools, and one of our faculties which makes us the most human.

That tool is our imagination.


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