Well. some people think they do and some people think they don’t. File this one under “thanks for telling us pretty much nothing we didn’t already know.”
Scientists – atheist and otherwise – would argue that if ghosts were real, there would be evidence that could be seen by believers and non-believers alike. ‘They obviously don’t exist. They’re in the imagination,’ says Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire who has spent 20 years investigating this subject. ‘That’s not being sceptical; it’s just common sense. There’s no evidence they exist. We’d know by now and there wouldn’t be a debate. There isn’t debate about whether aircraft or mountains exist, because the evidence for them is overwhelming.’
Some of the folks in the parapsychology field – a subset of which are ghost hunters – insist that the evidence for ghosts, or at least something that seems to correspond with the presence of unseen entities, is pretty good.
My favorite comment of the author here is that “there would be evidence that could be seen by believers and non-believers alike.” Plenty of non-believers witness apparitons or other phenomena that turns them into believers.
Anyway…for us, belief is not necessarily a binary condition. You can have an open mind toward the subject, and still retain skepticism.
h/t Daily Grail
