You Have To Move From Theory To Fact

Critics of religion and the paranormal are often overly focused on hypotheticals. Too much time in the abstract, too little time in the concrete. They claim a certain prior improbability for miracles, go on and on about how unreliable human memory supposedly is, the problem of bias, the potential for hallucinations, how an overactive imagination often misleads people, etc. That sort of consideration is valid up to a point. But there's also a point where it becomes suspicious, if the facts involved in a particular situation aren't being addressed adequately.

One area where I've seen this sort of problem come up over and over again is how people assess the Enfield Poltergeist. I've done a lot of work on the case, and I often follow YouTube videos and threads on the subject, read news articles about it and the comments made below the articles, etc. It's astonishing how often people will move from some generalization - about human biases, the potential for people to hallucinate, or whatever else - to a conclusion about the case without doing much, if anything, to interact with the relevant facts involved in the Enfield case in particular.

Observing that people sometimes hallucinate is one thing. Arguing that a hallucination is the best explanation of a certain set of circumstances is something else. Many people do the former as a substitute for doing the latter.

Or they'll cite a particular fact, such as something in a photograph, and reach a conclusion based on that fact without addressing other relevant facts involved, such as certain aspects of the larger context surrounding the photo. Applying abstract observations to a particular fact is better than making no application to any facts. But if there are other facts that also need to be addressed, then you need to address those as well.

Something scenarios like these have in common is that people seem to be looking for shortcuts. They don't want to spend much time or other resources on something, so they look for a quick and easy way to assess it. That can have some merit to one degree or another, depending on the circumstances, but there are dangers that go along with it. Shortcuts sometimes do more harm than good. You have to be careful in how you handle them.

What you often find with critics of something like the gospels or a paranormal case is that they're big on theory and small on facts. Sometimes, the historical record has put them in a situation in which they'd prefer to be focused on something other than that record. Or, as you often see in contexts like YouTube threads and comments sections below news articles, people are just gullibly skeptical (gullibility being something that can go in more than one direction), lazy, or misbehaving for whatever other reason. Whatever their motivations, they need to address both theory and fact, not just one or the other.