If Only You Were There

The sane individuals who experience these things find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they're rational, normal people most like anyone else: they know that normally, doors don't close themselves, stacks of games don't fly across the room landing stacked, and there are no non-existent neighbors walking around upstairs or on the roof. Normally, an anomalous noise might not even catch our attention. Key word: normally.

I can't help but wonder how those who only believe in what science permits would react to something like this. In all reality, I believe these are exactly the type of experiences skeptics need to have.-CL

This was a response by an anecdote of someone saying their door opened by "itself" and thinks this incidence is adequate justification for thinking his house is haunted, noting that he hasn't seen anything materialize and he feels like he is being watched. I think the message of this is theists saying, "if you had the same experiences we had, you would also believe." No, I have had similar experiences and have looked for natural answers.

Today, my door closed by "itself," a door not attached to the outside, but to a hallway leading into another room. Had the wind came through my window, the door would be blown more open and not closed. Did I freak out? No, I reset the door, and watched it close again, while also listening to the rustling sound of the leaves on trees. Sometimes the wind would not be strong enough and the door would oscillate back and forth, but nonetheless, the door would close by itself another four or five times until I concluded that wind was responsible. Aware that correlation does not mean causation, I go look for the cause. Low and behold, a window nearly thirty feet from my door was open and is the prime suspect.

Had it not been for the distant trees in the background, the audio cues of the wind would have been lost, and been unattached from my anecdote. Had I not checked the surroundings for other openings in the closed system (my house), other sources of wind would have been omitted from my anecdote and I may have falsely told someone that wind was not the cause. Maybe some other detail would be essential for coming up with the cause would have been lost had I not reset the conditions. Maybe when I quickly glanced over at the door (after all, I'm not watching my door on a regular basis), I imagined something which was not there, and when I repeated it, I would realize it was just a shadow. This is why anecdotes fail, they tend not to give enough information to establish a cause and some information that is taken as fact may actually not be as concrete as some would put it.

Let's take another example. The door opens from the closed position after being closed for a period of time, and the cause of wind has been weeded out, what detail would be necessary to figure out the cause? No wind, no physical agents such as pets or other people, the locking mechanism wasn't fully engaged and slowly lost the friction with the carpet fibers. Do we need to resort to demons just yet? No. The detail omitted is the excessive use of an air conditioner. In the heat, the door swells, doesn't get fully closed, I turn on the air conditioner after I enter the room, the room's temperature drops twenty degrees, the door returns to normal, losing grip with the frame and opens.

One might object that this as an ad hoc rationalization, custom tailored to a natural worldview. Well, it can be demonstrated that wind can effect physical objects, and that temperature has a direct relationship with density (when holding pressure constant) with increases in temperature resulting in less dense objects and decreases in temperature result in more dense objects (with exceptions such as water where the inverse is true). These principles have been demonstrated to be true, the demon hypothesis has not, which means that the scientific principles should be used as the best explanation.

What if I couldn't naturally explain something, is it then justified to explain a mystery with a bigger mystery? No. Doing so would be an appeal to ignorance.