The Ghost’s Leg Still Hurts?

Question from Remy:
Lately one of my friend’s friends died of cancer and left three kids behind.

I had a dream where I was watching a performance of my daughter in school and next to me was standing this lady. It was weird for me to see her there, because we weren’t close friends and saw each other only a couple of times. I knew, even in my dream, that she is not with us anymore. But she did look so vibrant, so healthy and happy, I asked her what she is doing here and she said that she came to look at her daughter’s performance as well. So I asked how is she doing? She just said that she is perfect, only her left leg bothering her when she sleeps, then I asked:
– does God exist?
and she answered:
– Yes. But the life on Earth is not the way we think it is.
and then she left the building.

I called my friend and asked for the phone number of the husband of this lady.
I wanted to tell him that his wife is happy and loves them even after her death and when I mentioned about the left leg, he started to cry, and told me that she had very painful metastases on her LEFT LEG and I didn’t know that!

I think that is a proof of another dimension which we mistakenly call Afterlife.

Answer by SmartLX:
One possibility here is false ignorance. You knew this woman was dead, which means you would probably have heard something of the story of her illness, through either local news or the school community. It’s very possible that you knew but had mostly forgotten about the issue with her leg, allowing your subconscious to draw on it.

Another option is that you had a very wide “target” to hit. She had metastases in the correct leg, but where else? Stage 4 cancer (the stage where it starts to travel around the body) can settle literally anywhere, and the colonies in her leg are probably not the ones that killed her. There may have been a great many sources of pain around her body which you could have named and gotten the same reaction from her widower.

Possibilities like these, and of course the possibility of a sheer lucky guess, prevent the kind of argument from elimination that would allow anyone to establish this as a true proof of communication with the deceased (provided of course that your story is true in the first place). It looks convincing to you, but the idea that it was either pure coincidence or a true visitation is a false dilemma, because something else might be going on.

“There is NO WAY I could have known that.”

Question from James:
I’ve been a believer since childhood but recently I’ve started to ask myself whether I truly believe in Christianity or not. I find the arguments against it very compelling, but I have seen and heard a few things that I can’t find any explanations, except the work of a God.

First, I’ve met people who supposedly had these visions about others. In those visions they could see details about someone else’s life, like their past, things that no one would have a clue about. For instance I know of a guy who just met a couple and instantly knew, by revelation, theirs names and the names of their relatives and how they got to know each other, all of that full of details so that no one would suspect it wasn’t a real revelation/vision. I know there are a lot of people faking theses things, but I truly believe these folks I know were at least honest in believing they’ve got a gift from the Lord. So I’d like to ask you guys if you can think of any explanations for what I have described. I no longer think that religion makes sense, philosophically speaking, but how can these, “supernatural” things happen? Any thoughts?

Answer by SmartLX:
Leaving aside the charlatans, a lot of people do think they’ve had genuine visions and premonitions. For most people (including me at a younger age) it’s little things, like seeing details of their car before they bought it, or talking as they play cards and drawing a number immediately after saying it, or guessing that someone’s future child will have blonde hair. Some people have more remarkable stories to tell.

Many of these can be explained through coincidences, which happen all the time because the number of possible coincidences on a given day is higher than the probability of any given coincidence is low. Many more stories are simply untrue and spring from imperfect memory, particularly memory-of-memory. If you get fuzzy on how you know something or when you learned it, you might start to remember having used (or simply thought about) that knowledge before the point when you think you acquired it.

If you have one of these stories, in the back of your mind you know people will consider three different possibilities:
1. that you had a moment of genuine clairvoyance for some indiscernible purpose,
2. that you don’t realise that you gained the knowledge some other way, or
3. that you’re just plain lying.

You might believe #1, but you know that if people think #2 or #3 it won’t reflect well on you, and that if either were actually true then you’d think less of yourself. So there’s an obvious pressure to make the story more convincing every time you tell it, and subconsciously people gradually give in to that pressure. The conviction in the voice becomes greater, little details are exaggerated or made more convenient. If the changes are small enough they’re not even remembered as changes, you literally edit your own memory and they’re just the way it always was. Give it enough time (a few months can be enough) and you end up with a profound airtight declaration that you believe absolutely, that no one can verify and that someone would have to impugn your integrity to reject. You end up daring people to doubt you.

I’m saying that these stories should not be taken at face value, no matter how much you trust those who tell them. Everything I’ve described above is part of the reason why anecdotal evidence, the proper term for such stories, is not legally (and especially not scientifically) regarded as similarly reliable to other forms of evidence. People test it if they can, and if they can’t there’s always a cloud over it.

With that point made, let’s suppose your guy’s story is actually 100% accurate and he really learned about the couple by supernatural means. That would tell us nothing beyond the fact that there is a “supernatural” of some kind. It doesn’t support the existence of any god because the world might simply have some inherent psychic energy which your guy momentarily harnessed. It doesn’t speak to any kind of purpose unless something significant occurred as a result of your guy rattling off this bewildered couple’s details to them like a stalker – and any significant result could still be coincidence. And it gives us no insight on how to reproduce the circumstances and actually be psychic instead of just winning some pointless lottery and getting nothing more than a chance to show off.