That's right, but if people wanted to have all that they would just strive for it... It's somewhat a tautology.

Yeah, but in Christianity people are suppose to not care about material things, which in itself leads to a lack of progress.

Sorry late reply. The point I'm getting at though is that I think there are more reasonable explanations, perhaps a factor that you may have overlooked. The door slamming due to supernatural interference is far less likely than many other explanations.

Hence, "Yes and No."

I am open to it being so, but don't believe it because I feel like there should be an alternate explination.

Not accepting something becuase "there has to be another explination" I feel is one of the greatest weaknesses of a scientist and a viewpoint I try to avoid.  It's why scientific revolutions are usually made at the feet of outdated scientists rather then the new and old going hand in hand together.

Heck "ghosts" may actually end up having a rational explination not yet known, invloving string theory or intersecting dimensions or who knows what that has nothing to do with peoples spirits.

But then they would no longer be supernatural, no? In the end isn't there a rational explanation for everything, but we just haven't found it yet?

The question was do you believe in ghosts, not the supernatrual.  Though yeah, Supernatural is just a term used for stuff we can't explain yet.

I mean, even god, if god existed just as people say god existed has a "natural" explination in that he lives outside of nature.  Like how a programmer could make "supernatural" changes to virtual world created just like ours.

Yep. That's true. But when people say "ghosts", I think they're reffering to a certain concept (as in supernatural phenomenon). There's a rational explanation to this if it actually is true, but people right now don't see it that way.

Maybe, I dunno, i've never really met anyone who thought of the Supernatural as "something that will never be explained."

I mean, maybe you don't have those shows in Romania but they have "Ghost hunting" shows in the US.  They set up cameras, night vision goggles, recorders, tempeture and electric reading machines.

All kinds of technological stuff... and these are the people that believe in ghosts... and they do find stuff on the meters that coincide with things that they consider ghosts and such.

LOL, of course we have those shows over here. They're on the Discovery Channel.

The idea is that most people I know that believe in the "supernatural", consider it by definition something than cannot be exaplained. Supernatural is by definition "beying above or beyond what is natural", which is not the same as "something that cannot be rationally explained yet (with the knowledge we have), but will be exaplained in the future (with the knowledge we'll accquire)".

I'm not saying that "there has to be another explanation", I'm saying that it's likely that there is another explanation.

If a heavy door slammed shut and I wanted to know why, the possibility that it was a ghost would certainly not be one of the first things I would investigate because I would see that as an incredibly unlikely event when taking into consideration other possible events.

Obviously though you could never rule out the possibility that it was influenced by a ghost because as I said earlier in this thread you can't really prove a negative. If the ghost doesn't exist, then you can't prove that it doesn't exist. all you could really ever say is "It's not known whether this was an influence or not due to a lack of evidence".

And your last statementabout the rational explanation being something to do with string theory is a popular one with Muslims when they try to explain Djinn, which I guess are kind of like ghosts.