Believing in ghosts is relatively easy, because a) people are gullible and b) they have direct experience of things that they consider “spooky” and which they cannot explain.

Belief in AGW is less direct and less impacting. I personally don’t buy it because I’m skeptical about the reliability of the data (and yes, I have looked at it myself and determined that I’m unconvinced… skepticism is a good thing), but most people don’t even have that data to back up anything. They look around, say “it doesn’t seem that warm to me” and get on with things.

So, this is not surprising, really.

Leif, you miss my meaning. The US produces a whole passle of scientific illiterates. But it is also a leader in terms of scientific achievement. We are a lot more heterogenous than Europe, especially the west and the north of it.

(I like anna’s analogy. A moebius strip coin.)

“Extracellular field potentials are local current sinks or sources that are generated by the collective activity of many cells. Usually a field potential is generated by the simultaneous activation of many neurons by synaptic transmission.” Wik

The presence of the tone [ sounds beneath 20 Hz down to 0.001 Hz ]resulted in a significant number (22%) of respondents reporting anxiety, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, chills down the spine and feelings of pressure on the chest.[19][20] In presenting the evidence to British Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the scientists responsible said,

“These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound. Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost—our findings support these ideas.”

The difference between scientific belief and ‘other’ [e.g. religious, ideological, etc] belief is largely that scientific belief can be falsified [and a lot end up that way], while ‘other’ belief is not open for discussion or falsification.

Indeed. And more generally…
“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.” (Bertrand Russell)

An 18th century scientist faced with a 3D hologram would surely believe in the supernatural.
Would he? A scientist of all people would surely look for an explanation of the phenomena.

I believe, and I know it is a belief, and not science, that any metaphysical effects, from telepathy ( of which I have experience) to haunted houses can be explained with laws of physics that have not been discovered yet.

But these beliefs can be (and have been) tested by experiment and have found to be wanting. A non-existent phenomenon doesn’t require a physical explanation.

The fact that so many people believe in haunted houses is testament to how woeful our scientific literacy is in the USA.

Not so sweeping please. Beliefs in metaphysical phenomena should not be contrasted to science in such a way.

The more science progresses, the more unknowns are discovered. An 18th century scientist faced with a 3D hologram would surely believe in the supernatural. This would not make him less a scientist, as long as he/she clearly knew where science started and ended and beliefs took over.

Beliefs are a level of thought organization crucial to our development as a species, and very useful. Science involved on a meta level when we finally organized a system of objective reality. Still, beliefs are needed to face metaphysical situations from birth and death to even falling in love, for all humans, including scientists. It behooves scientists to know where science stops and beliefs take over, but it is hard for the general population.

I believe, and I know it is a belief, and not science, that any metaphysical effects, from telepathy ( of which I have experience) to haunted houses can be explained with laws of physics that have not been discovered yet. Present day physics leaves open a lot of gateways with time being a dimension even in orthodox physics and many more time and space dimensions available in frontier theories to allow me to hold such a belief.

I will not invalidate the experience of fellow humans by saying :science cannot explain it therefore it does not exist, from reincarnational memories to near death experiences. In the end, each of us is one running experiment, with a beginning a middle and an end, and we each will know the results soon enough.

I suggest Dragshom Castle . . .

http://paranormal.suite101.com/article.cfm/ghosts_of_dragsholm_castle