Ghosts are well-attested. God is well-attested. Being well-attested isn't that strong evidence. But if there's no particularly good reason to think that it isn't happening, then it probably happens.
Ghosts are well-attested. God is well-attested. Being well-attested isn't that strong evidence. But if there's no particularly good reason to think that it isn't happening, then it probably happens.
You're mixing up evidence and priors. God being well-attested is strong evidence, just not nearly strong enough to overcome the vanishingly small prior for such a complex hypothesis.
Given similarly strong evidence for a hypothesis that's actually plausible, you would probably believe it. If you had never seen a cat before but knew that a large fraction of the population claimed to have one living with them, you probably wouldn't doubt their existence.
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean is a book about very big ocean waves-- the science, the danger (mostly to ships), and the surfers.
Really big waves weren't scientifically verified until about ten years ago-- part of the problem was that even though sailors had been reporting huge waves, scientists had a theory that big waves (maybe over 80', though I don't have a sharp dividing line) required very rare conditions. Once satellite surveillance for waves was possible, it turned out that big waves were fairly common, and might explain why a ship or two per week disappears.
Russell Wynn: "The way the radar system works, the very big ones are difficult to measure," he said. When behemoth waves appeared in the satellite data, the space agencies considered these readings to be errors, and they were automatically deleted. "They give you missing value code instead, which is really annoying. We shout at them for that."
The reason I'm posting this is that I've become very skeptical about any theory which claims that something which is well-attested and physically possible is actually not happening.