No one makes you say "I will believe a complete stranger I've never met, if he isn't trying to sell me anything."
We believe strangers all the time. A group of people is talking about some product, and somebody says, "those are on sale today at..." I'll be inclined to believe it. A university professor says something in a classroom and his/her students are inclined to believe it. A textbook says something and students are inclined to do the same. (
Pretty much everything that anyone on Sciforums believes they know about science was learned that way.) And on and on... Civilization is only possible if we believe other people more often than not. (And by a significant margin too. That suggests an interesting Bayesian/game-theoretical problem in formal epistemology. How large must that margin be in order for social groups of various kinds to function?)
In science one typically trusts (however fallibilistically) the reported results of experiments. People talk about 'confirmation' and 'replication' until they are blue in the face, but that's just multiplying trust in experience, whether one's own or another person's.
No one makes you say "A hoax or prank is just too implausible to even consider."
But believing others isn't a license for credulity. Nothing that other people say must be (or even should be) accepted as necessarily true. Neither are the conclusions drawn from one's own experience necessarily true. There's always going to be the possibility of error (or in some cases intentional deception). The possibility of error is going to depend on the circumstances and the topic. More hypothetical and speculative subjects will have higher probabilities of error. And the possibility of intentional deception will rise if those speaking are personally invested in what is being said. (Financially, politically, emotionally...) That probably applies to one's self as well.
No one makes you say "I believe in ghosts and spirits but God is too implausible."
That would probably depend on how we define 'God'. If 'God' means the character from the Bible, then one could say that ghosts are far more empirical. One experiences hauntings in ways that one doesn't typically experience that sort of God. If 'God' means whatever is ultimately responsible for reality itself, then reality itself might arguably be convincing evidence of whatever reality's unknown explanation is.
But yes. In my opinion as an agnostic, I agree that MR is rather inconsistent in his firm desire to believe in ghosts combined with an equally emotional hostility towards belief in God. I think that it has more to do with his rejection of the fundamentalism of his youth than with philosophy.
No one makes you say "Photographs do not lie."
Well,
literally they
don't. A lie is intentional deception, and being inanimate objects, photographs don't have intentions, they just
are.
Certainly a cunningly crafted photograph might be used by a photographer in hopes of persuading others of an untruth.
No one makes you say "Human perception is completely reliable, and records an accurate image of whatever is seen."
Human perception isn't a simple one-step thing. At one extreme, there's simply physiological reaction to stimuli (sound, light, mechanical pressure...). That's simply causal and doesn't seem to introduce much scope for error (and none for intentional deception). But there are also the conclusions drawn from that kind of physiological stimulation. There's huge scope for error there.
That's where MR's many ghost and ufo pictures fail to persuade me of the conclusions that he may or may not want to draw from them. There's a photograph with some sort of spectral image on it (hard to argue with that), and there's the conclusion that disembodied souls exist and continue to physically manifest in peculiar vaporous form (I'm hugely doubtful about that). I think that there's a huge leap between the former and the latter that cries out for better justification.
Having said that, I think that our (misnamed) skeptics are making a similar error when they interpret all evidence of ufos or hauntings as produced by mundane causes. They don't really know that either, and are just introducing it as an assumption. That assumption might perhaps be justified by an argument similar to Hume's argument regarding miracles, but that would require additional intelligent argument. Little one-line expressions of sarcasm and contempt don't suffice.
