first case....... chessplaying ghosts
Yes. Correspondence with the dead proven by Prof. Eisenbeiss.Who from the non-god position will correlate the simplest explanation with the observations?
You have a point there. Even if there were a real other party (the dead person) playing, maybe it was an alien or demon using mind control.
Those explanations are needlessly complicated. The simplest explanation is that the personality of the deceased person has persisted and is able to communicate the information that was receievd.
I disagree. It is not the simplest explanation as it invokes additional, unnecessary assumptions. Specifically, in addition to the assumption that the 'psychic' is telling the truth, it introduces the assumption that we should ignore all of the hundreds of times that people have claimed to perform such "supernatural" abilities but have failed or have conclusively been found to be liars. Since we do have evidence that others who have made similar claims have either failed to prove their claims or have been proven outright liars, we only need to introduce one assumption to reach a conclusion, i.e. that the supposed "psychic" is a liar.
Hey the joint, this is my reply to you
A working explanation must be powerful enough to explain all of the observations (Salient Points) as they are collateral assumptions. It is not enough that an explanation is simple, it must also account for the facts.