People often criticize religion for getting involved with science, but this story shows why science shouldn’t get involved with the supernatural either. A scientist claims that ghosts are not real because…wait for it…they don’t follow Newton’s laws of physics! How could they walk on the ground but then pass right through walls? Case closed.

The whole point of ghosts, of course, is that they are dead spirits with behavior ungoverned by normal physical laws. Anyone who believes in ghosts also believes that, and anyone who doesn’t believe in ghosts is aware that matter can’t pass through walls, so there is really no audience for this physicist with too much time on his hands.

It’s one thing to say that the science frequently seen on horror “documentaries” is bunk, quite another to say that science can actually disprove the existence of ghosts. Supernatural beliefs work so well, and are so common, because they are not testable.

Americans believe in ghosts through a combination of personal experience, religious belief and pop culture influence. This belief is not inconsistent with any scientific fact, because scientific facts must be testable. There’s no way to tell whether my dead great-great-grandfather is looking over my shoulder right now.

An aside — it always amuses me how intellectual snobs always call things like ghosts and intelligent design “nondisprovable,” then proceed to “disprove” them. First of all, by “nondisprovable” they mean “non-testable;” you can’t do an experiment or gather more facts to try to prove it wrong.

Anything that’s true is nondisprovable in the literal sense, so it’s a bad choice of words. The average person says, not at all illogically, “you mean you can’t prove it wrong? That must mean it’s right.”

Second, Stephen Jay Gould once argued that an intelligent designer would not give humans unnecessary features (like male nipples or thin, useless arm hair). That’s pretty logical, but it’s but it’s also an attempt to disprove something that Gould calls “nondisprovable.” Likewise, the argument that ghosts can’t behave the way they’re believed to (while less logical) is made on the assumption that a belief in ghosts is a scientific one.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.