I didn’t say I made something real by believing in it. I did NOT believe in dowsing when I actually did it. I wasn’t hallucinating or on drugs or having a psychotic episode.
EF Doesn't matter whether you believed it to be true or not. The reality of whether dowsing works or not cannot be based on your personal experience no matter how rewarding you found it to be.
I was in the presence of a couple of my relatives who were trying to find water and had already dug 4 dry wells. I thought they were trying to pull my leg when they went about with a stick in their hands. When they handed it to me, I said, “OK, I’ll try it, but this hocus pocus stuff can’t work.” But, it did. It really shook me up at the time.
EF Why did it work? What are the physics behind it?
I guess I’m a psychopath or a liar now, eh?
EF Nowhere did I indicate either. I trust you experienced what you said you experienced. I do not trust that it holds as a general rule.
There were 4 dry wells previously dug… they didn’t want to go for 5. And whether or not there was water there really doesn’t explain what happened with the stick.
EF Did they dowse for the other 4 wells? At any rate, the point is that you will eventually hit water everywhere. If water being there does not explain what happened to the stick, then what is the point of dowsing?
THERE IS NO PHYSICAL OR CHEMICAL EXPLANATION FOR WHAT HAPPENED!!!!! That’s the point!
EF Lol, then how do you know it works other than your own personal experience? Experimentally, it has shown not to be effective at a rate any better than chance.
Dowsing seems to work for only a few people, it does not work for the majority of people. The stick is not even important. Some people use metal rods. Some use an object like a pendulum and dowse over maps. The object to look for may not be water, it can be almost anything.
EF So let me get this straight. Neither the tool nor the source matter in dowsing? So how does it work?
I believe there are spiritual reasons for that… but that’s getting off the subject.
EF It's not off topic. Basically, you've discovered there is no scientific basis for dowsing. That's exactly what we say. Furthermore, the 'test' has been given to those who claim the gift and found to be no better than chance. I actually tested a colleague of mine who claimed he could locate metal objects. We hid a set of keys under one of ten plastic buckets and asked him to select which bucket hid the keys. His record? 1 right out of 11 (less than chance). He claimed that the experiment failed because there were metal wires and pipes in the floor affecting his results.
I was an atheist when I dowsed.
EF Relevant because?????
I did not believe in anything supernatural at that time and I certainly was not “projecting my desires” to accomplish some sort of psychokinetic feet even if I had wanted to or believed in such.
EF So you claim in hindsight. I suspect that alien abductees, ghost sighters, UFO sighters etc all claim the same.
I absolutely did NOT want the stick to move. I figured that, at best, there would be some sort of subconscious “twitch” of the stick making it move. But the stick BENT DOWN FORCEFULLY in my hand. I tried to keep the stick up, but could not. As I said, there was so much force bending the stick down that the bark was twisting off in my hands because I was resisting so much the downward pull. The stick BOWED OVER… it BENT… is that clear enough. There is NO naturalistic explanation for what happened that day. I was clearly shaken by the experience… but the crack in my atheistic beliefs was irreparable.
EF Why did you attribute it automatically to something spiritual? I have to admit, you're the first person led to Christ via dowsing.
It is not true because I believe in it.
EF Oh really? Based on your answers, what else could anyone conclude?