Do You Believe In Faeries?

I DO believe in fairies!

It depends entirely upon one's definition of reality. At its basest level, faeries (including elves, goblins, leprechauns, trolls, boggarts, brownies, etc.) are real in the sense that the idea of them exists. You can easily picture them in your mind, and they exist in the reality of your imagination. We have books, paintings, movies, etc., depicting these creatures. We 'know' what they are. There is a plethora of 'evidence,' in this sense, for their existence.

From a philosophic standpoint, you can neither prove nor disprove something's existence by a lack of proof for it. That is, if someone says faeries aren't real because "no one (reliable) has ever seen one" or "you can't go out and touch a living one" or some other empirical rubbish, the opposite can be said to prove their existence. "Fine, then, show me how they can't possibly exist!!!" and on the debate goes.

A note on the empiricism: the belief or proposition that what cannot be sensed does not exist is absolute nonsense. Such a position, whenever argued from, actually ends up shooting itself in the foot from the very fact that a) one's senses can be deceived and therefore are not reliable means of perception, b) one can only prove one's own existence to oneself (the famous "I think, therefore I am"), and c) discounts the existence of logic and reason, the very foundation of empiricism. (It also banishes imagination and creativity to the realms of non-existence as well, but that's another matter.)

TL;DR
Faeries cannot be proved or disproved from a lack of evidence for them. They do exist in the hearts and imaginations of people across time and space, and so in a sense they are real. Anyone who argues that no evidence means no existence must answer with evidence that definitively says something cannot exist, which at this point in the debate does not exist (and probably never will).

Young Writers Society

Sponsors

About / Info

Forums & RPG

Literary

Resources