Brian2
Veteran Member
Everything in nature is natural, with nature (reality) being the collection of objects and processes existing in time and space and interacting with one another. Anything that does that is a part of nature. Everything that cannot can be considered nonexistent, like Sagan's dragon.
How do you know that we have no spirit that acts in and with us?
https://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20070823/out-of-body-experiences-tested-in-labThese reports aren't reliable. Also, the experiences have been reproduced with cortical stimulation:
Out‐of‐body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin | Brain | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
Out-of-Body Experiences Tested in Lab (webmd.com)
I don't see how neurological experiments can tell us how people in NDE can report things that they have seen and heard and which can be verified.
You probably see wisdom there. I see a problem. I'm a seeing-is-believing guy, an empiricist. What you wrote is believing-is-seeing, and it's not a good way to determine what is true about the world. If one can somehow convince himself that a god exists, that's what he'll see.
It's called a faith-based confirmation bias. It acts like a demon at the portal of consciousness prescreening what will get through and be visible, and what will be rejected as wrong or impossible based on the faith-based presupposition. This is observer bias. Researchers go to great lengths to neutralize it in therapeutic trials by blinding both the clinician and the patient as to whether the treatment being evaluated or placebo was given.
The Talk.Origins Archive Post of the Month: February 2002 (talkorigins.org) is a link to a description of this phenomenon by a YEC who became a geologist, which converted him to OEC. He reports how he experienced this phenomenon and how he tunneled out of his faith-based confirmation bias, which he describes using the literary device of a demon controlling what he could see.
Critical thinking (reasoning) is designed to prevent this and is in fact the opposite of it. One is trained to evaluate evidence dispassionately and go where the application of reason to that evidence takes one.
Think about what you're asking. If the only way to believe something is to convince oneself it's true before seeking evidence, then it isn't true. Correct ideas do not require that you believe them first to see that.
Also, it should be self-evident that faith is not a path to truth. A path to truth limits one to correct ideas only and weeds out incorrect ones. Empiricism is the only method that accomplishes this. Faith has no mechanism for separating wrong ideas from correct ones, and there are many more untrue things than true. For example, whatever your age is, there is only one number that is correct and dozens that aren't.
If someone convinces themselves that empiricism is the way to find God without faith that is how he will seek God. So belief in a false way can lead to failure, in this case failure due to God not being detectable empirically, just detected through what He does or has done. This requires an opening of our eyes to seeing what God has done in order to find God. This means seeing empiricism as a way to test the physical universe but not to test, find God.
Believing correct ideas means we need to look in the right place and use the right tools. Initially it's a case of being open to things other than empiricism for seeing what God has done.
Faith is as much a path to truth as empirical science, where many wrong paths are taken before the right one is found.
Yes, I know. I am not willing to believe more than what the quantity and quality of available evidence supports. It's the only method I have to prevent accumulating wrong beliefs. My sincere seeking is for sound conclusions, and that requires critical analysis. If gods can be determined to exist empirically, then we can know they exist. If not, we must remain agnostic.
You have chosen to remain agnostic and empiricism.