[net.religion] Logic based on ... reason for belief in "something more"

davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel) (04/17/85)

I think Laura touches here on a key issue: personal events which indicate
that "something more" is going on than current strict materialistic
concepts would lead one to believe or expect out of life.

In article <5473@utzoo.UUCP> laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) writes:
>
>This doesn't help when you are overcome with a dread feeling and then
>discover that night that your best friend was killed at that time. It
>doesn't explain why you sometimes know that a friend who hasn't
>talked to you in weeks is on the other end when the telephone rings.
>  [etc. etc.]

It seems that just like Laura my own life is filled with these "something
more" events, and they occur far to frequently to be dismissed as mere
coincidences.  When one finds things like this going on there is only a
very limited amount of "scientific" study available (parapsychology) and even
that for the most part is rejected or unknown by others in the scientific
communities.  (More on this later.)

So, since science seems to have nothing to offer (indeed it seems antagonistic
even to the very possibility) that leaves only religion or religious views
available to explain what is really going on.

>Suppose you keep records and discover that you cannot account for all
>that happens by coincidence or chance. Then what? You still have
>nothing but subjective evidence which people can deny ever happened --
>but you might want to shop around and see if anybody else has any
>explanations of what happened. Suppose your subjective evidence fits
>descriptions of somebody else's religious experiences? Suppose you
>never even knew the first thing about that religion before you
>started having these bizarre things happen in your life. I would
>maintain that you had rather strong subjective evidence for the
>truth of that religion.
>

Lets take an example right here from the net.   Leif Sorenson (sp?) posted
in net.origins an event that happened to him which in his eyes indicated
a reason to believe in the reality of God.  Basically, after praying for help
he found himself uncovering lost items in his yard in such a way as to be
beyond normal explanation by current day science.  Thus, he finds religion
offers to explain something very real that happened in his life that science
completely fails to even acknowledge. I cannot blame him at all for his
reaching to religion, since science gives no other alternatives.

I find this regretable.  I think that 'science' could very well come to
understand what is going on but has a blind spot in the very nature of the
scientific method - the reproducability of results on demand.  What this
part of the scientific method does is a priori RULE OUT anything going on
in the universe that CAN NOT BE EXAMINED THIS WAY.  Now I'm NOT saying science
should throw out this rule or anything like that.  I am saying that there
should be an attempt at developing a 'scientific method alternative' for the
investigation of such things instead of the blatant bigoted refusal to even
recognize such things are possible within the scientific community.

There are vast areas to be covered in this subject but I'll stick to one.
Why is it that not everyone has these "something more" events happening to
them?  For those that do usually religion, the occult, or mysticism is the
road taken to form further concepts.  I, evidently, am among the few that
feel that science should be doing the investigating and that these events
in no way have anything to do with a God or whatever, that these events are
an intrinsic part of the nature of reality.  In my opinion, religions are
myths to explain these "something mores", i.e. religions are not true in
themselves but fulfill a deep and important need to understand these events.

But back to those that do not experience these things.  (This could make a
posting all to itself.)  There are definite studies in parapsychology which
show that certain attitudes indeed affect the very possibility of having
paranormal events occuring in ones life (or noticing that they occur.)
One of these attitudes is believing that such things are possible to begin
with - note I did not say believing they WERE true, just possible.  I myself
didn't start having 'paranormal' experiences for the most part until I opened
myself up to the possibility that they could happen.  But its not so simple.

I have a friend here in Austin who has been discussing these things with me.
He finds absoultely no "something mores" ever happening in his life, and he
finds no mystical quality about it at all - very different from myself. We
are (when he graduates) going to do an indepth study of our belief
systems to see if we can pin down the differences in hopes of uncovering a
clue about this.

>Not that that religion was absolutely true. Not that there was no
>truth in other religions. But that that religion had some truth,
>which you could grasp and find relevant.
>

As I said before, I find it unfortunate that religions are the only alternate
belief systems available.  I hope one day science will wake up and tackle this
extremely difficult area.  In fact, I feel this area to be more important
for mankind than any other studied by science today.

>But - the evidence is still subjective. And you always could be
>mistaken, along with a lot of other people. Or you could be lying.
>Your claims will never stand up to a persistent skeptic who is
>determined to believe that you are either lying or a victim of
>mass hallucination, or mistaken or a victim of your own wishful
>thinking. There is no way to avoid this. The best you can aim for
>is the understanding from the point of view of the skeptic that you
>are sincere.
>

Alas, this is the BIGGEST problem to be tackled in studying this subject.  It
IS very difficult, if not impossible, to weed out subjective biases in
accepting events as paranormal becuase we cannot use statistics at all to
determine how improbable an event really is.  Take the following example
which happened to me:

  I mention to my roomate while watching our hummingbird feeder that I never
seem to notice ants in flowers the way that I constantly see them crawing
into the fake flowers on my feeder.  He replies that its true for him also.
We speculate on this for a while.  The next day two of his friends come over
to the house and just happen to be showing us pictures of their Hawaiian trip.
They go though them one by one when one happens to be a closeup of a flower.
The girl mentions how odd it was that there were so many ants crawling on the
flower and points out the ants in the picture.  My roomie and I both stare
at each other in disbelief since it was only the day before we were discussing
the very same subject.  (We usually come out with lines such as "Carl Sagan
would just close his eyes and ignore this" indicating how funny it is to us
that Sagan would deny any meaning to this coincidence.)

The problem here, of course, is there is no way at all to label how improbable
this event really is.  I know I don't think of ants on flowers very often, but
just how often do I?  Once a Year?  Once every five years?  Further
complicating the situation is the fact of how do you tie this in with the
second event of having someone else bring it up a day later?  Would two days
make a difference versus one?  The entire thing boils down to the question
"How often do I come across the subject of 'ants on flowers' in my everyday
life." One impossible to answer with any certainty.

>Rich, ...
>You first reject all subjective evidence and then you say that there is
>no evidence.
>

But how to solve this dilemma?  Unless each individual experiences paranormal
events in their everyday life, why shouldn't they disbelieve them?  I guess
we could blame this on science fostering the notion that such things are
highly unlikely, even though they aren't.  What to do?

Responses to this are welcomed and should prove most interesting.  This topic
really hits so many newsgroups like net.science, but I'll just reply here for
now.  I actually am quite shocked at how little is known about psi research
in parapsychology by those here on the net.

Dave Trissel        {ihnp4,seismo,gatech}!ut-sally!oakhill!davet