Thoughts On Atheism and Faith

[pocaracas]

I would suspect intellectuals would be open to hearing new ideas. Not in the sense that the new ideas shouldn't be criticized, but that they can be entertained for the purposes of discussion. If this were to be true, I would ask the atheists to entertain the existence of a force realm, and to imagine its implications. A realm that cannot be seen in the physical, but perhaps can be fathomed by humans nonetheless.
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How can we prove by the physical that which exists beyond the physical? Would we be guaranteed such a proof if the force did exist?

Is the inability to prove the force using the physical an excuse to avoid naturalism and the scientist? Have we yet learned the limitations of the scientist to know that their is nothing beyond their ways?

So if we were to suspend the necessity of naturalism, to entertain the idea of the force, what would we find? Perhaps we would find some truth by entertaining the idea of the force, or perhaps not, either way it may be beneficial to attempt to experience reality beyond the limitations of naturalism.

I just replaced "spiritual" with "force" in your text...
It still makes the same sense.
I could have used "magic" or some other fictional quantity... Yes, we can entertain ideas, no matter how ludicrous. It's called philosophy.
Just because we can entertain ludicrous ideas, it does not follow that those ideas represent reality.
Reality simply is what it is. Science is our best means of ascertaining reality.
The Truth that people like to think of is, to put in simple terms, "an accurate description of reality".
However, truth in philosophy is nothing more than a statement that a particular person considers to be an accurate description of reality.
If one person considers a statement to be true, does it follow that it is indeed True?
I think you can come up with a number of cases where it does not follow, am I correct? (think visual illusions, hallucinations, realistic dreams, etc.)

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On this, when I was learning about special relativity, the professor posed an interesting problem.
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A guy was driving along in his space ship and passed by a traffic light.
A cop pulls him over and informs the driver that he ran a red light.
The guy is astonished and swears by all his ancestors that he saw the light as green.
Assuming the driver is speaking the truth, the cop writes him a ticket for speeding.
How fast was he going?
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-It's a problem involving the Doppler Shift of light. I don't remember the result exactly, but I think he was going at something like half the speed of light... slightly above the allowed speed limit on most roads on Earth

All this to say that perception can also be subject to some extra interpretation..... don't trust yourself.

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This leaves us, humans in general, with the need to distinguish an individual's truth from the actual Truth.

Religion mangles both these truths together and trudges on, because it can.... because people are, in general, stupid and follow the herd... because it empowers those who "sound" right...

But, if you have some drop of intellectual honesty in your mind, you will endeavor to discern those two truths apart. How? For now, the best candidate for such a task is Science.... what you called "naturalism".

[/rant]