(October 7, 2013 at 2:08 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote: I've read plenty of first hand experience accounts. You could say they were hallucinating it if you want to presuppose material naturalism and consciousness as a secretion of the brain and all that business.
Right. And I could say that they aren't, if it was convenient to believe so. But what I cannot do is falsify or confirm any of those accounts. And neither can the people providing them, even when they're first hand. That's my point. When you cannot corroborate such things, then the listener may accept or reject the story on his or her own, and then biases come into play.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
