Creation/evolution3

[Thumpalumpacus]

I do disagree with your post quoted below (that empirical doesn't allow "stuff that happened only in my head"). We don't know if anything is real outside our heads. If I'm a scientist taking a measurement, I can't know that I'm really taking a measurement.

This is nonsense.

You can demonstrate your convictions on this point by jumping off a building. I'd be very willing to bet that the ground will demonstrate its objective reality to both you, and the people who scoop you up into a gurney.

A scientist taking a measurement elides solipsism by presenting his work to the broader science community, which then replicates his experiment. If the results match, the hypothesis is strengthened. If the results don't match, the hypothesis is refined, new experiments are run, and the disparate results are again compared.

By using multiple vantage points of individuals who do not know each other and report their own observations, we can be reasonably certain that an objective reality exists outside our perceptions.

Mind-altering drugs are, ironically, another way we can see that there is an objective reality, because they tend to have the same effects on different people. The fact that individual brains experience psychoactive substances in a similar manner is strong evidence that there is an objective material substrate to our perceptions.

Simply because Drich claims to have experienced god doesn't mean that that claim is true. He may have experienced an excitation of the left parietal lobe, inducing a religious experience; or he may simply be a lying sack of shit. But it is not an empirical claim because it cannot be observed.

Indeed, Drich cannot himself observe his alleged interaction with his deity and given the plasticity and corruptibility of human memory, may have no clear idea of what he experienced and is merely coloring in shapes.

Anyone hearing his claim is perfectly justified in asking for observable evidence; and they are equally justified in dismissing the "empiricism" of his claim when you comes up with nothing.