(April 18, 2015 at 12:03 pm)robvalue Wrote: The hardest thing for me to figure out with theists is what they really believe.
Conceded I may not be helpful on this. One item perhaps basic to theism is a conviction that naturalistic explanation doesn't cover all phenomena of interest. I can remember when everyone in school virtually worshiped the then-recently dead Albert Einstein and wanted to be as smart as he was. The 17th century divorce of "natural philosophy" from both classical philosophy and religious oversight was indeed a welcome development in western thinking.
But science has limitations. A phenomenon is explained only by a theory which can be tested by observation and measurement. Observations and measurements in turn must be communicable in words or language from one person to another, so that the second person can reproduce them. That's how theories are validated. This process necessarily excludes a lot of information privy to individual conscious minds, such as subjective sensations of color, sound, pain, desire, and so on. It's remarkable that brains which effectively act as computers even have subjective experience to begin with. There's no apparent reason they should; all the brain's workings can be explained by neurobiology without reference to a personal consciousness.
Thomas Nagel explored this gulf between minds in his paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (The Philosophical Review 83 [4]. Oct. 1974, pp. 435-450, copies widely available online) Personal, subjective consciousness, our vivid sense of being alive, is thus one phenomenon that science will have trouble explaining because it involves something that can't be measured and communicated. Existence of subjective consciousness doesn't imply existence of deity of course. Yet it does suggest that science and spiritual experience represent two modalities for understanding reality.
