No reason justifies disbelief.

[bennyboy]

This statement seems a little peculiar to me, and I'd like you to clarify on it.  Is science really the vehicle by which you know what exists?  Like, are you suspicious of putting books on a new desk until you confirm the hypothesis that it's a real desk?

My post was in response to Belaqua’s earlier claim that there is no way to investigate or gather information about the existence of god using the scientific method. I was accused of having a closed-minded, metaphysical commitment to empirical investigation as the only means to acquire knowledge about that which is real.  My response, then, is that if you’re asserting one method is not going to work, by what other method can I gather information in order to have a good chance at reaching an accurate conclusion about the existence of a god?  And how do we know this alternative method is reliable?  What about this alternative method lends itself to accuracy, so that I don’t have to wonder if I’m just guessing about stuff?

It’s not helpful to tell someone, “I can’t believe you think this one way is going to get you there; you’re so closed minded”, without telling them what the other ways are.

Yes, it's complicated. However, I think Belaqua has attempted to describe another way of collecting knowledge, and it was summarily discarded.

My view of things is this: we start with raw experience, filter it through our world view, and then categorize and systematize it.  There are plenty of experiences, in my opinion, which are so intellectually, emotionally or philosophically powerful that they are worth categorizing as such.  You might call them religious experiences, or moments of realization.

I myself have had experiences which I recognize as matching descriptions of religious experience.  I can honestly say to a Christian talking about the feeling of communion with God that I've been there.  Personally, I don't think it's necessary to attribute the experience to God or any other mythological source.  But what I CAN say is that the truth of that moment is self-contained: either you've had the experience and can "get it," and can understand why Christians might call it God, or you haven't had that experience.

Science might provide interesting insights.  Very many so-called spiritual experiences have been reproduced in the lab: lucid dreams, OBEs, near-death experiences, and so on.  But in my opinion, having the experience provides a level of insight that none of the mechanisms a scientist might use can proxy for.


There's another path by which experiences can be confirmed: by the following of instructions meant to arrive at a particular mental realization or state of mind.  The problem is that it often requires an investment that an unconvinced party is unwilling to make-- and those unwilling to make it, being unable to reproduce the experience, will nevertheless place the BOP on those who outlined the path to having the experience, and discard both the experience and verbal descriptions of the kind of realized truth the experiencer had.

A simple example would be that of lucid dreaming.  If I told you that you could wake up in your dreams, and have complete control over the dream content, and that in this state, the dream felt much more vivid and full of detail even than waking life, then what next?  You could discard my assertion as woo or as an overzealous exaggeration.  But I have actual knowledge of lucid dreaming that your appeals for me to "show the evidence" cannot devalue.  To really be qualified to discuss the issue, you'd have to have a lucid dream, the steps of which can fairly easily be followed by all.

So the short answer to your question: another way of arriving at knowledge is by personal introspection. And the categories of truth arrived at in this way are qualitatively different than those arrived at inference from objective observation.