Science and origins

one of my favorite books is Spook: Science tackles the afterlife by Mary Roach. obviously, main theme of the book is how people throughout history have tried to gather empirical evidence of supernatural claimslong story short, "science" can and does investigate supernatural claims, from ghostly visitations to mediums talking with the departed to NDE/OBEs. it simply has found no evidence of any, everi just like to keep reminding everyone that the claim "science ignores the supernatural" (eg, philosophical naturalism) is clearly falsethank you for reading =)

"IF something were truly supernatural, it wouldn't necessarily register on any scientific equipment..."but then we would also be unable to percieve it at all. even if that "supernatural something" is utterly undetectable of and by itself, it must have some physical, or at least empirical, effects. and those CAN be investigatedone study of NDEs/OBEs -- utterly subjective experiences -- looked at what the subject was able to observe. in the case in mind, there was a randomly-generated word on a laptop that could *only* be seen from an near-the-ceiling perspective. if the subject did indeed "float above his/her body", then the randomly-generated word would have been visible, and the subject could identify it. hasn't happened yet, but when/if it does, that would be objective evidence of a subjective event

quote:

---

what proof do we have that the subjective experience is not evidence of "somethings" existance?

---

i can imagine (subjectively experience) a unicorn, thus unicorns objectively exist. are we *really* going there?anyway, since we cannot prove a negative, i'll just point out that, throughout history, very few subjective experiences of one person correlate with the subjective experiences of another. that lack of correlation is good evidence that there is, in fact, no objective reality to those subjective experiencesif everyone who ever meditated had the same epiphany, that would support the "subjective experience = objective reality" hypothesis. since that has never, ever happened we can consider the hypothesis falsifiedthanks for reading =)