Sort of a follow up to my topic asking why NDE Research wasn’t taken seriously. Which btw I got great replies to.
I was expecting the usual “Oh near death isn’t REALLY death.” And “Because its bullshit.” Strawman non answers
But instead I got people interfacing with the data and pointing out that an afterlife was no the direction the data headed outside of spirituality circles that did not interpret the data correctly to begin with.
So looking at how everything to do with conciousness leads to the brain and how we have discovered that a sense of self separate from the body is illusionary.
I have to ask
Is it an open secret that the afterlife is debunked?
I can find tons of arguments and information against it and the only thing supporting basically going “Well the brain is your conciousness but no one knows for sure.”
So a “I’m not saying no, but I sure as hell am not saying yes.” Being the strongest yes isn’t exactly reassuring. It makes me think the “I don’t know” is actually a “no” trying to be polite
I agree, but the flipside of that rule is that if someone claims that something exists, then the onus is on them to provide evidence for it.
We do dismiss all kinds of theories all the time due to a lack of evidence. For example, I might claim that there’s a pink space unicorn hiding behind Pluto and you really don’t need to now put tons of thought into whether that’s true, because I have no evidence for it.
As far as I can tell, the afterlife concept doesn’t get the same treatment purely because people like the thought of it. But that just isn’t scientific…
Once something becomes a shared experience, it ‘exists’, to a degree. Perhaps some people genuinely believe in a flying spaghetti monster, but it’s not comparable to the number of people who have the shared experience of xyz-religious-view.
Why are ‘we’ asking, “Does God Exist?”. Rewind 2000 years and ask that question, and buddy would just point to Jupiter and say “there he fuckin is!” like you’re an idiot.
We ask “does god exist”, because god must fundamentally supercede our ever evolving understanding. We have disproven the old gods by understanding the forces of nature that ancient “common sense” attributed as evidence for them. As our understanding grows so does our definition of what can constitute a god.
We ask why does god exist because are at a point of knowledge where nothing is apparently god anymore.
Proving negatives is certainly a more philosophical endeavor than a problem to solve with the scientific method. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply proper scientific methodology to our philosophical discussions.
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