Just to add a bit to this interesting discussion.
First, re Mitchell’s dismissal of reporting of first person experience as valid science. I’ve been reading David Chalmers’ The Character of Consciousness and he makes a strong case why it is not appropriate nor necessary to dismiss accounts of first person experience as unscientific. As Chalmers points out, it is the only way scientifically we can study consciousness as it is a private and not public phenomenon.
However, not all first person accounts are veridical (as they say). Just because someone says they experience reincarnation does not make reincarnation real (or any of the other items he listed). What makes a report of an experience veridical, if anything? It seems the answer is in comparing with other such reports and validating empirically as much as possible. So, when someone says the sky is blue, others agree and scientists can come up with reasons why the experience of blueness is so common. Not all such shared reports can be empirically established. Does that force us to dismiss them? I think not. Love might be an example. Not sure how it can be empirically established but it is a pretty darn universal experience and the reports of it, while infinitely varied, suggest that there is something real in the concept of love.
This bears directly on the main issue of contention, which is does the virtually universal human experience of a spiritual world or spiritually reality make it real? So far, of course, it cannot be empirically established. (I say so far because I find all this talk of multiple universes, of 26 dimensions, or five dimensions, or dark matter very intriguing. Is it possible that the reality that humans apprehended that they called non-material are just a different form of material? I’ll leave such wild speculations for another time.)
The two theories of the emergence of religion at play here are:
Religion including the idea of a non-material spiritual reality emerged as a characteristic of humans through evolutionary fitness
Based on the near universal experience of humans throughout history, we can conclude that there is such a thing as spiritual reality.
From a materialistic/physicalist science point of view, of course, religion has to be a product of evolution. But, the spirit world or ‘something more” has existed as part of human experience since the dawn of consciousness. Either that is because there is some reality reflected in that nearly universal and shared experience, or there is some evolutionary explanation. Materialism says there can be no other. It rejects out of hand any other possibility. That does not make it right or true, it only says that the dogma of physicalism forces those who subscribe to close their eyes to any counter evidence because that’s what dogma does.
The evolutionary explanations appear to me to suffer from lack of parsimoniousness. They don’t fit Ockham’s Razor nearly as well as the simple explanation that nearly everyone believes in or experiences a spiritual reality because there is actually a spiritual reality. The argument that somehow it contributes to fitness and survival by contributing in some way to social cohesion appears to be a stretch (also doesn’t seem to fit with history which suggests religion is more a divider than uniter). Doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But, we don’t know. A non-parsimonious, out of the way explanation seems necessary to demonstrate that humans are somehow more fit to survive by believing in something that is a figment of their imagination.
Where does the burden of proof lie? It normally lies with the most complex explanations according to that ever sharp razor. But, here It seems it depends more on presuppositions or, perhaps, dogma.
