As I've aged and gotten around a little more, I have had experiences that the scientific method cannot confirm, yet I'm pretty sure what's happening cannot be accounted for by random chance or biased interpretation. Here's a few areas:
Health: I'm convinced that Eastern medicine (acupuncture +) works for certain ailments and also provides explanations that resonate better than Western medicine sometimes. I got Reiki and Reiki 2 attunements , and while I cannot be sure it's doing any healing, I know that some people can tell if I am or am not doing it at an accuracy well beyond chance. I have a friend who's a practictioner and believer of the Wim Hof ice bath path to controlling his own immune system.
Energy: I've felt the difference in energy at the vortex spots in Sedona and seen my wife react to the type (male or female) energy allegedly there without knowing about it in advance.
Death: I've heard first hand stories and had personal experiences that strongly suggest the existence of souls, spirit world, and reincarnation. The number of people with a common accounting of what happened when they were clinically dead also points to the distinct possibility that maybe you don't just cease to exist when your body dies.
Psychic: I've had predictions made about my life with great specificity (as have others) that have come true enough to believe that some of the practitioners are actually connected to something.
Most or all of these things do not pass evidence-based thresholds, and yet they cannot be brushed off as chance or wish-fulfillment.
As atheism comes further out of the closet it seems clear that some atheists aren't just drawing the line of science and reason at whether or not there are any real gods, but rather it has become their only yardstick of truth in the universe. I am wondering how the belief spectrum of the unmeasurable distributes among those who consider themselves atheists. How big is the percentage that only accepts what science can measure? What are the most popular non-scientific beliefs held by atheists?
I'm guessing it's an inverse pyramid as I've written it (most commonly believed at the top), plus there must be some I haven't even listed. I'd love to hear other people's takes (including speaking only for yourself) on the subject.
4 comments:
I wrote this entry as an elucidation of what I was trying to get at in Quora, where you are limited to a short question. I wrote it as
What are the most common things on earth today that cannot be scientifically measured that atheists believe?
1) There's a term that separates people based on the level of proof they need in order to believe in something. The skeptics need pretty much iron-clad scientific proof. The non-skeptics are open to more unquantified ideas. That makes me a non-skeptical atheist. The most helpful person who responded to my question is here.
2) So what I'm really interested in is the percentage split between skeptical and non-skeptical atheists. I suspected beforehand that the skeptical side is much larger and the overall responses confirm that.
3) I went way down the rabbit hole with one guy and what I concluded was that he is terrified of uncertainty. His idea of justifying that he isn't was to say if he doesn't know something, he can always look it up or ask an expert. That isn't uncertainty, it's certainty with a time delay. Relatively speaking, I was glad to discover that I'm a lot more comfortable with uncertainty than I gave myself credit.
4) Lots of people liked to say some version of "Atheism is just the common belief among atheists, there are no other relevant patterns of atheists." I think that is unlikely. Like any big pile of data, if you hold one variable constant, the others shift around.
5) Bottom line - not a single person would volunteer one concept with uncertainty that they might entertain. Well actually, one guy said "Dark matter" but I think that's a cop-out because it's a theory by great scientific minds that's easy to understand why it can't be measured.
6) Furthermore, no one seems to know what the split of skeptics vs. non-skeptics are. I think this is an under-researched topic.
For the whole Quora thread look here:
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-things-on-earth-today-that-cannot-be-scientifically-measured-that-atheists-believe
Also, key learning #7:
Atheists can be as stubborn, dismissive, and arrogant as True Believers.
n regards to key learning #7, that’s because atheism, like many (if not all) religions, is a faith-based belief system. No one can scientifically prove or disprove the existence of God or gods. The belief that God doesn’t exist is based on one’s faith in that belief, not on any scientific evidence of God’s nonexistence. The only rational scientific belief about the existence God or gods is that of an agnostic: that God (or gods) may exist, but there’s no scientific proof that they do.
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