Hello everyone,
I'm new to this forum. This topic is of most interest to me at the moment.
For most of my cognitively developed life, I was an atheist and an anti-supernaturalist, so I didn't believe in afterlives, ghosts, etc. These stances resulted from my belief that there were no compelling reasons to believe in God or supernatural phenomena generally. My views on these issues gradually changed, such that I now reject atheism and anti-supernaturalism for a number of reasons.
The first is that the arguments for materialism, physicalism, naturalism, or whatever brand of anti-supernaturalism one prefers are not compelling. Typically they depend on appeals to parsimony: supernatural phenomena aren't in evidence, and there's no need to posit them to explain the phenomena we know about, so we shouldn't think there are supernatural phenomena. All these arguments tend to beg the question in that they assume that consciousness, or the mind more broadly, has been or can be fully explained with reference only to material phenomena. It is simply untrue that anyone has developed such an explanation. It remains entirely mysterious how a wet lump of biomatter (the brain) can generate mental phenomena. Vague claims about the mind being an "emergent property" don't count as satisfactory theories, since they utterly fail to explain the causal mechanisms that make this emergence possible. Subjectivity remains a complete mystery, and materialist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett have done nothing to resolve the mystery other than insist that science will figure it out eventually (a reverse God-of-the-gaps fallacy, as far as I can tell, insofar as the claim is that "science has figured stuff out before in a way compatible with physicalism, therefore [here comes the non-sequitur] we
know it'll work out the same way this time"). As it stands, to say we know the mind is a purely physical phenomenon is simply to assume what is at issue. It is entirely possible that the brain is a receiver rather than a generator of consciousness and perhaps other mental phenomena, for example. No scientific fact or body of such facts rules out this possibility, and in fact it is more consistent than materialist accounts with some observations, such as the countless documented cases of individuals who have experienced increased mental lucidity when their brains were impaired (for example, those having near-death experiences or NDEs). People often forget that physicalism, materialism, or whatever is a metaphysical rather than scientific thesis, as is supernaturalism. Such theses can be consistent or inconsistent with scientific data, but to say that materialism or a related view has been scientifically established is simply incorrect: "There is also the inductive generalization from the conspicuous success of materialist science in a wide variety of other areas. This undeniably has some modest weight, but seems obviously very far from being enough to justify the strong presumption in question [i.e. that materialism is true]. Inductions are always questionable when the conclusion extends to cases that are significantly different from the ones to which the evidence pertains, and even most materialists will concede that conscious phenomena are among the most difficult—indeed, seemingly the most difficult of all—for materialist views to handle. Thus the fact that materialism has been successful in many other areas does not yield a very strong case that it will succeed in the specific area that we are concerned with" (Laurence BonJour).
Second, and as alluded to above, there is quite a lot of evidence of phenomena that simply don't fit, or don't clearly fit, into materialist frameworks. Other members, such as shattered dreams, have mentioned NDEs, and indeed no satisfactory materialist account of NDEs has been offered. The idea that NDEs have been successfully explained as results of DMT surges near death is false: no one has demonstrated this, it is merely speculation. In fact, all materialist explanations of NDEs are highly speculative (see
https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/110/2/67/2681812) and none can account, even in principle, for veridical information gained through NDEs, as in the cases where congenitally blind persons acquire sight through which they accurately describe the appearance of things they couldn't have seen if materialist theories were correct. Various other phenomena that are inconsistent with standard materialist views of reality are treated in detail in the books
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century and
Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality, among others
. These works aren't from no-name cranks, but respected academics (for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greyson). Unsurprisingly, the arguments in such books don't go without criticism (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_Mind) but I'm yet to be convinced by any materialist critiques, which frequently beg the question and ignore inconvenient findings.
Third, the various philosophical arguments for atheism (and the only real such arguments are philosophical, contra Dawkins and company) are unpersuasive. The argument from evil is perhaps the strongest, but it depends on the assumption that God is omnipotent, which some have argued even the Bible doesn't clearly indicate.
Fourth, many cases of apparent miracles, both modern and historical, are not easily explained in materialist terms, and seem to evidence the existence of God. Attempts at materialist explanations of, for instance, apparent medical miracles tend to invoke bizarre organismic healing mechanisms the reality of which isn't established. So, for example, the most thorough scientific review of the meticulously documented healing miracles at Lourdes shrine concluded that "Uncanny and weird, the cures are currently beyond our ken but still impressive, incredibly effective, and awaiting a scientific explanation" (
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3854941/). These and related seemingly supernatural phenomena attending religious activities and events to my mind render theism rationally defensible, though not justified beyond doubt.
Materialism and related metaphysical views don't have much going for them, as far as I can tell. Their supporters are unfortunately quick to try to explain away all apparent evidence that doesn't fit their favored views as resulting from hallucinations, mental illnesses, dishonesty, and so on. This tactic, however, is close to simply assuming the truth of materialism. Positing that the countless people with no history of hallucinations, mental illness, or dishonesty have only experienced what they claim to have experienced due to the first two of these, or one or the other, or are otherwise lying, when there is no evidence for any of this suggests that one is simply closed off to the possibility of being wrong.
