Transcendence and physicalism
This is a post about science and religion. As someone who believes in Jesus Christ and a scientist, I am concerned about the physicalist tendencies of the modern scientific world. Physicalism , the belief that the physical world we can measure and understand through science is the only reality, is the dominant worldview of academics, especially in the hard sciences. Physicalism explicitly denies any spiritual reality that transcends the material world. Religious experience is extremely common. By one measure, about half the US population claims to have had a religious or mystical experience. Academically minded people generally ignore or dismiss this extremely common phenomenon, presumably because it doesn’t fit their scientific worldview. But how scientific is it, really, to dismiss a whole aspect of human experience, a whole field of data points, just because you don’t like the data? A more reasonable approach would treat religious experiences as data from which we can learn - yes