Well, I think it does justify prioritizing investigation toward that area. In my work in biology/ biochemistry, we don’t typically start with hypotheses which invoke mechanisms that seem counter to known physics. It may be necessary in the end but we don’t start there.
And even if it involves unknown ‘physics’, simply knowing that similar conscious experiences are found in over 3 billion individuals that share common biology might suggest that it is amenable to statistical analysis and that the underlying, regular phenomena and patterns can be investigated in a scientific manner. This is some of the fuzziness of explanations for which I criticize the advocates of ‘disembodied intelligence"‘. If someone wants to invoke ‘special physics’, well, that’s fine. But build a testable theoretic around it and report back after analyzing the data and any attributes you’ve identified.
I’m not proposing a biological research program; I’m simply saying that uncertainty doesn’t require me to interpret people’s experiences as brain malfunction in advance of conclusions.
You’re really missing the point. You can’t trust your senses… at all.
When you hold up a cup in a dream, it’s basically the same as holding one up in waking life.
The sensory experience of life tells you nothing about what is behind it. You don’t know, for example, if cup is “physical matter”. You only know that in your dreams (half the time) it’s not.
You assume it is maybe, but that’s an assumption you have no right to make. It’s based on your emotions.
Physics actually increasingly suggests the opposite: non locality, entanglement, particle radius of zero, quantum teleportation… these are properties of an information based system… like a video game or a dream… not a “physical system”.
That’s what it means that you “can’t trust your senses”… not that they don’t work for practical living.
Sure I have a right to trust my senses, based on volition. I choose to. That is a valid prerogative which requires no further justification nor approval from others.
I’m extremely short on time these days, but I do want to respond to this: such a view would not only make physics itself untrustworthy, it would also render our faith in the testimony of the apostles completely moronic. If we cannot trust our senses in ordinary and mundane matters, how on earth could we trust the testimony of people who claimed to have witnessed something that contradicts universal human experience—namely, that a dead person remains dead?
The radical skepticism that claims we cannot even rely on what we see and hear is, frankly, idiotic. In any sane world it would be dismissed immediately, because it undermines the very possibility of reason, science, language, and daily life. No one actually lives as though their senses are worthless: we look both ways before crossing the street, we trust our memory of where we left our keys, we believe what we hear from others, provided that they are at least sort of reliable, and we build entire civilizations on the assumption that perception generally corresponds to reality.
To deny this is not intellectual seriousness but philosophical posturing. A skepticism so extreme that it destroys the foundations of all knowledge is not wisdom—it is simply absurdity.
And yet this kind of radical skepticism is a product of our time, and one of the greatest reasons behind the modern man’s impermeability to the Gospel.
Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." John 12:25
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Ephesians 6:12
Our senses don’t help us understand our true plight. They may be useful and consistent, but ultimately, they show us nothing of the spiritual reality. That is the truth about our lives.
The quote from John doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t trust our senses otherwise the apostles would have had no reasons to trust their own senses when they saw the resurrected Christ.
You’ve shifted the claim (and in a good way, because it’s now clearer what you mean).
At first you said we “can’t trust our senses at all.” Now you’re conceding they’re “useful and consistent,” but arguing they don’t disclose the spiritual dimension of reality. That’s a very different point.
On that narrower point: sure — Christianity teaches that the decisive realities (God, sin, grace, spiritual conflict) aren’t delivered by the five senses. But it doesn’t follow that we “should live as though our senses are worthless.” John 12:25 is about allegiance and self-denial, not an instruction to treat embodied perception as meaningless.
Likewise, Ephesians 6:12 doesn’t deny “flesh and blood”; it says the struggle isn’t ultimately against them. The physical world remains real and morally significant — it’s precisely where love of neighbor, justice, and ordinary obedience take place.
So: yes, senses are limited; no, they’re not worthless — and neither passage supports global distrust of perception or a “dream/game” metaphysic.
See this is where we get stuck usually, there is no “spiritual dimension” to reality. There is no reality over here and then beside it there is a spiritual dimension over there.
We are created and sustained by the Word. The things of the world have no substance in themselves except that Word. That’s key. No substances.
To dismiss this as a “dream/game Metaphysic” is simply wrong….
Maybe you feel that the world must have some independent existence outside of the Word of God or it is not “real”.
But there is nothing more real than the Word of God.
And to exist outside of God’s Word is to equate one’s self with God, because only he exists outside of his Word.
I agree with almost everything you said, though I would slightly revise one point: you wrote that decisive realities are not delivered through our five senses. I would correct it by saying that decisive realities are not ordinarily delivered through our five senses.
But let’s be frank—if the apostles had not seen the risen Jesus, Christianity would never have come into existence. They had fled. Peter denied Jesus three times, and yet after seeing and understanding who He truly was, he became willing to be crucified upside down in Rome (he requested that form of death because he did not feel worthy to die in the same manner as Jesus), and he did so in order to bear witness to the Gospel.
That is also why I can’t help but chuckle when atheists compare the apostles’ martyrdom to that of kamikaze muslims, saying, “Dying for something proves nothing, and it doesn’t mean what you die for is true.”
The difference is that muslim extremists die for a distorted view of what they believe to be true, but they have no way to verify or falsify it.
The apostles, however, died testifying to something they have seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands.
1 John 1-4
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete”
On the contrary, we see in every moment that which the spiritual reality ordains for us to see. And further the effects of the spiritual reality that we observe are always physical.
Whether it be the resurrection, the feeding of the 10,000 or The parting of the Red Sea, the cloud, or the pillar of fire, or whether it’s simply be the rising and setting of the Sun, the pull of the tides or the continuity of cause and effect…
Those which deviate from our typical experience, we call miracles, those which don’t we call Providence. But they are in reality all acts of the same powerful Word.
When the Bible says that “God is not mocked a man reaps what he sows,” it is not referring to a law of “karma” but rather the laws of nature, both mundane and spiritual. In this way we see how it is always true not only in the next life but in this one as well.
Jamie, at 77 I’m a little old to be navigating, in rapid succession, epistemological skepticism about the senses, quantum metaphors, then a strong theological grounding of reality in the Word, and now a doctrine of continuous providence. Those are not identical claims, and it would ease the challenge of sailing through them not to treat them as though they were.
My original point was much narrower: the world in which I now live, breathe, and move is ordinarily reliable. Classical Christian theology affirms that creation is upheld by the Word of God, but that does not render it illusory, unintelligible, or cognitively worthless.
As for the world I will leave this one for soon enough, I assume it will be reliable in ways appropriate to that order of existence. Precisely how extraordinarily reliable it will be remains to be seen.