Bill D and Ed,

One of the problems is that far more than we admit of what we call "scientific truth" is actually taken on faith by the vast majority of people. Here's a pair of questions I ask my students

1) how many of you have looked through an electron microscope and seen atoms?

(usually three or four hands go up)

2) how did you know what you were seeing?

(answer: this scientist-guy told us.)

The existence of atoms is taken on faith (that is, on someone else's authority) by almost everyone who believes in it. This is precisely the same way that the belief in God is instilled in most people. So what's the difference? A science-supporter would say "well, if I went to school to get a Phd. in Physics, and got a job at a lab, I COULD look into an electron microscope, and then I would have the background to know what I was seeing." But a theologian would counter: if you gave yourself over to prayer for six years, you would come to know equally surely that you were communing with God.

Bill D , you say you can measure energy, and you pay for it monthly. But you really pay whatever the power company tells you to pay. You do not independently confirm how much energy you have used. Even if you did, you would do so by using equipment pre-made, and could not confirm its accuracy, or even that it was measuring anything. Add to this the fact that the concept of "energy" as a catchall that includes motion, heat, elecricity, light, height above a gravitation source, chemical explosive potential, is a human-made concept, not a physical reality. We use it because it is convenient, not because a certain amount of light "equals" a certain height above the suface of the earth (gravitational potential energy). You can convert one to another, but you can also convert matter to energy and we don't generally consider them to be the same thing. Thus, the way "objective" science categorizes the world is by convention, not the necessities of reality, and most of the world accepts it on faith without having any direct experiences that confirm what science tells us.

On the other hand, many people do have experiences that intuitively suggest the existence of the supernatural. They feel encompassed by an all-loving light, or are attacked in bed by dark figures that press them down. These experiences, it has been shown (principally by David Hufford, a Medical School professor at Penn State) are cross-cultural, so people have them whether or not their culture has a system of supernatural beliefs to support them.

So what do we expect people to do when they are accustomed to accepting on faith most of the knowledge that is supposedly "scientific" but then have a direct experience that suggests a communion with God? The problem with authors like Sagan is: they ask you to discount the authority of others when it tells you (for example) that ghosts exist. They ask you to discount your own experience when it tells you that ghosts exist. They ask you to accept the authority of others when it tells you that atoms exist. And they ask you to accept your own experience when it tells you that atoms exist. In other words, they have a complete double standard when it comes to evidence.

I understand that this is because the scientific method demands certain things of evidence, in particular that it be reproduceable. But unfortunately the scientific method is arrogant. It assumes that Humans are the most powerful beings in the universe, and that if we wish to "prove" the existence of any other beings, they have no choice but to be found. Most people, however, believe that supernatural beings are more powerful than we are, and can avoid being found if they wish to. So any "experiment" involving the supernatural is doomed to fail and results will never be reproduceable. Science will never accept them, because it cannot. Science, as a creative endeavor of mankind, is limited by the conventions we have set so that it cannot accept the existence of beings who can evade capture. Does this mean that the supernatural does not exist? No. Science could not accept the existence of giant squid until fairly recently, because humankind did not have the power to find them. Science considered the Giant Squid a supernatural legend. But fishermen have kept axes in their boats for generations because they KNEW the giant squid existed.

Sagan, by the way, willfully distorts case studies from other peoples' work to make them look ridiculous. Then half his work of claiming there is no evidence for the supernatural is done. I don't have my books handy, but I love to compare the passage in The Demon Haunted World where Sagan cites David Hufford (you can find it in the index) with Hufford's own case study from The Terror that Comes in the Night. From word one, Sagan distorts and misreports every particular, in order to make the person being studied look like a crazy person.

Anyway, my point is this: the absence of scientific evidence for the soul is an artifact of human creativity, not physical reality. Humans decided what counted as scientific, and in recent years have steered that definition until it cannot accept the existence of beings without bodies. This does not even suggest that those beings can't exist, it simply means that people who require scientific proof wouldn't even believe in ghosts if they saw one.