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2. Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar, or on generic flamewar tangents generally.
Is that evidence in the room with us right now?
Too little science leads away from God, while too much science leads back to Him". So said Louis Pasteur.
I'm sorry but I can't see how the first sentence supports the second in any meaningful way. It's easy and pointless to shit on religion and I'm not doing that here, but "evidence" is something other than common stories.
Consider that the evidence for a non-evolutionary origin of humanity is equally abundant, in religious traditions. Would you say that evolution is still dubious because so many traditional beliefs exist that don't include it? Would you hold up "we're molded from clay, because a lot of people said so" next to centuries of living and fossil evidence for an evolutionary origin of humanity and say, "Well, they both have a lot of evidence."?
I believe the source of your confusion is that death is such a black box. But the failure of current science to pierce that veil doesn't make non-evidence-based theories any more valid. It only means, "this is still unknown." Could there be an afterlife? Sure, it's possible, but there's not yet any significant evidence for one.
> Could there be an afterlife? Sure, it's possible, but there's not yet any significant evidence for one.
First off, you can discount "common stories" all you want, but even science operates on "common stories", i.e. we use a "common" method, record our observations, and make educated guesses about what those observations imply, and share our results. When we begin to come to a "common" consensus, we say the stories line up and that therefore we've likely hit upon some truth.
It's so easy to find the evidence I didn't think I'd have to mention them. Off the top of my head, we can observe the numerous accounts of near-death experiences across cultures and religions which share striking commonalities.
Then you can also point to paranormal phenomena also universal across cultures and religions.
Another line of thought would be to read some Plato, particularly the Phaedo which gives several very convincing arguments for the immortality of the soul.
These are different definitions of common, and that's on me for not being precise. "Common stories" refers to "stories you hear often, albeit with different forms/origins/meanings." Ideas such that they're easily repeated, but they're also easy to independently invent, because they don't rely on verifiable evidence. The "common" methods and stories of science are "common" as in "shared." Science operates on the intentional sharing of knowledge to build a shared understanding of the world. Two different religious concepts of the afterlife are not a shared idea, they're just convergent ideas.
(Your argument seems to be that they actually are shared via a shared seed - an actual afterlife, but we don't have direct evidence of that being true. If it were true, how would living people know about it? The assertion that "an afterlife exists, because so many cultures talk about it" requires additional assumptions about some mechanism of transmitting information from the dead to the living, and such mechanisms are even less universal than the simple existence of an afterlife. Is it angels? Is it ancestral memory? Is it astral projection? etc.)
> It's so easy to find the evidence I didn't think I'd have to mention them. Off the top of my head, we can observe the numerous accounts of near-death experiences across cultures and religions which share striking commonalities. Then you can also point to paranormal phenomena also universal across cultures and religions.
Neither of these are evidence of an afterlife. Near-death experiences are not the experiences of immortal souls that have exited a dead body, they're experiences of living people. Even if you count the experiences of people who literally died for a brief period of time, which is what I assume you're actually referring to, we can't say that anything they remember experiencing is certainly a supernatural experience generated by a soul, instead of a chemical process of their brain. Is it possible? Sure, but where is the evidence that those experiences aren't just physical processes?
> Another line of thought would be to read some Plato, particularly the Phaedo which gives several very convincing arguments for the immortality of the soul.
Sure, I love me some Plato. Perhaps I'll get to Phaedo eventually. In what way is that evidence for the existence of an afterlife? I feel you're quite confused about what evidence means.
Let me clarify about science: It does operate on a degree of faith. I haven't derived special relativity myself, yet I believe it is true. But that's because I'm trusting the authority of experts who have done the math. The likelihood of them all lying to me, and to the other expert opinions I internalize, is vanishingly low. Every bit of math and science and logic I do know, agrees with the parts I am taking on faith. It is clear at a high level to me how the entire story of special relativity comes together logically and explains all the evidence those experts have used to support it. It's the most likely explanation for how everything works, and it's been tested by experts to an insane level of precision. None of that is true of claims that an afterlife exists. It is only speculative.