). That means we all have pretty much the same basic issue of hardware, but each of us runs a different version of software. So when we experience things with our eyes, ears etc. we are quite likely to interpret them in different ways.Harvey1 wrote a marvelous piece in the When God knows a soul goes to hell.. thread (a source of much interesting debate about everything but the original OP!):
This raises an interesting question: Are some of us getting all worked-up (into a spiritual lather) over nothing more than coincidences and other illusions? I firmly believe this to be the case. I believe this mainly because of the nature of our minds and the the way they are known to operate. While it is often impossible to dismiss experiences such as those supplied by Harvey, we can do simple experiments to demonstrate to ourselves that we perceive things not as they are, but as we expect to find them. The classic Negative mask illusion shows that what we "see" is informed greatly by our expectations.Harvey1 wrote: Once I was pondering what God would say about a certain situation that I had encountered, and I was deep into that particular thought (parked in front of a store), a particular message on an LED display lit up with a sentence that perfectly answered the question. So, I don't think it is necessarily in contradiction that God can communicate to us. Incidentally, Richard Feynman had an interesting experience with a so-called supernatural clock:
Once we were talking about the supernatural and the following anecdote involving his first wife Arline came up. Arline had tuberculosis and was confined to a hospital while Feynman was at Los Alamos. Next to her bed was an old clock. Arline told Feynman that the clock was a symbol of the time that they had together and that he should always remember that. Always look at the clock to remember the time we have together, she said. The day that Arline died in the hospital, Feynman was given a note from the nurse that indicated the time of death. Feynman noted that the clock had stopped at exactly that time. It was as the clock, which had been a symbol of their time together, had stopped at the moment of her death. Did you make a connection? I asked NO! NOT FOR A SECOND! I immediately began to think how this could have happened. And I realized that the clock was old and was always breaking. That the clock probably stopped some time before and the nurse coming in to the room to record the time of death would have looked at the clock and jotted down the time from that. I never made any supernatural connection, not even for a second. I just wanted to figure out how it happened.
Now given the fallibility of our perceptions it seems obvious to me that, like us today, humans long ago would readily fall for such coincidences and illusion and develop a great deal of superstition where none was warranted. I suggest that the world is a regular place with no hocus-pocus going on anywhere except in our furtive imaginations. How, given the knowledge of our fallible nature, can we justify any belief in the supernatural at all?
