Post by unkleE on Dec 13, 2012 9:10:53 GMT
I wanted to share some interesting, and no doubt slightly controversial, books I have recently completed reading - Visions of Jesus and God and other Spirits by Phillip Wiebe.
Wiebe is a philosopher who has taken an interest in apparently supernatural phenomena - visions, healings and other actions believed by the recipients or observers to be originated by God or spirits. He has, over the course of his academic life, interviewed a number of people who have had such experiences, and who he considers genuinely believed they were "real" - i.e. they weren't deliberately lying.
In "Visions of Jesus" he examines each of the main types of possible explanations - supernatural, psychological or neurological - in some detail, considering a number of different forms of each type of explanation. He concludes that no single explanation can explain all the phenomena he has reported.
In the later "God and other Spirits", Wiebe considers some further experiences, based on further interviews, and also refers back to his previous book and to the history of "Judeo-Christian experiences of the holy". But here his purpose is not to examine possible explanations, but to consider the philosophical questions of trying to deal with such claims.
He considers the most obvious approaches of naturalistic philosophy, and points out that many of them don't consider the specific evidence he refer to sufficiently, and their conclusions are based more on worldview. He questions how one might seriously investigate a "theory of spirits", and suggests some philosophical approaches.
In all this he refers often to the change in attitude to investigating Near Death Experiences (NDEs) - once not taken seriously as the subject of research, but now a recognised field of study. He suggests that the same approach - gather a lot more data and test it against all possible hypotheses - be adopted for the theory of spirits.
I found all this very interesting, and wonder how his books have been received. Doubtless he will be pushing it uphill to get a lot of interest. I would once have been pretty sceptical about these sorts of experiences, and doubtless there are many urban myths out there. But the correct scientific approach is not to assume we know the answers, but to gather evidence. Sceptics should at least be interested in the human psychological or neurological reasons why such experiences are reported.
In the end, the books are an interesting though solid read, and they raise far more questions than they answer. I don't who will read them, and I don't know how strongly I would recommend them, but I'm glad I have read them.
Wiebe is a philosopher who has taken an interest in apparently supernatural phenomena - visions, healings and other actions believed by the recipients or observers to be originated by God or spirits. He has, over the course of his academic life, interviewed a number of people who have had such experiences, and who he considers genuinely believed they were "real" - i.e. they weren't deliberately lying.
In "Visions of Jesus" he examines each of the main types of possible explanations - supernatural, psychological or neurological - in some detail, considering a number of different forms of each type of explanation. He concludes that no single explanation can explain all the phenomena he has reported.
In the later "God and other Spirits", Wiebe considers some further experiences, based on further interviews, and also refers back to his previous book and to the history of "Judeo-Christian experiences of the holy". But here his purpose is not to examine possible explanations, but to consider the philosophical questions of trying to deal with such claims.
He considers the most obvious approaches of naturalistic philosophy, and points out that many of them don't consider the specific evidence he refer to sufficiently, and their conclusions are based more on worldview. He questions how one might seriously investigate a "theory of spirits", and suggests some philosophical approaches.
In all this he refers often to the change in attitude to investigating Near Death Experiences (NDEs) - once not taken seriously as the subject of research, but now a recognised field of study. He suggests that the same approach - gather a lot more data and test it against all possible hypotheses - be adopted for the theory of spirits.
I found all this very interesting, and wonder how his books have been received. Doubtless he will be pushing it uphill to get a lot of interest. I would once have been pretty sceptical about these sorts of experiences, and doubtless there are many urban myths out there. But the correct scientific approach is not to assume we know the answers, but to gather evidence. Sceptics should at least be interested in the human psychological or neurological reasons why such experiences are reported.
In the end, the books are an interesting though solid read, and they raise far more questions than they answer. I don't who will read them, and I don't know how strongly I would recommend them, but I'm glad I have read them.
