Felix wrote: ↑March 15th, 2019, 4:27 pm
The same - you've heard of psychological research?
Yes. So far, it has given many - even some plausible - explanations for the subjective experiences that may be collectively interpreted as "religious", but non at all regarding an external, or observable and testable, supernatural entity/event/phenomenon.
Which, of course, may put this research in the area of mental aberration and malfunction. But even if this particular cluster of mental states is not necessarily symptomatic of illness, psychological research is not observing the experiences, but only the subject experiencing them; it is not a study of
the supernatural, but of the human mind.
Incidentally, there are those who question including psychology among the sciences. I'm not one of those: it's closely enough to neurology as to be scientifically useful.
But it will never give you a scientific basis for deities.
[Any endeavour can be compromised and its achievement diminished by bias]
That's to what I was referring....
Ah, but not the other half: that bias can never stretch a science so far as to include imaginary beings.
This is irrelevant anyway: if you tell a child gobbledygook that you know is gobbledygook, it's story-telling, or embellishment or lying;
if you tell it gobbledygook you yourself believe, it's honest indoctrination.