I'm glad that you are searching for God, but please do so with some faith. Otherwise your endeavors will yield no fruit. Hugs dear~<3
Hi thanks for the great reply!
Yes it's a scientific fact that energy has never been seen to be created or destroyed, only change forms, but to me that doesn't suggest that our mind survives brain death- the energy of our bodies is accounted for in how our flesh rots, it gives it's energy as food to bacteria. Just like the energy in an animal's body (and I assume you don't think animals have immortal souls) when it rots.
There was a test set up with that concept in mind, to weigh bodies before and after death, and the test supposedly gave positive results, that bodies lost a few grams - but eventually it was revealed that the test was poorly executed, the bodies were stored in freezers for long periods between weighing or something. Nobody has repeated the experiment under better conditions yet to my knowledge, but that would be an interesting way to prove energy had left the body, under carefully controlled conditions where we could be certain they hadn't lost fluids to evaporation or anything
I've had an out of body, near death experience
It was just as realistic as people say, but of course, the brain is brilliant at generating realistic experiences - that's what dreams are. I think my experience of floating above the operating table and seeing everything was my brain improvising, building reality on information from just my ears without my eyes, which usually give the most input into building a model of reality.
Also, I've read about many ways we can generate such experiences by messing with the brain, like electrically stimulating the brain centres that generate your sense of self-location. I'd certainly be open to learning convincing evidence these things are real, but at the moment I think there are sufficient naturalistic explanations for out of body experiences as natural neurological phenomena
Ummm what else did you mention... Ooo that many scientists have gone out to prove God doesn't exist, only to become Theistic. That's mirrored by just as many scientists who have gone out to prove God does exist, only to become atheistic after realizing there isn't enough evidence to believe.
I've looked into claims of fine tuning of the universe before, what I notice is that people only point to mysteries about the universe and call them fine tuned, like-
"IF this constant's value is determined by random chance, it would have a 1 in 100000000000 chance of having this value"
Never
"This constant's value IS determined by random chance"
And many of the values of the universe pointed to have since been solved, and discovered not to be random chance, but determined by a balance with other values.
For example, I've heard that
"If the ratio of electrons to protons were just 0.00000000000001% different, the universe would have been chaotic and collapsed in the big bang, and life would never have formed"
But the truth behind that claim turned out to be that the ratio is 1:1, because of the conservation of electrical charge, there's exactly as many electrons as protons, and it was impossible for it to have been otherwise.
I'm not able to have faith
I don't see the difference between faith and pretending, honestly. I find myself mentally unable to believe things that I'm not convinced are true, that I don't understand reasons that demonstrate it true. I mean, what does it even mean to say you believe something, if you don't think there are reasons to think it's true?
