If these experiences were entirely random in nature, and/or the experiences jived with the belief system of the individual at the time, you might make that case. Since there were long term consequences on the individual, including long term changes to the belief systems, it's clear that these individuals did not believe the ND to be any sort of hallucination.
Which hardly proves that they're not.
What makes you personal subjective opinion better than Jung's opinion when his beliefs are born of experience and an understanding of human psychology, whereas you have never even experienced an NDE to begin with?
For the third time: nothing whatsoever. My point was that the 'hallucination' hypothesis is simpler, and therefore more probable, than the 'God' hypothesis.
Did you even read the Lancet article all the way through? It seems to me that your opinion on this matter is not born of personal experience but upon a "personal belief' that you have about the *many* experiences of others, including professionals trained in psychology. What makes your subjective opinion valid? In many cases the patient was not oxygen deprived nor on drugs of any sort. Jung was a skilled psychologist and his beliefs were born of experience. He even reported to have "new knowledge" from the experience.
Yes, I'm sure he did. Now, how does
any of that matter to the point I was making?
The same can be said of "dark energy" and string theory. EM fields cause plasma to "accelerate" just fine. We don't need new forces of nature to explain particle acceleration. Strings don't seem to have any influence on anything so including them in some ancient creation mythos achieves absolutely nothing and "explains" absolutely nothing.
String theory actually explains everything, which is part of the problem: no matter what experiment you run, no matter what the outcome, string theory can account for it. The reasons it's untestable isn't that it doesn't makes, but that it makes too many; there's no falsification test.
Oh come now. "God did it" enjoys just as much empirical evidence as your string theory and "God did it" just also happens to be completely congruent with all those other historical tidbits and human experiences. Pure coincidence?
Yes. Like string theory, 'God' is such a vague term that it can be used to explain anything; there's no possible falsification test.
But your "solution" didn't "explain" any of the information in that article and it flies in the face of that article's findings. It's not clear to me that you actually read the entire article if you keep claiming it's a "hallucination" because none of these individuals seem to agree with your assessment and your opinion is not born of experience, but a lack thereof. More convincingly, many of their behavior and beliefs changed dramatically as a result of their conviction in the merits of the experience.
So? If they were hallucinations, I daresay some people would be convinced by them.
Lambda-CDM is in fact a "creation event" since all matter in the universe supposedly came from that singular event.
ΛCDM is a model of the universe, not an explanation for how it got there.
Well, I tend to agree, but then you still don't seem to be the least bit consistent in they way you are applying your concept of "Occum's razor". The fact you don't posit anything new isn't "automatically" a plus, particularly if your "solution" doesn't jive with the evidence in any way.
Yes, it is. All other things being equal, the more parsimonious hpothesis is more probable. Besides, what evidence doesn't string theory 'jive' with?
None of the folks that were interviewed many years later believed this experience to be a "hallucination", nor did Carl Jung. Most of them experienced very significant changes in their long term belief systems (even religions ones) as a result of these experiences. Atheists report these same sorts of experiences and they all seem to share a common theme. Your "explanation" didn't jive with the evidence, it didn't "explain" things like that missing teeth incident (there are many better accounts by the way). It fails to explain why so many people keep have the same type of experience and report meeting their "creator", including atheists.
On the contrary, the ubiquity of the human brain means they do the same thing in the same set of circumstances. It is entirely possible that NDEs result from the random firing of a particular cluster of neurones, making the individual believe they can see an ill-defined point of light, and are in the presence of someone else (given the fundamental importance of these two aspects of our normal lives, it's not unsurprising that these two symptoms would be manifested). That people attribute this presence to God is a testament urban legends: "Everyone else sees God during an NDE, so that must be what I saw as well!".
At the end of the day, you have no real reason to suppose that the experiences of these individuals were genuine. You simply assert that, because lots of people have these experiences, they must be true.
It seems to me that your application of Occum's razor is utterly arbitrary based on your faulty "assumption" that any sort of an "explanation" is equally valid as any other explanation.
I made it quite clear that the absence of evidence allowed us to use Occam's razor.
Some explanations fit the evidence and some do not. Just because one idea poses nothing new and another does not isn't a logical justification for excluding either theory.
I never excluded anything. We were discussing my claim that it's the
best we've got, not that it's
all we've got.
Since your theory does nothing to explain the long term changes in the beliefs and behaviors of these individuals and addresses nothing related to the "knowledge gained" from such experience from folks like Jung, it's hard to consider your solution to be much of a solution at all.
You asked for my opinion, and I gave it. Whether you accept my explanation or not is of no concern to me.