I never said i saw a phantasm.
I said WHAT IF,,,,,that is conditional.
Sure, I haven't said otherwise; you actually said, "
... let's say I see a phantasm..."
There can be reasons why a person might THINK they saw one....OR it could be real.
I believe this because I believe in an after-life.
You have problems believing it because you do NOT believe in an after-life and so your explanation is the auditory and sensory problems that might explain that away.
Not quite right. I don't believe in an afterlife, but phantasms don't necessarily have any connection to an afterlife - popularly, they're supernatural entities - spirits, demons, ghosts, spectres, disembodied souls, etc., which may or may not have once been alive (ironically, one meaning is '
a figment of the imagination').
I don't believe such things are physically real because, like an afterlife, they contradict fundamental physical laws established through experiment & observation; if such manifestations
were possible
, we would have seen interesting low-energy exceptions to the standard physical regime in our experiments, including local conservation of energy violations, and we haven't - remember, if these things were real, they'd have to interact with the matter and forces of our everyday world just to be seen.
As a youngster, I used to hope such things might be possible, along with mind over matter, seeing the future, remote viewing, and other paranormal and supernatural phenomena. I now have a better understanding of why this is not realistic.
This is what you say above:
because absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence,
Apply this to God.
It works just fine.
Because I cannot PROVE to your satisfaction that God exists...does not mean He DOES NOT exist....just that it cannot be proven.
Sure - I haven't asked you to prove it and I haven't claimed God doesn't exist. It isn't a falsifiable concept. I don't believe in God because I see no reason to think or expect that such a thing exists. I could be wrong, just as I could be wrong about the non-existence of Zeus, or Thoth, or Vishnu, or Anubis, or goblins, or tree spirits, or magic.
Your suggestion that 'absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence' works just fine when applied to God, also works equally well for
anything you care to imagine, from gremlins to monsters, from fairies to demons, from ghouls to 'things that go bump in the night', and all kinds of magical and superstitious thinking. It's not in any way a rational or sensible guide to reality. To build your worldview and belief system on some arbitrary deity because, well, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, would be absurd.
But this, presumably, is why the vast majority of religious believers believe in the god or gods popular in the culture or family they were raised in - because, beyond cultural memes (anecdotal claims, stories, myths, legends, and the belief of others), there's simply no evidence to go on.
