I agree, but this is hardly specific to religions. There are many people here (Alex included), who seem to hold that psi is 100% proven and not really open for debate anymore, and that to continue debating the point is to be "stuck on stupid". This is the biggest failing of Skeptiko, in my opinion. The debate is not over just because Alex says it is, and says that anyone who doesn't agree is stupid or silly.
I don't claim to be 100% convinced of ψ - and I more or less conflate ψ and life after death, in the sense that a new way of looking at consciousness sets us back to square one!
I think Alex's problem is that he really has interviewed a lot of prominent materialists, and they haven't performed very well. The most extreme example was Patricia Chuchland, but there have been other consciousness experts that had read none of the literature on NDE's for example. Others seem to want to explain everything in terms of fraud and error.
That said, it's his platform, so clearly the debate is over on Skeptiko. The 100% certainty angle has basically neutered this forum and chased virtually every dissenting opinion away.
You and Paul, and several others are here. There is absolutely nothing to stop you starting a thread that extols the virtue of materialism just as much as you like. Honestly, I have only banned people who feel the need to fool about, or abuse others.
What remains is a shell of what was here before the debate was declared over.
Well as I say, feel free to re-invigorate it! I guess your problem is that you yourself are not 100% materialist. However, despite what you would claim, a lot of the most vocal opponents are 100% materialists. The problem is that if you are 95% materialist, what does it mean? I mean if ψ operated very rarely, but unequivocally, how does that fit in with the scientific picture?
I mean everyone recognises that a lot of things simply follow the laws of physics and chemistry.
My take on the situation, is that materilists may indeed have some doubts as you describe, but they hate to describe their doubts because others will condemn them for it - Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, etc. They just keep their heads down.
Who is taking a wholly materialist viewpoint, other than people who want to characterize the viewpoints of their critics? Are there really lots of scientists out there who will say "We have it all figured out, and it's just materialism and there is no room for any other explanation. Case 100% closed."? Exactly who are these pure materialists? And if they do not exist in a 100%, wholly materialist framework, then why characterize them that way?
The standard view seems to be that at normal temperatures and pressures, matter (including brain tissue) simply obeys the laws of Quantum Mechanics. This produces a deterministic world with some pure quantum randomness.
Again, who exactly is asserting pure materialism? Certainly not I. And if pure materialists do exist, what do these pure materialists say about dark matter, or dark energy, or the two-slit experiment, or entanglement, or the big bang, or what exactly matter is, or any number of other things that are not explained perfectly by pure materialism?
Well assuming materialism includes QM, which it absolutely has to - the classical description of matter simply fails, for example, atoms would radiate electromagnetic energy and collapse - that covers the two-slit experiment and entanglement. Dark matter is a fudge to try to make the equations of gravity fit the observed reality.
As I see it, QM describes a very alien world, and its interpretation is still up for grabs, but the vast majority of people who work in the field, don't claim publicly that it relates to ψ.
I think that there are certainly people working in magic who may have psychic abilities, but I doubt that they are using these abilities in any kind of pronounced way in their performances, since the effects that psychics produce are oftentimes so minor and unpredictable, and the needs of a magic act are usually the exact opposite.
You see, to me, your first sentence means that you recognise that ψ is sometimes real, and that puts you yourself outside materialism.
I guess some of Alex's arguments push materialism to its limits. For example, if you genuinely believe that nobody has any free will because they are simply brains evolving under a stochastic form of Schroedinger's equation (biological robots in a meaningless universe), then maybe you don't say it unless really pushed.
I agree, it is hard to see how routine ψ can be used for magic, but I do wonder if there are a few people who can produce ψ effects reliably, and use it to do magic rather than face the hassle associated with claiming it is real - but maybe there aren't.
David