here is a link with working links for the stuff below
theists cant show things that look supernatural, but theists can
first cause per God is merely a philosophical problem and is the most likely scenario
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there are credible people in respectable positions of science who believe in exorcisms. there are credible people who say of things that look supernatural.
"Dr. Richard Gallagher is an Ivy League-educated, board-certified psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and New York Medical College. He was part of the team that tried to help the woman.
Fighting Satan's minions wasn't part of Gallagher's career plan while he was studying medicine at Yale. He knew about biblical accounts of demonic possession but thought they were an ancient culture's attempt to grapple with mental disorders like epilepsy. He proudly calls himself a "man of science."
Yet today, Gallagher has become something else: the go-to guy for a sprawling network of exorcists in the United States. He says demonic possession is real. He's seen the evidence: victims suddenly speaking perfect Latin; sacred objects flying off shelves; people displaying "hidden knowledge" or secrets about people that they could not have possibly have known."
"Gallagher agrees and has answers for skeptics like Novella.
He says demons won't submit to lab studies or allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment. They want to sow doubt, not confirm their existence, he says. Nor will the church compromise the privacy of a person suffering from possession just to provide film to skeptics."
more doctors discussing this from a scientific perspective
here is the leading proponent doctor giving an example of a 'true' possession
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evidence of the objective nature of NDEs:
people literally die and come back to tell us of the afterlife and God. it's hard to get much more straightforward than that.
NDEs of atheists
-most atheists meet a divine being and more than half of them come back believing in God. reading the examples at nderf.org seems to make one think almost all of them do. there is some decent arguments that NDEs can be somewhat subjective sometimes, but the fact that athesists dont just see an afterlife without God is significant.
of course NDEs of agnostics and theists involve this stuff too
out of body experiences
-the AWARE studies show people who have cardiac arrest and are resusitated. they die, experience the afterlife, and come back to tell about it. the first study showed someone experiencing both visual and auditory ability while clinically dead through an out of body experience. more studies are being done.
-one peer reviewed study showed someone who died reading numbers on a page while out of body, and that would only be possible otherwise if they guessed the numbers randomly and correctly.
-"In a little over 40 percent of my surveys, NDE"rs observed things that were geographically far from their physical body, that were way outside of any possible physical central awareness. Typically, someone who has an NDE with an out-of-body experience comes back and reports what they saw and heard while floating around, it"s about 98 percent accurate in every way. For example, in one account someone who coded in the operating room had an out-of-body experience where their consciousness traveled to the hospital cafeteria where they saw and heard their family and others talking, completely unaware that they had coded. They were absolutely correct in what they saw."
-there is the testimony of thousands of credible people who have died and told others what they were doing when dead, affirmed by both the dead person and the person observed. often concerning reliable witnesses like doctors. there are books dedicated to giving examples. a common example is pam reynolds, who accurately described the surgical equipment that was used while she was dead, and was said to not have been available while she was awake and not something a normal person would know.
consistency argument
'near death experiences' are consistent globally
-the near death experience happens to everyone in very similar ways. this even happens to people who have never heard of the phenomenon and to kids. to suggest that there is a story embedded in our brain is far fetched.
seems more real than real
"we ask that as a very direct survey question: What do you currently believe about the reality of your experience? And of about 590 NDE responders, 95 percent say the experience was definitely real with the other options being probably real, probably not real, and definitely not real. So among those that have these experiences, virtually everybody knows that it was a real thing. It"s just much harder to believe for those of us who have never had one. Seeing is believing. If you don"t personally have a near-death experience, which is again a blessing"obviously these people nearly died"it"s hard to understand these unearthly experiences."
non-hallucinatory
-there is nothing that reproduces the NDE and the closest drug that can like ketamine you can draw marked differences between that and the authentic experience. mostly by noting most ketamine and drug induced experiences are random, but NDEs again are consistent.
here is a load of scientific evidence produced from NDEs:
