I’m starting to remember why I don’t blog. If I hadn’t posted that last entry for God and everybody else to see, I wouldn’t now have to confront Marc’s irritatingly well-written rebuttal. But I did, and I do, so I will now attempt to trim some of my less-well-considered comments with the cold steel of the Majcher reason-razor.

I was of course wrong that you can’t prove a negative. But at the risk of pissing off the propellerheads even further, God is a special case. We can say that there’s not a dragon in my hand because we have access to the entire area encompassed by my hand. But saying that God doesn’t exist anywhere requires complete simultaneous awareness of everywhere, and if you had that . . . you’d be God, disproving your own theory.

I should have been much more specific about the reference to Occam’s Razor. I agree completely that anyone who thinks that gravity is proof of the existence of God just because science hasn’t figured it out yet is grasping at straws. (I further agree that attempting to “prove” theological assumptions using scientific principles is both bad science and bad theology.)

No, what I was referring to is those situations in which (a) there’s no good scientific explanation and (b) there’s a fairly straightforward and coherent explanation that happens to depend on the existence of God. But because these situations are typically experienced internally rather than externally, they’re completely subject to the interpretation of the person experiencing them.

I know a guy who, though not a scientist, is as hard-headed a superrationalist as anybody. He told me about a seance he was a part of in which the group decided to try to invoke a specific person, and since they were in a cabin in the Hill Country, they hit on a Scotch-Irish farmer from the 1800s. My friend told me how the table that everyone had their hands on tumped over on its side and rolled across the room, all hands clearly visible the entire time. He saw this and remains convinced that nobody in the group was making it happen.

“Wow, so you actually called up a ghost,” I said.

“NO!” he shouted. THERE WAS NO GHOST! We accessed some kind of paranormal energy, but THERE WAS NO GHOST!”

So he was willing to acknowledge that during a seance a table had rolled itself across the room unaided, because he saw it with his own eyes. But when it was suggested that in ironically attempting to contact a spirit, he’d actually contacted a spirit, he denied it completely. Because he didn’t have “proof,” and because he doesn’t believe in ghosts.

I mean, come on.

What chaps me about scientific fundamentalists is not that they dispute the existence of God. It’s that they’re so bloody smug about it, as though they’re tossing their judgments down from some uninvolved height of objectivity. Occasionally, as in the case of my ghost-dissing friend, the practical limits of “objectivity” become clear. But for the most part science snobs act like they’re moving through life completely uncorrupted by illogical thinking. Please.

I’m in the middle of rereading William James’ The Will to Believe, but if I remember it rightly his argument is that wanting to know the truth and not wanting to be wrong are two different things, and that it’s possible that you sometimes have to risk being wrong in order to get to the truth. In other words, you might have to make a leap of faith. This seems to line up (again, if I remember rightly) with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that scientific advances, far from being built on what came before, are actually paradigm shifts that require a radical break with existing orthodoxy.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason science and spirituality get crosswise with each other is that they’re coming from completely different places. Science is based on verifiable observation and reproducible results. Spirituality springs from an internal experience that is neither verifiable nor reproducible.

Need I point out that you ignore either of these viewpoints at your peril? Everyone reading this probably agrees that flying in the face of empirical scientific evidence is a bad idea, but the science jihadists don’t get that if you’re only going to accept scientifically valid information, you’re going to have to ignore about 99 percent of your own experience . . . including those intuitive leaps that move science forward. Ultimately, your own experience is all you have. Why you wanna put Baby in the corner like that?

The trouble starts when either one goes wandering off from its home turf. Spirituality hardens into organized religion, and suddenly internal experience is less important than defending the faith. The scientific method hardens into scientific orthodoxy, and suddenly openmindedness is less important than . . . defending the faith. In both cases, humble inquiry metastasizes into rigid belief.

Which is, I suppose, what we do as human beings. My current theory is that most of the trouble in the world comes from people thinking that their personal experience is the benchmark for humanity. I don’t see that problem going away anytime soon, no matter who’s winning the culture wars.