I don't really know what Tjump's precise stance is. He seems to be a materialist and an atheist, but then he seems to be indicating he can be convinced otherwise and accepts a certain amount of evidence for NDEs, etc.
His fallback position seems to be science-of-the-gaps admixed with a promissory note. There's something we don't know, and the gap will most probably be filled by science, practised more or less as it is now. Anyone who can prove him wrong on that, he'll change his mind and stop looking for materialistic explanations. Well, of course, no one can prove him wrong with regard to something that hasn't yet been discovered. Can I prove that at some future time some method of detecting presently undetectable signals in the dying brain won't go some way towards explaining NDEs? No.
There's always a chance that such signals will be detected. Why, it's probably part of the million things we don't know but that must (of course) be explicable under the current paradigms of science, or ones very similar to them. No matter that we didn't find the answer in the signals materialists hoped and believed we would. Let's let go of that pack animal and go looking for another, for surely it will be found; can't fail to be.
No less strong than faith in an Abrahamic God, is faith in materialism. I know, because I went from the former to the latter, before (eventually) ending up as an idealist with faith in consciousness as the fundamental primitive, and a science based on that idea rather than materialism could be more productive. I admit it's a faith, though it's backed up by quite a lot of evidence plus a little personal experience. I could be wrong, but I find the evidence intellectually satisfying because it explains much that neither Abrahamism nor materialism can (nor a number of other -isms including theism in general, dualism, panpsychism and animism).
That's just a personal opinion, and we all have those -- including TJump. It wouldn't be so bad if there was public space for varied opinion; if the models people have in their minds were recognised and encouraged to compete in the marketplace of ideas. I guess the thing about there being dominant paradigms is precisely their dominance, which tends to stifle other, possibly more fruitful, ways of modelling reality.
Empiricism is purportedly the backbone of science, and yet at present, quite a lot of science is based not on observation but speculation, and pretty wild speculation at that -- one might say woowoo. Modern science with its Big Bang (a universe arising out of nothing one fine day), black holes, neutron stars, inflation theory, etc. indulges in faux mysticism just as religion has always done in the past.
And, as in the past, its loyal devotees unquestioningly parrot the mantras as if they're facts as real as noses on faces. This enables them to bask in the glow of the exalted ones, borrowing from their authority, happily declaring heresy on, and and sneeringly denigrating, anyone who might want to pursue ideas residing outside the box they've defined. Why not? So many of their heroes do the same thing.
It's all totally FUBAR: gnarled and broken. These people have the effrontery to question the empirical evidence provided by rigorous NDE research, and at the same time to glibly accept without question so much of the woowoo that passes for "science" these days. I'm not saying that science is all completely wrong, still less useless. Models based on empirical evidence sometimes prove extraordinarily useful. But that doesn't prove that the models are literally true. Take the Bohr model of the atom: it's bollocks, but not entirely without utility if only as an educational tool.
More than anything, mathematics is responsible for the cachet that many modern scientific theories possess. Most of us aren't terribly good mathematicians, and stand in awe of those who are -- and they are probably aware of this and can't help feeling a bit special. By using pure mathematics in pursuit of beauty rather than truth, mathematical physicists have come up with the some pretty exotic models.
They speak without hindrance, nay active encouragement, about aforesaid black holes, multiple universes, and so on, looking for the merest scintilla of confirmatory "empirical" evidence to support their models, and at the same time reject whole swathes of actual empirical evidence that support uglier but possibly truer models of reality. That's why Electric Universe and cold fusion theories, for example, have garnered so much opprobrium: have had their leading exponents be marginalised or excommunicated.
I suppose the rot set in with Darwinism, the idea that a combination of RM+NS could account for macroevolution. Initially, the theory looked fairly plausible, but that was a time when cells were seen as mere blobs of protoplasm, and the fossil record could -- you never know -- have come to show many infinitesmal shades of variation between one type of body form and the next.
Today, the cell is shown to be of gargantuan complexity, and virtually all the modern extant phyla appear to have arisen in a comparatively short period during the Cambrian explosion. At the molecular level, there's no naturalistic explanation of how the DNA code came about, because it isn't dependent on pure chemistry, and the odds against random mutation being able to produce one (let alone thousands) of working proteins are enormous. As to abiogenesis (the origin of life), it's no less of a problem. There's increasing rebellion against Darwinism even among members of the non-ID camp, the so-called
Third Way people.
We need much more space for rebelliousness like this in science. IMO, it needs to be much more vibrant and open to new ideas than it is now; it's presently full of sheep enclosed in barbed-wire paddocks to prevent wolves from entering, and sheep from straying. Arguably, fewer and fewer big discoveries are being made -- hardly surprising when the establishment sees to it that all the funding goes to those inside the paddocks, and woe betide any lamb that might leap the fence.
The really interesting figures, those I see as true scientists with open minds, have to tread carefully lest they suffer the fate of Hannes Alfven, Pons and Fleischmann, Peter Duesberg, Rupert Sheldrake, Jacques Benveniste and a host of other thinkers. The problem is, they are vilified, marginalised and ignored (and their work even actively lied about) by the high priests of
modern science religion. Their models don't fit in, threaten the reigning paradigm, so they must be denigrated at all costs, otherwise many in the mainstream will lose their cushy jobs inventing absurd new theories or infinitesimally adjusting existing ones.
Like I said, I don't know where precisely on the materialist spectrum Tjump lies, so how much of the above applies to him I can't say; in any case, this isn't really a diatribe against him personally, but against the present attitude of modern science. It's not just that it rejects the primacy of consciousness, psi and other things it considers "woowoo", but it also gangs up against
any idea that threatens the status quo.
Latitude is only allowed in acceptable directions, and in those almost anything goes, however offensive to commonsense. You want to talk about matter that can't be detected? About quasars that are purportedly enormously energetic and unimaginably far away despite the fact they appear to be connected to much closer galaxies? About all red shift as being down to the Doppler effect when it could actually be related to the age of galaxies? About basing your whole cosmogony on such ideas?
Fine. Wonderful. Here's a billion dollars, go build yourself a Hadron collider or launch a new space mission where you can continue to be surprised that empirical results don't support your theories. Waste as much money as you like, deprive resources from as many promising new lines of research as possible. We want to keep you as happy as pigs in dung, carrying on as always and getting yourselves more and more tied in knots tinkering endlessly with existing models.