Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
I try to keep my thinking in line with scientific materialism. That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable, which means, I don’t entirely believe them. There there always needs to be a bit of a hole or escape hatch in any truth to prevent it from becoming dogma.
I don’t “believe” what I’m about to say, but it’s something that has come up for me many times under psychedelics, which is the concept of a ‘consciousness first’ manifestation of reality. It’s the closest thing I have to a spiritual or supernatural belief, and it’s not really a belief because I don’t believe it, but I do entertain the idea from time to time. The basic argument is that we’ve got the order of operations backwards, that the universe doesn’t manifest consciousness through emergent properties, but rather that consciousness manifests universe concepts and scenarios that end up being plausible. This concepts extends the concept of consciousness to all matter and energy as well, because it all ends up being one and the same. I think of it as an extension of some Taoist thinking around wei wu wei where, because one is aught to find what they are looking for, if we can step back and stop dictating what we think/demand reality to be, reality may actually be much more fluid if we aren’t so dogmatic in our thinking about it.
Anyways, I don’t really believe any of that. But I think it would make for good science fiction, although it’s already been done extremely well by Le Guin in her novella The Lathe of Heaven.
It’s possible to have real science without it being falsifiable in the Popperian sense. For example, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, medicine (unless your sense of ethics would even shame a Nazi).
Popper’s goal was to discredit soft sciences like sociology because he was an extreme conservative who didn’t like the findings that people like Horkheimer and Adorno were coming up with.
As for psychedelics, one part of the mind that’s affected by psychedelics is the part that tells you what’s important and meaningful. What you’re being shown is the subjectivity and emptiness of that sense of awe.