Oh boy....
What evidence do we have for any non material form of life?
None, that I'm aware of.
Problem is that, we gather all evidence only through our five senses.
Firstly, there are significantly more than five senses. Secondly, most of the evidence we collect, in this day and age, is actually gathered by mechanical recording machinery, and only accessed via our senses after the fact.
Only those things that we can see or hear or taste or smell or feel,...we consider as existing. We believe that things that we cannot sense cannot exist or at least, we cannot know of them.
Not necessarily. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are both considered to probably exist, although we've not been able to directly detect them - we interpret what we can detect, and then hypothesise about what we might not be able to detect, what properties it might have, and then derive experiments to demonstrate those theories are correct. We don't rely our senses, we consider those things which demonstrably have an effect on other things to exist - if something has no effect then a) how are to we to tell that it exist, and b) what's the difference between it and something that doesn't?
This is obviously a wrong way to go about it because our senses have evolved for specific purposes on earth and we cannot rely entirely on them to give us all information about the world. The world could be much more complex than we imagine.
It could be, but unless you've got a methodology for determining what you are or aren't going to accept, you just have to accept every possible or impossible conjecture on the equal basis that someone's come up with it.
Suppose some people have a faculty through which they are able to sense certain forces, patterns and influences in our lives that we cannot sense through the other five senses...wouldn't they consider these influences also as a normal part of life? Of course they would!
Yep. And then, to convince the rest of us, they need to demonstrate it - like most of the great scientists of the past have done, in various ways.
I have mentioned many times about how we can never prove to a stubborn born blind person that Light exists.
Of course you can - you describe the effect, explain your idea of the cause, support it with the mathematics, predict from the theory the effect in a different situation, and then demonstrate that it happens. Blind people aren't stupid, they're blind, and they know they're blind. Maxwell's excellent demonstrations that light and magnetism are linked means that you can shine an infra-red lamp onto a blind person's hand and they can detect the heat - let's call that the sixth of your five senses - and they've detected exactly the same physical phenomenon (electromagnetism) from a different effect that it has.
Even though Light exists everywhere all around them, blind people cannot sense it and if they are sufficiently stubborn, they could insist that it does not exist at all. And it is impossible to prove it to them conclusively.
The important bit there being, of course, if they are sufficiently stubborn - just like you can't convince someone that non-material claims in the absence of any sort of methodological framework for establishing their veracity have no validity. If I wanted to be particularly stubborn I could deny the existence of New Zealand, because I've not been there, but there is sufficient evidence from other sources for me to accept that it exists - to not accept it would be unreasonable on my part, not a flaw in the arguments.
However, some of the blind people may accept that something called 'Light' exists purely on faith because others are saying so.
You are confusing 'faith' with 'trust'. Trust is the acceptance of a claim because of circumstancial support (such as a reliance on personal testimony from a source considered reliable), whereas faith is the acceptance of a claim in the absence of any justification.
Similarly, whatever patterns and influences are sensed by those people who have the extra faculty, cannot be communicated to those who do not have this ability. It is almost impossible.
'Flatland', by Edwin Abbot is an entertaining expansion of this idea.
However, some people may accept on faith what is told by the others.
Or they may, as social creatures, trust some of what they've been told.
What are these patterns and influences and what causes them....we cannot say off hand. We just know that these occur. But it is possible that they relate to ... the Unconscious Mind.
And there's the leap of faith... The problem with people making claims of unsubstantiated sensory perceptions is that there is no way to independently or reliably validate them. Even blind people can operate machinery that can detect light intensity, frequency, direction of emanation.
We know from recent scientific research that what is often called the Unconscious Mind influences our decisions and our lives.
Yes.
We know that the Unconscious Mind creates placebo effects that can sometimes cure illnesses.
No, the unconscious mind can create placebo effects that mitigate some of the effects of illnesses, but the illness itself is still defeated by either the body's reasonably well-defined mechanisms or the external support of medicine.
It can foresee and forecast better than the rational mind.
It can't operate anything like as reliably, however, and is prone to false positives.
It is awake when the conscious mind is asleep.
Which is interesting, but of any particularly strong use.
It has been pointed out by scientists that unlike earlier impressions, the Unconscious Mind is actually very powerful and very influential. It is not just a memory bank as some people think. Some people have even compared it to a closet in the mansion.... where the Unconscious Mind is the mansion and the conscious mind is the closet. Many people including Freud have compared it to a iceberg where 90% is the hidden Unconscious Mind and only 10% is the seen Conscious Mind.
None of which changes that lack of reliability or improves the hit rate.
It is therefore possible that the subtle influences and underlying patterns that are sensed by many people are actually the working of the Unconscious Mind.
The problem isn't whether it's the unconscious or conscious mind that's generating these signals, but whether they are accurately interpreting the situation.
Whether this Unconscious Mind is connected to an independent agency like the Spirit or Self cannot be said emphatically, but cannot be ruled out either.
Many things can't be definitively ruled out, that's not a sufficient basis to accept them.
NDE's and other 'paranormal' experiences do point towards such an independent agency.
Or, to a tendency for the human subconscious to operate as though there were.
So...why do people have faith in an unseen power?
If we knew that, perhaps we'd be able to cure them of it?
Because they are able to sense the powerful influence of the Unconscious Mind in their normal lives even though we are unaware of its existence. What evidence do we have? There is plenty of evidence for the Unconscious Mind. We should just know how to connect the dots.
A long an error-ridden attempt to say there must be something spiritual, because some people feel that's the case. Argumentum ad populum is still not valid, even when you cite neuroscience for some elements of your argument.
O.
