> This is a most interesting philosophical question. How do you know that "evidence based reasoning" gives you access to the whole of reality, instead of an (admittedly large and very useful) subset of it?
"Evidence-based reasoning", as goes the misnomer, is not actually based on some ontologically basic thing called evidence; it's based on causal interaction. If I can't use evidence-based reasoning on some phenomenon X, it's because X and I don't have any interactions via causality.
Now, this could mean that X is, for instance, an ultra-distance galactic supercluster completely outside our light-cone, so far away that the last time it interacted with us was when we were all inside the singularity pre-Big-Bang.
But it effectively means, "X doesn't exist [in the same universe as us]".
Agreed. If X does not have any observable evidence in my world, it might as well not exist to me (though it might exist Elsewhere(TM)).
But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.
In practice, what happens is that if I claim to have had direct experience of X, they will dismiss it out of hand and go trying to shoehorn some explanation which does not offends their world view. And if I go further and point out that there are millions of people who have had similar experiences during history, they will blast that we are all a bunch of brain-washed idiot sheep.
Personally speaking, and to make it clear, I have had a couple of experiences that make much more sense if you consider that there's more to reality than what scientific materialism would be willing to accept. Maybe there's is perfectly materialistic explanation that is yet unknown to us, but maybe there's not. I simply point out that accepting the limits of our own ignorance is a more philosophically sound position than to dismiss evidence before considering it.
>But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.
No. It means that if X does not behave in such a way that it is physically possible to design an experiment, X most probably is not a sensible concept for anything other than "the idea of X".
The problem here is that subjective experiences are highly malleable and have never particularly corresponded directly to objective reality without further interpretation. So your subjective experiences are explainable in three possible ways:
* You subjectively experienced something we don't have a theory for yet, but which is part of physical reality. We will eventually figure out how to test it and construct a theory of it. This is very unlikely.
* You subjectively experienced something whose underlying causal basis is so highly complex that the interaction may not be repeatable (ie: whatever you interacted with could be capable of choosing with whom to interact or not, and when). This is extremely unlikely.
* You had a subjective experience that does not correspond to any external reality. This is quite common, actually, and the most probable option.
Again you fail to reason correctly. It's not that if you can't devise an experiment for X that X does not exist. It is more that you speak of X, X does things for you in this material world, etc. yet you have never seen X but you trust other human mammals who told you there is X, and you never even asked for ordinary evidence for X, let alone the extraordinary evidence it would require to prove the claims.
"Evidence-based reasoning", as goes the misnomer, is not actually based on some ontologically basic thing called evidence; it's based on causal interaction. If I can't use evidence-based reasoning on some phenomenon X, it's because X and I don't have any interactions via causality.
Now, this could mean that X is, for instance, an ultra-distance galactic supercluster completely outside our light-cone, so far away that the last time it interacted with us was when we were all inside the singularity pre-Big-Bang.
But it effectively means, "X doesn't exist [in the same universe as us]".