First, I'm claiming that a short account of a particular incident or event (an anecdote) can, indeed, increase or decrease the probability of an hypothesis.
Asked and answered. We know what you're claiming. Stop resetting the argument by declaring that your critics must not understand you and using that characterization as an excuse to simply restate your argument. Restating it doesn't make it any clearer or more valid.
To the point, we've belabored the academic distinction between compelling belief in a hypothesis and providing scientific proof for the hypothesis in a more objective sense. Your anecdotes might affect belief, simply because belief differs from the hypothetico-deductive method science most often uses. The book you're reading is written toward the goal of compelling belief that NDEs are objective proof of life after death, not of testing the hypothesis of life after death. Scientifically speaking, your anecdotes do not provide objective or scientifically probative evidence for the hypothesis you and your editors are trying to support with them. Your critics consider it disingenuous that you keep trying to equivocate between "[affect] the probability of a hypothesis" and "prove the hypothesis scientifically."
Then, I'm claiming that some such accounts given by NDE subjects do, in fact, increase the probability of immateriality.
Asked and answered. First there's the ongoing equivocation between operative standards of proof that you continue to exploit in order to prolong the discussion. Second, there's the ongoing equivocation between immateriality and immortality. Regardless of your desire to move the goalposts, you are here to prove
immortality and the proof for immortality is what you are being held to provide. We are well aware of your history of softening your claims in order to win a meaningless victory. This leads (third) to your ongoing inability to show any causal relationship between NDEs and immortality or the existence of an immortal soul such that observing one would prove the other -- what Loss Leader refers to by insisting on falsifiable hypotheses. There is a gargantuan inductive gap between perceptions allegedly reported and the need for an immortal soul to have purportedly made those perceptions. Until you fill that gap, you don't have a structurally valid argument; it's a
non sequtiur.
My claim is that there are numerous such cases that appear to pass that test.
No. You have no idea whether these cases pass any qualitative test for empirical validity, because you have taken no thought to determine whether your editors have appropriately represented the cases, and whether the source material has applied proper empirical controls. In the case of Dr. Sabom we are able to determine that his empiricism does not support your hypothesis, not just because he declared it so in his conclusions, but because we are able to investigate the source material and see what variables he considered. You simply don't care that others have done your homework for you and have found the qualitative flaw in your attempt to conclude from his research what it doesn't support.
And you have taken no pains to determine whether the comparatively small number of cases your editors report succumb to proper quantitative controls to rule out such things as lucky guesses. You rightly note that they would be improbable, but to conclude that they really do rise statistically above chance requires a quantitative study that neither you nor your editors have attempted. They simply marvel, as do all such fringe claims, that such experiences should have occurred at all and suggest, with no argument, that this is a rational reason to dismiss scientific models.
You have simply declared that you take the second-hand representation of these accounts entirely at face value, showing little willingness to evaluate them critically. And your argument doesn't rise above inviting your critics to be equally uncritical and credulous.
And, until I hear that I should decrease my quoting of copyrighted material, I'll start quoting more cases.
The quoting of copyright material is not (yet) the problem. The problem is your quoting of secondary material whose sources you personally know little or nothing about. Just as you did in the Shroud thread, you have latched onto popular, partisan material that is purposefully written to convey the illusion of scientific rigor in favor of a fringe claim without actually providing it. And you demand that your critics must be as credulous as you.
They are not obliged to acquiesce.
You have been asked what you did to vet the accounts in your book. You acknowledged the question, but then tap-danced around any obligation to answer it. And now you're trying the same side-step you did in the Shroud thread. When confronted with the clear problems and misrepresentations in your secondary sources, you just pretend they don't exist and set out on a Gish gallop to flood the thread with all that hearsay, hoping that your incessant begging for credulity might snag some poor unfortunate.
