For centuries, philosophers have wrestled with the problem of what we can “know” about external reality. They have continued to experience profound uncertainty about whether individuals can reliably comprehend it.

One reason for this is that the dependability of sensory data as a source of knowledge has been questioned. But even those who conclude that direct apprehension of reality through the senses is possible are quick to point out the fallibility of human judgment in interpreting that data.

Everyone used to “know” that the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Their observations gave them rational, logical reasons to believe that.

Any observer on the Earth’s surface can “see” the sun moving across the sky, rising in the East and setting in the West. As a result, people believed for millennia that they “knew,” based on direct observation, that the sun circled the Earth.

In fact, they were not relying solely on direct observation, but on the interpretation of experience that was, in that instance, wrong. So powerful, however, was the effect of this misleading sensory impression that discarding the geocentric view of the universe was not achieved without significant scientific upheaval.

While our common sense intuition that we “know” what is happening in our immediate environment may be correct in many instances, it is not in others. Distinguishing between the two will often be very difficult for the “perceiver.”

To begin, inherent limitations in our sensory organs may lead us to experience external reality in a form different from that in which it actually occurs. Humans, for example, do not see light as wavelengths and amplitudes, but as brightness and color.

When we go to a movie, we “see” motion when what is really presented to us is a rapid succession of still photographs blinking between black frames.

A man once told me he saw an angel lying on the piano at Amy Grant’s concert. Another man repeatedly saw an angel outside his window for four successive months. I knew a girl who saw a flurry of demons come in her front door and circle overhead while she sat on the couch in the living room. Another girl saw the demon Jezebel float into her room overhead while she was lying in bed. Were they all hallucinating?

I heard a story about a little boy who received the gift of speaking in tongues, and when he called his skeptical dad to tell him about it, he began to speak the garbled language. His dad, on the other line, heard his son say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin. Was that the result of faulty perception?

Using this foundation belief in human inability to observe the external world with perfect accuracy, two different and conflicting arguments can be made.

First, one could argue from a religious perspective that people who train themselves to deny the supernatural no longer have the ability to perceive these things, this spiritual realm. One might also argue that our interpretations of common “knowledge” and intuition are severely wrong because we claim to know things intellectually, but we can’t see God because of a lack of “spiritual eyes.”

Secondly, the atheist can argue that these religious people are trained to expect to see and experience these things, so they do — but interpret what they see wrongly. A further argument might be that just because someone had a supernatural experience, that doesn’t prove their religious beliefs are the truth because many conflicting religious people have experienced similar things. Furthermore, it doesn’t explain where that experience came from — God or Satan, angels or demons.

Cultures throughout the ages have been entertained by the thought of a supernatural world, a spiritual realm. Many have claimed to be workers of Satan. Others have seen angels. Was it all in their heads? Did they have hallucinatory experiences based upon faulty sensory perception?

Through their experience, people “know” about the world beyond. Atheists are reasonably convinced that it doesn’t exist. Religious people, through their experiences and interpretations, know that it does.

Do their testimonies prove or disprove there is a spiritual world beyond?

Experiential and emotional reasons for belief are faulty because everyone’s experiences lead them to believe different things. The truth should be determined by and founded on logical reasoning.

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April Goodwin is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ames.