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.
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.
I’m on the page of discrediting soft-sciences. Because they are not rigid and testable, they are filled to the brim with what are essentially witch-doctors who read the tea leaves so-to-speak. Social sciences especially. They are a pseudo-science that has infected the minds of many.
I have to defend archaeology here because that is not true in the modern discipline whether or not you want to call it a true science. Modern archaeologists are (generally) very meticulous with their findings and very reluctant to come up with conclusions that sound like anything near objective truths because they are more aware than anyone that it is fragmentary information about the past which we have to come up with conclusions to and basing them on our own modern biases.
Modern archaeology has also (again, generally) embraced the idea that archaeology is inherently destructive, so studying sites in on-invasive ways with actual scientific tools like magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar is very popular and requires someone with actual grounded training in geophysics to do properly. Even basic GIS mapping requires scientific instruction in order to do it properly and GIS is a primary tool of archaeologists now.
I’m not an archaeologist, just a very keen amateur enthusiast who wishes less of it didn’t go over his head.
I wouldn’t group Archaeology in with humanities or soft-sciences. They are using rigorous methodologies for their findings, and they kind of take from multiple fields in that regard. Radiocarbon dating for example; sure it doesn’t give us exact answers, but it gives a repeatable, testable result.