Testing theological dogma will inevitably result in the religions dogma proving to be wrong. The nonsense with the flood hypothesis is a classic example. Whenever religious dogma conflicts with testable science, it nearly always fails.
The central thesis of all theological systems invoking God is not testable. As such, they will never be scientific. I think atheists like Richard Dawkins go too far the other way and essentially say that if it can't be tested, it does not exist. That is overreach in the other direction.
My. opinion on the veracity of subjective spiritual experience has changed over the years. After digesting the implications of the work of Anil Seth, I've come to believe we can never be certain of anything subjective because contrary to our beliefs about the completeness and accuracy of sense experience, our mind plays such an active role in producing our experience moment by moment. Just like a modern TV only refreshes the pixels that change, our mind only uses our sense experience to fill in the changing pieces of our internal representation of reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI&t=21s
The central thesis of those who've had a revelatory spiritual experience is that some force, presumably God, from the outside created an experience that science can't explain. Furthermore, the only possible explanation is that God, Fate, or whatever you want to call it, created that experience.
The work of Anil Seth completely destroys that hypothesis.
He clearly shows that our mind's feedback mechanism produces our experience. Even deep meditators who "experience" God are actually experiencing their mind's feedback mechanism providing them the experience they expected to have. There is no way to prove a subjective spiritual experience, and there is a testable mechanism for proving these experiences can easily be created by our own minds.
I've experienced many wonderful things in deep meditation. But I have no illusions about those experiences being "planted" in my mind by some outside force.
I don't go full Richard Dawkins and assume that means God can't exist, but I recognize that no matter how beautiful and moving an experience is, I can't attribute it to God with any certainty.
