Into the Wardrobe

No, it's known by testing common sense over and over and finding it unreliable.

Robert, what Jesus said was not an analogy; it was a direct answer to the discipes' request to see the Father. Jesus said that you can't see the Father because He is spirit and you can't see spirit but you can see Jesus and He and the Father are One. In other words, the only way you can see spirit is if it's clothed in body.

The Bible didn't say that it was Samuel being conjured up. It indicated that the medium certainly believed that it was Samuel. And Saul probably believed it too. In light of Jesus' words, I would question it.

Like many since Plato, I really question Plato's sensibility in coming up with that whole forms thing. He believed that you cannot at all experience realty but must know it through intuitions gained by your spirit long before you were born - that's made rather clear in the Meno. :) You should know my stance on old phiosophers.

Now, I do believe that we're able to "see" subtle entities in the world simply because our brain is able to form a virtual reality in which we can virtually interact with them (it's, in fact, the "shamanic world") but I have quite a few reasons to believe that ghosts are not (usually) human spirits, demons, or angels - some of them I've already stated.

I may have been unclear about Berkeley - I didn't mean that he was agnostic about God. Despite the fact that he never proposed any logical basis of a belief in God, he doggedly held to the belief that God was the source of ideas. Berkeley was totally agnostic about the material world. He held that abstract ideas have no reality and sense impressions and other ideas about the material world were abstract ideas: therefore, they have no reality and we reall can't know anything about the material world.

Well, you might be right about Berkeley. I certainly have no privy knowledge of his internal cotemplations and I'm sure that there are a variety of positions taken by his commentators.

I wouldn't completely discount Plato's insights, after all, there's a lot of similarity between some of Paul's ideas and those given in Hebrews (if it wasn't Paul).

For angels to be spirit and to interact physically with matter would require fiat creation - the Bible doesn't give them that power and I've never known of them to have it. It wouldn't be the first time I've been surprised, though.

You're right that Jesus' comments about the Kingdom of God being like the wind is analogy, but His comments about God not being visible because He's Spirit is not. The point He was making was that you can't see God the Father. You can't see him because He's spirit. The way a pure spirit becomes visible is to take on a body and that requires an act of fiat creation.