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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 6692231" data-attributes="member: 40166">What does finding departed souls in the afterlife--I'm not sure which spells you're referring to, exactly, but anyway--have to do with the existence of the gods? You drop someone like me (but not a D&D geek) into one of these worlds, and I might have such skepticism, especially if I ran into a sorcerer first. Both in real life and in thaumaturgy, there's a rule that what you think limits you, actually limits you. Is the cleric really getting power from the gods, or is he really a sorcerer who believes he gets his power from the gods (or a sorcerer who claims he gets his power from the gods--there's an entire nation-state ruled by fake clerics in Golarion)? Sorcerers can't cast healing--well, maybe, but a bard who casts just like a sorcerer but has to sing while casting can heal (and in Pathfinder, so can an oracle and a witch.) You do know there are a heck of a lot of people who can speak to the dead in the real world. Even if Mage A and Mage B were so convenient  as to perform the experiment, and I don't particularly see the concept of scientific reproducibility being a big one in D&D worlds, most of us don't believe their counterparts in the real world.In any case, and? There's a big difference between souls and gods.Saving throws, spell resistance, and I'm sure I could find a half-dozen spells and magic items to help people evade that. Heck, have the supposedly compelled be an illusion with the caster outside the zone. And again, that's only works worth anything if you have a Spellcraft high enough to know what Zone of Truth is and that it's being cast.In a world where scientific knowledge is at some level universal to anyone who finished high school (freely offered to all) and hundreds of thousands of people have the knowledge to understand it, there's still a lot of people out there to deny any scientific truth that makes them feel uncomfortable. In a D&D world, where any real magical knowledge is pretty limited, and only a tiny percentage of people can cast these spells, and many might kill you for bothering to ask for something as silly as a test of their power, why would it be unreasonable for a number of people to not believe the gods are real?</blockquote>

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