A response to Richard Dawkins' argument against the existence of God.

[SentientMeat]

ITR, thanks for your responses. I admire your willingness to engage with so many opponents here, so I’ll try my best to talk about what you want to talk about.

@ITR

I’m not asserting in this thread that God is required as a reason for the complexity of the universe. I’m instead responding to a specific argument that Richard Dawkins makes.

In that case, I’d suggest you’re not the person Dawkins is arguing against. Dawkins is presenting a consequence of the argument that the universe does require a designer: that said designer would themselves require an explanation of why they exist rather than not. If you’re not positing God as an explanation for the universe, Dawkins would say, great, I’ve no need to waste time reductioing your absurdum.

@ITR

Dawkins’ argument against the existence of God rests on the assumption that any God who created the universe must have had a beginning moment. (He never states this assumption, but just tries to slip it past the reader.)

Here, yet again, I feel you are deliberately misreading plain quotes in order to construct an argument you can argue with. Like I’ve already said, “God” - a Heavenly Father who loves us and can affect the universe, is a heck of a thing to exist at all whether or not He had a beginning moment. And even eternal things need some kind of explanation for their characteristics – why are they like that rather than like this. Cosmology provides candidate explanations even for the characteristics of eternal universes. I would hope you’d agree that theology does not explain God’s characteristics in anything like so transparent a way. This is Dawkins’ rather simple and obvious point, not the strawman you’re aiming at here.

@ITR

Perhaps you wish that Dawkins had made that argument. But it’s not his main argument. I’m quoting from a chapter entitled “Why There Almost Certainly is no God”, so apparently I’m supposed to be convinced of the point by the end of the chapter.

His main argument being the same as mine: God is unnecessary in an Ockham’s Razor sense. That is what the chapter attempts to convince you of. If it fails, and you think certain phenomena still require supernatural explanation, that’s fine. We can discuss why you think that is so. You clearly think that’s true about religious experiences, so let’s continue with that.

@ITR

I don’t think I ever denied that someone could have a hallucination, dream, or drug trip and mistake it for a mystical encounter.

Ah, but I’m not necessarily talking about these “obvious” cases. I’m talking about what you call religious experiences – the longer, clearer, more specific, better-remembered kind – and whether there are non-impossible candidate explanations for these, too. In the past you’ve suggested that some aspect of introspection is impossible to explain without invoking divine intervention. Is this still your position?

@ITR

Second, religious experiences are not generally like hallucinations, dreams, or drug trips.

Agreed. Like I say there, misattribution may be a more accurate, less perjorative term.

@ITR

Third, I simply find the explanations of religious experience as psychic phenomena to fall flat. Basically, none of the explainers actually tackle religious experience as it exists, but rather a fictional version that they crafted to match their particular theory. Any neuroscience-based explanation of religious experience needs to explain what really happens, as carefully documented by James and Otto and others.

OK, but I’d need you to specify precisely what the miraculous, inexplicable-by-other-means aspects of these experiences are.

@ITR

Fourth, that it’s been carefully documented that people who have religious experiences are, on average, in much better mental health than those who don’t.

I don’t see how this is relevant. A useful fiction is still a fiction, if such it is.

@ITR

Fifth, there are the many cases where such experiences are backed up by outside evidence, ranging from correct prophecies to miraculous healings to simultaneous experiences among people far apart to scientific studies with EEG and MRI devices used on the brains of visionaries.

Ah, here we are – this is what I’m really talking about: Actual testable phenomena which would not have an easy natural explanation – obvious gaps. Note, however, that positing these phenomena as already being clear indicators of such gaps puts you way out on a limb with some highly dubious company given the extremely sketchy and anecdotal nature of such ‘evidence’. EEGs (which have terrible resolution, BTW) and MRIs might show that visionaries had some unusual brain function, but not that their visions came from an external source.

@ITR

You claim it’s a god of the gaps argument. You could likewise claim that my argument for my mother’s existence is a mother of the gaps argument.

Actually, yes, that’s rather neat. We could examine the phenomena for which “your mother” was posited as an explanation: her appearance before the very eyes of you and, crucially, others around you, her ability to make objects move around a room, the effect her atomic nuclei had on those of the hand of anyone who touched her. After assessing all of this evidence, we would indeed posit that the most obvious explanation for all of these phenomena is that your mother really does exist. There is a gap, and you mother fills it nicely.

The difference with your God, of course, is that it is extremely questionable whether there is a gap at all, and still more questionable whether God is the most appropriate means of filling it. You mother is detected empirically, your God is not.

@ITR

If you have real evidence on the issue I’d be happy to look at it.

I’m not sure precisely what kind of evidence you would find convincing (if any, given your past opinions on academic research), so I suggest we compare our own experiences. I have had ‘epiphanic’ religious experiences as a teenager, along with the longer, ‘deeper’ experiences that you and William James consider more important. Since becoming an atheist, I still have ‘deep’ experiences (deeper still, if anything), yet I attribute them to simple meditation, which is a major focus of study in neuroscience. Put simply, is there anything you believe you experience which is fundamentally “less explainable” than what I experience?

The quote below, to someone else, suggests that you think there is:

@ITR

Most religions are not centered on the relationship between individuals and a deity, as Christianity is, and hence other religions produce a much less rich experience for individuals.

Do you have any evidence that other religions produce a much less rich experience? My atheistic experiences are every bit as rich as those which occurred when I was a theist (and they were pretty impressive too – if yours are better still, you must be getting some real good shit, epiphanically speaking.) Do you believe me when I say this? Would you believe a Buddhist, or a Fang trance singer, if they told you that their experiences were very profound, long-lasting, clear, specific, and well-remembered?