It occurs to me that it would be the ultimate irony if god really does exist, but evolved through the process of natural selection.
You owe me a new key-board and a new beer.
Wait, what kind of energy? You’d think that one would be testable somehow. We have formulas for energy.
Personification often* is* analogous. Wisdom as a person lighting the way for others. Mercy as a person tending to the sick. Justice as a blind or blindfolded woman, judging all the same. The point of personification, in many cases, is entirely to draw an analogy between an intangiblity or an emotion or feeling or force, and a person performing a similar task in a more literal, physical manner. And it was seen as a reasonable concept or else it wouldn’t have occurred - the very point you make here, that personification was a widespread idea, shows that the concept was pretty accepted as a valid and understandable method of portraying non-personal things.
I’m not sure i’d necessarily agree with you on your last point. Aquinas is, I would argue, not really a reasonable metric by which to judge all religious believers of the time - after all, if he was not unique, his ideas widely accepted, then he would not be so notable today. In medieval times, people would not have the same access to treatises that we might today. You could make an argument that if people thought the same as Aquinas, he would feel no need to put down his ideas in writing, and therefore it’s quite possible that others didn’t feel the same way as him. Not a surefire argument, really, but i’d certainly say there’s very little reason to “highly doubt” the issue.
That said, however, it is true that I misinterpreted your post earlier, and I apologise sincerely both for that and for thinking that you were capable of such a poor argument. Clearly it was entirely unwarranted.
Using the “every mind is unique” line would obviously allow us to throw the definition of anything into dispute, so let’s focus on the “keep it simple” argument. You’re impressed by the fact that Christians have differences in their conceptions of God as Jesus Christ. I, speaking only for myself, am much more impressed by the similarities than the differences, especially when I consider that Christianity has existed for almost two thousand years and spread across continents. Now of course there is not total uniformity, and you can point to a few fringe groups that classify themselves as Christian yet profess something with little relationship to Christian doctrine, but on the whole there is such a thing as ‘Christian doctrine’ and people including atheists have generally acknowledged as much. And when I say that I am impressed by the consistency, I mean the consistency in definition things such as the canon of scripture, the creeds, the order of services and so forth. For while there are certainly differences between the United Methodist Church and the Roman Catholic Church, what stands out much more to me is that both read the same scripture, recite the same creeds, confess sins, take the Eucharist, ordain a hierarchy based on the apostolic succession, and so forth. In addition to that, I have also found substantial similarity in descriptions of private religious experience from members of every church that I know. So in sum, I do not buy into the argument that I should be impressed by how different the conceptions of God held by Christians are, but rather I see it the opposite way around.
It would perhaps be easier to see where I coming from on this part of the debate if when you accuse the concept of God of being nebulous rather than precise, you ask, “compared to what?” To me it is more striking how most other ideas besides God as subject to huge change over the ages, or from place to place, or sometimes just from one individual to the next. People’s understanding of concepts such as justice, truth, science, art, beauty, education, and others has been revolutionized in just a few centuries. Even for a concept that you’d think could be clearly defined, such as a nation, if you investigate you find that people don’t think of it the same way as they used to. Heck, even individuals can undergo revolutions in understanding. Our Shakespeare isn’t the same as the Shakespeare of the eighteenth century.
Rubbish. Early Christians didn’t even necessarily believe in the divinity of Christ, and in modern practice, the only unifying thread common to all Christian practice is the belief that Jesus is one’s savior.
I’ve already listed a number of others. Do you have any intention of actually responding to what I said?
Actually you do need to take my word for it that she exists. I’m just an anonymous internet user to you; you have no way to verify anything that I say. Further you have no team of scientists willing to do what you said, nor any publication that would publish the paper you described, on top of which there’s the difficulties I’ve mentioned before, lack of cooperation, etc…
Of course you can try arguing around these difficulties by insisting that if reality was different than what it was, and if you actually had an appropriate team of scientists and an appropriate publication and all that, then they could do what you described. But it’s plain that the same is true for God, namely that if we had such a team who was actually willing to approach the question in an open-minded manner and was truly willing to investigate the relevant issues and submit to the authority and follow the instructions of the an appropriate religious adviser, and go through an appropriate process of study, prayer, meditation, and so forth, I find it quite likely that they would find evidence to their satisfaction. But regrettably we have no such team, the question is moot.
As far as I know, the Christian position on whether a seeker should expect independently verifiable empirical evidence has always been that which Jesus said to Thomas the Apostle at the end of the Gospel of John: some people will see and believe, other people will not see and will believe. So as far as you’re saying that I can’t provide such evidence to you right now, it’s true and I don’t deny it. There have been at many times in the history of Christianity and of other religions examples of mystical experiences which were independently attested to by many. That, however, is getting away from the main point. If you complain about the lack of outwardly visible evidence and the emphasis on inward experience, any historical defender of any religion would respond in basically the way that Maurice Nicoll did.
Hence, since I can’t receive or give independently verifiable empirical evidence of anything important, it seems singularly useless to obsess over the fact that I can’t receive or give such evidence of God.
Really? There aren’t enough religious scientists in the world to do this? I assure you ALL of them would jump at the opportunity to scientifically prove god’s existence. It’d pretty much be the biggest scientific discovery ever.
:dubious: Did you guys catch that?
I would say they could be “mystical”, not “religious”, since a fair attempt to define religion can be “organized and systematic effort to connect humanity to higher levels of being”, which atheists do not participate in by definition. But as our entire debate about religious experiences could be rephrased to be about mystical experiences, I would agree that your personal experience is entirely relevant.
I have already said that I’m entirely open to researching the question of whether these experiences come from my own mind and whether others who have religious experiences are merely experiences something generated by their own mind. But realize the situation I’m in. Some mentioned earlier a hypothetical case where some loser claims to have a hot girlfriend, yet is never able to produce her. Well, I’m in a situation where every atheist I meet claims to have hot evidence concerning religious experience, yet are never able to produce it. Consequently I’m in doubt as to its existence. Now based on what you’ve said, you’re not asserting that religious experience can be explained away by hallucinations or alcohol or drugs or stress or magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobe or ‘god genes’ or any of the other canards that are commonly tossed around in these threads. So, leaving aside the question of why so many scientific materialists are so deeply wedded to claims that are factually false, I’m willing to see what you have to offer.
I am entirely at home with the idea of the “inner dialogue”. It is bluntly true that everybody talks to themselves in their head, and sometimes–though far from all the time–does so in the form of a dialogue between two speakers. In fact, this understanding is one of the main facts–though not the only main fact–that a great deal of modern psychology seems to be blissfully unaware of, and which makes so many of the theories that are flying around look so silly. And yes, I agree that it’s fully possible that a person could mistake some part of inner dialogue as coming from another source.
OK, that’s important. You see, what I’m trying to establish is precisely what it is you are saying requires an external entity. It still seems that even my own meditations (easy version) and introspection as an atheist cannot be explained by cognitive science to your satisfaction.
So, two questions:[ul] Which precise aspects of the scientific explanations for my atheistic ‘mysticism’, examples of which are given in the citations above, are unsatisfactory?
[li]Why do you then propose an external entity to explain whatever it is you believe that cognitive science currently cannot? There is much we don’t understand about geology, climate and electronics also, but to posit an external entity to provide those explanations in these subjects would be obvious God-of-the-Gappery.[/ul][/li]
This is crucial. You seem to be admitting that it is possible that you are mistaken in attributing mystical experiences to an external entity. ie, External entities are not necessary to explain your experiences, only one option amongst several candidates.
And this is crucial why?
Because my fundamental argument, and indeed the argument of Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, is not that God is impossible but that God is unnecessary. Having established that God is one candidate explanation, not the sole default, we can then ask which of the candidates is more parsimonious.
OK, in the past we’ve dealt briefly with hyperactive agent detection and the evolution of language and in this thread I’ve introduced material on meditation, introspection and the inner dialogue. All of this evidence concerns mentally healthy individuals who have not taken anything, worn any kind of helmet, had a stroke or developed epilepsy, and you seem to agree that it is at least relevant to religious and mystical experiences. Am I wrong?
If I’m right, then you have to realise the situation I’m in. There are a whole string of ‘hot’ cognitive science papers seeking to explain some aspect of religious or mystical experience in mentally healthy individuals, but I need to know which precise aspect you’re most interested in. I’m happy to stick with an aspect already mentioned here and explore it further, but would much prefer you to tell me the aspect you consider most inexplicable.
So would you say that the cognitive science of the inner dialogue provides a feasible candidate explanation for the specific aspect of religious experience one might call “prayer”? I’m not asking whether it’s the candidate you choose – you wouldn’t be a theist in that case! – I’m just asking what aspect of prayer necessitates an external divine explanation.
And sory to butt into your conversation with someone else, but I couldn’t ignore this:
Hey, I’m an open-minded scientist who submitted to the process of study, prayer, meditation etc., to the point where I had not only subtle religious experiences but full-on, whacked-out-on-Heaven ones. The evidence of an external cause for those experiences is still unsatisfactory to me, whereas the evidence of an external cause of all the phenomena I attributed to my mother is utterly inescapable.
Do I not demonstrate the clear difference between Heavenly Fathers and mortal mothers as explanatory entities?
You listed a number of similarities between the United Methodist Church and Roman Catholic Church. Do you claim that these entitites represent Christianity as a whole?
So I guess it’s official; **ITR **is not going to try to rebut the design argument as turned back against theism. Both I and SentientMeat pointed out that the argument doesn’t have to rely on the problematic premise that God has a beginning. Starting an entire week ago, I pointed out that it doesn’t matter whether the argument as charitably construed in this way is Dawkins’ or not; it represents an effective way of turning the design argument back on the theist, and so you would you, ITR, pretty please respond to it since the gambit of turning the design inference back on the theist was WHAT STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING THREAD IN THE FIRST PLACE.
**SentientMeat **is doing a good job of being patient, but **SentientMeat **is a far better man than I. I assumed that since this thread was about the attempt to turn the design inference back on the theist, **ITR **might want to respond to a version of the argument that (IMO) actually works. Silly me. Speaking for myself, in the future, **ITR **, please let us know in advance when you are going to waste our time by ignoring our good-faith efforts to engage in debate with you.
[quote=“SentientMeat, post:252, topic:514544”]
OK, that’s important. You see, what I’m trying to establish is precisely what it is you are saying requires an external entity. It still seems that even my own meditations (easy version) and introspection as an atheist cannot be explained by cognitive science to your satisfaction.
So, two questions:[ul] Which precise aspects of the scientific explanations for my atheistic ‘mysticism’, examples of which are given in the citations above, are unsatisfactory?
[li]Why do you then propose an external entity to explain whatever it is you believe that cognitive science currently cannot? There is much we don’t understand about geology, climate and electronics also, but to posit an external entity to provide those explanations in these subjects would be obvious God-of-the-Gappery.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Debating what can and can’t be “explained by cognitive science” seems to me a dead end. Cognitive science can describe what occurs in some of the simpler thought processes, but there is no explanation for why consciousness exists at all. We may know a great deal about the structure of the brain, the chemical composition of neurons, and the processes which occur in the nervous system, but as to why this combination of physical objects and electrochemical processes produces a conscious mind capable of thought, we’re as clueless as we were a thousand years ago. Indeed, you must surely be aware how many materialist scientists and philosophers in the twentieth century decided that consciousness was an epiphenomenon or perhaps that it didn’t exist at all. But as I reject that thinking and refuse to be a David Hume-style skeptic, I must therefore believe that mind is a real phenomenon and that there is a real and meaningful connection between the mind and the outside world, established at least through the agreed upon five senses and possibly through other channels. And therefore it follows in ways that I would hope are obvious, that I reject the reductionist thinking which claims that the best explanation is the one that assumes that a given experience does not spring from a real entity, but rather that somehow the mind generates what the mind perceives. If one accepts that thinking, then it sets one a logical path that ends in total skepticism.
Now of course there are some instances where the evidence obviously points towards hallucinations. Fine. I’ve never denied it, nor has anybody as far as I know. But most of the discussions of cognitive science that I take part in on this board, and most of those that I see in the media, do not meet that standard. They’re light on evidence. Often times they present no evidence at all. The most common means of approach that I see is that somebody comes up with a hypothetical explanation of some behavior, offers no evidence, and I’m simply asked to assume that it’s true. In other words, “cognitive science” is often an attempt to smuggle in philosophical presuppositions disguised as science. In that previous thread, which you’ve linked to several times, there was mentioned a paper asserting that women respond to a high prevalence of STDs by sleeping around more in order to assure that there children have a greater variety of immunity genes. To me, such a statement seems absurd. To you, I suppose, believing such a thing is all in a day’s work. But if we were determined to debate further about the validity of the paper, we’d not be debating science, but rather assumptions about the meaning of consciousness. So that and many other instances like that are why I find it so hard to take the current output of cognitive scientists seriously.
Yes there is. Where did you get the idea that there isn’t?
[quote=“SentientMeat, post:252, topic:514544”]
So, two questions:[ul] Which precise aspects of the scientific explanations for my atheistic ‘mysticism’, examples of which are given in the citations above, are unsatisfactory?
[li]Why do you then propose an external entity to explain whatever it is you believe that cognitive science currently cannot? There is much we don’t understand about geology, climate and electronics also, but to posit an external entity to provide those explanations in these subjects would be obvious God-of-the-Gappery.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Now at this point I do, regrettably, feel that we’re going round in circles. You keep asking me to list precise aspects of religious/mystical experiences that I feel are in need of explanation, and I keep trying to make clear why that question simply can’t be answered. The closest that I could come to answering that is to say that when I consider the whole portion of the human experience that I’d classify as religious experience, I find it fits well with the explanation that another level of reality beyond the physical is involved. I find it fits badly with any other explanation. As to why it fits well, I cannot nail down a list of aspects that fit well, but perhaps this
[quote from G. K. Chesterton]
(Orthodoxy by Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Ch. 9: Authority and the Adventurer) will better get across what I’ve been trying to say.
My experience in coming to accept Christianity is very similar. That is to say, having first found that I could accept the doctrine of Christianity as being morally good, the history of it to be good, the current state of Christianity to be a positive force in the world, the people I know who practice Christianity to be good and happy people, and so forth, I still for some length of time did not accept Christian doctrine because when I was young I had been taught many reasons not to. Then, as I investigated those reasons intellectually, I found that the reasons did not hold, but in fact that the more facts I learned, the more the whole body of facts pointed towards the truth of Christianity rather than not. I can’t summarize every single thing here, but as I’ve said before Mr. Dawkins’ book contains a good list of most of the things that those who brought me up atheist wanted me to believe. He says that the gospels were chosen arbitrarily among many (but they weren’t), that the gospels were copied from pagan sources (but they weren’t), that Christianity was created by Paul of Tarsus (but it was created by Jesus Christ), that religious experiences can be explained as hallucinations (but most can’t be), that all religious followers feel needless guilt (but they don’t), that the changing moral zeitgeist has steadily lead towards peace and freedom (but it hasn’t), and the list goes on and on. But the point being that all of your emphasis on whether God is a good “explanatory being” is completely misplaced in regard to my understanding of Christianity and the world. I see Christianity not as a good explanation for this thing or that thing, but as a mold into which everything fits well.
I have responded to it, maybe not codifying my whole response in one place and not putting it in a post directly addressed to you, but if you’re reading the actual thread you’ll see I have. My responses being on two lines, one line being that Dawkins offers no definition of complexity, no reason why a God must be more complex than an near-infinite number of universes, and so forth. The other line being that judging the existence of something by assessing its “theoretical utility” for “explanatory power” or anything like that is totally alien to the way that I or any normal person thinks, and for good reason. But that said, I see no reason to continue that portion of the thread because it seems you all have decided that the chapter by Dawkins entitled “Why God almost certainly does not exist” wasn’t supposed to convince anyone that God almost certainly does not exist. (And also because you’ve apparently decided you’d rather insult me.)
That (Chesterton) quote is nonsense. The reasons for disbelief are not vivid, but cold, grey and rational. Belief is based on emotion, not calculation, and is not based even in part on “unanimous facts”.
That aside, what in what possible sense is the doctrine of Christianity “morally good” that does not also apply to other religions?