Personally, God as described in the Bible (specifically the Old Testament, but I have it on good authority that YHWH is also the Father in the New Testament) does not behave in a manner that I can condone. I believe that people get the deity they desire, and unless we demand better, more moral behaviour from the Almighty He is going to continue to act as a capricious tyrant.
That being said, if **kanicbird’s **scenario plays out for me, and the visitant convinces me that it does indeed represent the God of the Bible, I will, as I said earlier, piss my pants and grovel. Everythign I hear about this aspect of the Godhead inspires me to fear It, and I wil do wahtever it takes to appease It to possibly spare myself and my family from harm (although that didn’t work so well for Job).
Any deity that wants my respect and love MUST have higher moral standards than to keep (for one example) a special place where souls can be tortured for all eternity.
In the OP the premise is during the event itself you have no other explanation other then the being was a angel, thoughts of maybe this is a acid flashback and this is really my neighbors pet poodle just simply do not occur at the time of the event, after the event alternate explanations are fair game.
That makes me firmly convinced that is the result of some kind of hallucination. If my mind was operating properly, of course I’d be at least be able to think of it as a hallucination; the sort of compelled belief you are describing means my judgment while under it is completely untrustworthy by definition.
I would think that an omniscient being would know exactly how to manifest to you (or me, or anyone) so as to leave no doubt of the veracity of the encounter. However, I cannot imagine that the same approach would be effective on everyone, and I really have no idea what that sales pitch would be for me.
But, I expect a all-powerful deity should know my personal psychology better than I do.
Being omniscient only helps you find a solution if a solution exists. It could be that nothing could convince Der Trihs that this powerful being is in fact the individual called “God”.
Irrelevant, since kanicbird already specified what would happen, which happens to be something that would convince me of the exact opposite. That it has to be a hallucination or fraud of some sort.
Agreed. **Kanicbird’**s scenario may be what he (she? I rarely bother to learn the gender of folks on the Interwebs) feels is sufficiently persuasive but probably would not work for me, either. A vision of a supernatural being saying “You know what, I don’t believe in you either, and I don’t care what you think of that” might be more amusing.
I say we cut to the chase. Let’s just distill this hypothetical, and all the other dopey hypotheticals asked of us atheists, down to its true essence and word it the way it, and all the others, are actually meant:
'Ok, atheists, what if, hypothetically, you all of a sudden believed in God. What would you do then, huh?"
How could the answer be anything other than, “golly smart religious person, I guess you got me there. Congratulations, you win again.”
How about “be really freaked out”? Because I’d realize I was under some kind of mind control or mental illness caused compulsion if the rest of my knowledge and personality was unchanged. It would be like suddenly believing that Darth Vader was a real person while still knowing that he is a fictional character from Star Wars.
Oh no no no. In this hypothetical you can’t make any sort of rational consideration of the situation you just now believe in God. What would you do then, smart guy? Huh? Huh?
I can accept that a Supreme Being might well have the ability to alter a person’s mind regardless of that person’s wishes, but any Supreme Being who would deliberately choose to do so *must *be fought by any entity with Free Will. No truce with tyrants!
Ah, ok. In that case, i’m really not sure what I would think. I mean, sure, on one hand, I would tend to say that on balance there are more likely arguments than i’ve met an angel. On the other hand, if i’m hallucinating or something like that, then pretty much all my thoughts should be considered suspect at that point.
Hi Gleno, the story you quote would suggest that all evidence is equal: the words of a prophet are equal to seeing a body returned from the dead.
So, question: do you give as much weight to hearsay (“some guy on the internet told me”) as you do to your own experiences and senses?
Blessed are the credulous? Reminds me of my fundamentalist brother-in-law… who also believes the moon landings were faked because he saw a TV show about it.
To quote Dawkins: “Doubting Thomas… required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists.”
Now if kanicbird wants to refine the OP hypothetical so that there is no other explanation than angels – at least during the experience – then I won’t fight the hypothetical, but will stand by my previous posts…
Based on experience with a friend who has suffered delusions, and second-hand information from him about his mother who has suffered hyper-religiosity… OK, kanicbird, it’s an angel when I see it, afterward I’m off to see my doctor.
So you’re saying that even if you were confronted with evidence that God exists, you would deny his existence because your faith is stronger than any evidence you might be presented with?
Well, I’ve said in the past that atheism is not the equivalent of a religion but I stand corrected. For some people, apparently it is.
I can see where Der Trihs is coming from. He’s reached the logical and not-unreasonable conclusion that god does not exist and if presented with evidence to the contrary will go with the far more likely interpretation that his mind has broken.
So far we have seen no evidence for god beyond hearsay. We do have evidence for mental illness, hyper-religiosity, and full blown delusion.
Presented with the OP scenario that has no material evidence – outside of one’s own senses – which conclusion is more probable: god really exists, or one is hallucinating? Occam’s Razor may be over-invoked, but this seems like a reasonable use for it, no religion required.
All our information comes to us via our senses. If I question the evidence of my senses I might as well doubt that the chair I’m sitting in exists.
I felt the OP was clear. You weren’t hearing about an angel’s existence from some second-hand account. It was a personal appearance to you in a clear and direct manner. He even said that it was not explainable by some other means.
Now I don’t believe in God or angels. I also don’t believe in Zeus or Santa Claus or unicorns. But that’s because I have no evidence that these things are true. Present me with credible evidence and I’ll revise my beliefs in accordance with new information.
People who deny the evidence before them because it conflicts with their pre-existing notions of what’s real are irrational, regardless of what it is they believe in.
You see an ordinairy pig hovering in the air 1 meter above the ground. Just “standing” there doing ordinairy pig like things (well, except the hovering in the air thing, that is new).
Will your conclusion be that you are hallucinating or that pigs can fly? (well… hover)
What “faith”? God as typically portrayed is logically contradictory (in other words, impossible), ridiculous, blatantly wish fulfillment, contradictory to everything we know of the universe, and composed of the most extreme claims possible. Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, perfect, etc. The more extreme the claim, the more extreme the evidence needed - and what evidence could possibly be good enough for something that is essentially the least plausible, most extreme idea ever conceived? What evidence is imaginable that could not be explained by something far more plausible than God? As has been said again and again, far less powerful (and far more plausible) entities could fake evidence that a mere human like myself could never, ever see though.
I have no idea what this means. I don’t understand how you could remove “I’ve gone insane” from the list of possible explanations, which makes the hypothetical meaningless.
If you woke up one morning unable to see would you assume that all light had disappeared from the universe, or that you had gone blind? Either would explain the observable (or unobserved) phenomenon.
If you then groped for the phone and called your friend who also couldn’t see (and who could normally, and doesn’t pull practical jokes, etc) it would be reasonable to begin revising the simplest explanation. But until then I suspect “blind for some as yet unexplained reason” is the most rational conclusion. (After working through the obvious “why is my room so dark”).
The OP is clear. There is a little wiggle room in that, as stated, the experience has no other explanation during, but does not preclude other explanations after.
I guess our benchmarks for credible aren’t the same then. The OP also stated that there was no external evidence, and that after the experience everything seemed back to normal. A full blown hallucination is just about the simplest (and most likely) explanation absent other evidence. If after the experience I discovered I could read minds, see through walls, whatever – and this was testable – then I’d be looking for alternate explanations. (It would still concern me that I’d actually simply go so insane that I could no longer tell any fact from fiction… but there’d come a point where you just have to roll with it).
Yes but… degree of evidence matters. I mentioned it up-thread but… a friend who has suffered delusions in past (due to problems with brain chemistry) told me that they were at the time of the experience utterly real – as real as anything else he’d ever experienced. Now, afterward he may have doubted them due to their improbability / incompatibility with other evidence, and subsequently got diagnosed with a problem, but at the time they allowed for no alternative explanation.
Isn’t that pretty much the exact set up of the OP?
So, you’d be arguing that if I suffered a similar delusion I’d be rational to accept it and irrational to reject it?
Schizophrenics are therefore rational by definition?
