Brightpenny provided a link to an interesting article about the conversion to Christianity of science fiction author and former atheist John C. Wright
I found the article pretty interesting for a couple of reasons.
His fondness for reason and an honest thought process that he didn’t surrender after his conversion. His observation that even as a man of reason he had denied the fact that his thinking was flawed "Logic then said that, if
my conclusions were definitional, they were circular. I was assuming
the conclusion of the subject matter in dispute. "
and this statement
"A philosophy composed of structural false-to-facts
assumptions is insupportable.
A philosopher goes where the truth leads, and has no patience with mere
emotion. "
Check out his prayer of skepticism before his conversion Funny stuff that will look familiar to dopers.
After his conversion I appreciate this line. "The Truth to which my lifetime as a philosopher had been devoted turned
out to be a living thing. It turned and looked at me. Something from
beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality,
reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me. "
He goes on to say that his mystical experiences helped him to see the spiritual connection and common thread in many spiritual paths, but he himself chose Christianity for personal reasons.
I invite comments and observations about the article.
True conversion as in spiritual experience, or just a “dam I almost died I’d better get religion” Has his brush with death made him gullible and delusional?
what about this gem
"Occam’s razor cuts out hallucination or dream as a likely explanation
for my experiences. In order to fit these experiences into an atheist
framework, I would have to resort to endless ad hoc explanations: this
lacks the elegance of geometers and parsimony of philosophers. "
Since OR is thrown out so often in denying the existance of God, what do you think of it’s application here?
You will be shocked - shocked, I say - to hear I vote “delusion”. Subjective experiences are not evidence of anything beyond the experience itself. I fail to see how Occam’s Razor fails here; despite what he says, without hard evidence dreams, delusions or outright lying are more likely than Christianity just happening to be the One True Faith.
He talks about how wonderful his religious experience was and how it gave him tremendous insight into the meaning of everything. But he fails to give any specifics of what happened to him. It’s difficult to judge the vericity of such a vague claim.
I read the article and comments. If there was any real philosophy in it, it escaped me. He seems a third rate author, an objectivist who has a thing for writing about spanking young children.
This guy has simply chosen ignorance over honesty, particularly self-honesty. Ignorance makes for low-rent and drugged-like happiness for oneself, but poses a great danger to others. He obviously doesn’t care.
Such “conversions” are routine for older people; my guess is that this gentleman (who was in the hospital for a heart attack, as you’ll note) simply hit the bump of older age and, fearing the total and complete end of his life, threw away his higher principles and grabbed on “for dear life” to the comforting but quite potentially murderous delusion of faith. I pity him, but I understand him.
Look at this, from his article:
That assertion seems to me to be among the most pointless and naive things a person can ever say. He offers no evidence, just an insult. He needs to explain in detail why it is pointless or naive or lacking in sobriety to decide that one will not hold beliefs that are not epistemologically well-justified (what constitutes adequate justification is a matter for a different thread). For that’s what athiesm means, in my view.
In all my life I’ve never seen an atheist “lacking in sobriety and gravity”, certainly at least when sobriety and gravity are what’s called for. Only the most serious and sober people become atheists in the first place!
Then there’s this nonsense:
How can this fool not know that Communism, like Nazism, ARE religions? That they are founded on metaphysical notions as utterly devoid of evidence as is his now-apparently-beloved Roman Catholicism? And that Catholicism has perhaps murdered as many as Communism and Nazism? That the Roman Catholic Church was undeniably quite complicit in the murder of six million Jews? That they opened up their birth and marriage registries to the Nazis so the Nazis could be sure to kill all of them? And doesn’t he know that now he is compelled to believe by his religious hallucinations that Christ IS a cracker?
Finally, although he claims to admire science and philosophy, he is manifestly ignorant of both. He foolishly writes:
Only someone ignorant of neuroscience and philosophy could imagine that he could reliably tell when he was having hallucinations. Many hallucinations are absolutely indistinguishable from normal experience (which, if you know even a little about neuroscience – thoughI don’t claim to know particularly much – is always part hallucination). Some hallucinations – which are more common than most people know – are adamantly described by their experiencers as more than real (whatever that can mean).
Speaking of hallucinations, “God” and other profoundly religious experiences can be and have been readily produced on demand by electrical stimulation, both internal to the brain during surgeries and externally in a completely ordinary labroratory using a very precise electromagnet. This, alone, is more than ample reason to reject a belief in God and the supernatural: it is entirely impossible to tell when one’s brain is functioning such
that you are immune to false religious impulses. Just like you can’t tell in many cases if you are hallucinating or not.
Religious belief – even profoundly deep religious belief – is a KNOWN consequence of certain brain damage or illness. Read Ramachandran’s book, Phantoms in the Brain, for descriptions and references to the medical literature. This was almost certainly the case with Joseph Smith, for example.
To answer directly the OP: This guy is definitely delusional.
This guy is, IMO, twisting Ockham’s Razor so hard that it snaps. He is saying that his experience needs a further explanatory entity beyond cognitive neuroscience because it felt so darned convincing to him. This is, of course, a non-sequitur. He is assuming that he could tell an incredibly convincing hallucination from ‘reality’. In this case, OR clearly suggests that since other intelligent people have been convinced by such clearly physical phenomena as strokes, magnetic fields or LSD, he might have been so convinced also.
Subjective experience is not scientific evidence. It is not evidence that can be repeated under lab conditions for all to verify. They are however evidence for that individual. All people make decisions based on their own subjective experience.
He’s not saying that Occums Razor fails. He saying that because of the fequency and consistancy of his spiritual experiences make less likely that his experiences were merely dreams or hallucinations. He’s saying OR logically supports his conclusion. He also is definately not saying that Christianity is the one true faith.
A personal choice, as simple as that. He doesn’t imply that his choice is the right one for everyone.
Okay, something of a brain dump here, so I hope it all makes sense.
Yep. He clearly states that he believes God gave him a heart attack, then that prayer kept him from dying. Except it seems pretty clear from his own words that what kept him from dying was an emergency cardiac operation, not prayer.
This is followed by some vague statements about having ‘visions’, which he seems completely incapable of describing.
For the rest of it, Mr. Wright speaks of “hating” Christianity prior to his conversion. Speaking as an atheist myself, I see no specific reason to hate Christianity as a concept, and do not think it totally worthless from a philosophical viewpoint, I just happen to think that it draws a large number of erroneous conclusions about how the world works. Frankly, Mr. Wright appears to have been something of an egoist prior to his conversion, and remains so after: “God thinks my opinion of him is so important that He just had to make sure that I decide to beleive in Him before I die”. Something like that.
I wish he had gone into more detail about some of his experiences. I doubt the details would have been anymore convincing to those that have decided not to believe. I think he makes the point he wanted to make in the article.
It seems the reverse of many stories I’ve read here on SDMB about people brought up to believe a certain thing and then having their own subjective experiences lead them to discarding it. Based on reason and his own subjective experience it seemed true and reasonable to him to believe. What I appreciate about the article is his committment to personal honesty. To me that’s key.
Speaking as a Christian, I must admit that Mr Wright’s story didn’t impress me very much, either. I agree with other posters to this thread that his “mystical” experiences can easily be explained by his medical condition, and I would suspect that any rational reasons he may have for his conversion can be reduced to his sudden realization of his mortality; he now knows, for the first time in his life, that he is going to die, and is understandably scared by the prospect. For all his much-vaunted “philosophy”, he doesn’t really appear to have thought very much about the arguments of the genuine philosophers he’s read, just accepted or rejected them following his own personal preferences. I note he doesn’t mention Descartes, who had a lot to say about the relative reliabilities of experience and reason.
From a religious perspective, I’m rather concerned to note that he doesn’t say anything about repentance. Nowhere does he mention any sense of being sinful, of his requiring God’s forgiveness; I would say this is an essential part of any Christian belief. Indeed, he says: “I am somewhat more useful to my fellow man than before, and certainly more charitable” - in other words, he has less sense of his own sinfulness now than he did before his conversion. Pride is the worst of the Deadly Sins, and Mr Wright, if this article represents his personality accurately, seems to possess it to more than the usual extent. As he’s apparently unrepentent, I think his current beliefs are better characterized as theosophical rather than Christian.
I hope, naturally, he does get over this stage in his life sucessfully, and come to a more mature understanding of the universe and his position in it - but I think he has a long way to go.
I couldn’t disagree more. Because he doesn’t agree with your view then you conclude as fact that he isn’t being honest with himself. That’s exactly the type of smug excuse for knowledge that he refers to. It seems the atheist equivilent of smug Christians saying, “if only you’d open your heart sincerly then the Lord would come in” that seems to infuriate others. He obviously does care. He clearly says he is better to his neighbors now than before.
Or at least you really think you do.
Look at this, from his article:
AS you are about to do
You do know he’s not in a debate thread don’t you? What’s he’s saying is the so called logic and higher intelligence of the atheist that he refers to simply wasn’t evident from their words and actions. He’s not condeming their choice to be atheists. He’s saying their foundation for being atheists seemed as shifty as what many atheists describe many believers to be. I know exactly what he’s talking about.
Actually I knew an atheist who was a weightless alcoholic. I think what he’s saying is that the depth and significance of their arguement wasn’t meaningful to him.
I’ve heard this song before. I couldn’t dance to it then and still can’t. I understand the similarities between organized religion and Communism. It seems a convenient though weak defense to simply declare them to be religions. IMHO the point made is that in religion and atheism it is something other than the existance or lack of spiritual belief that leads to good or evil results. Motivations beyond that foundation moved the murderous Catholics and Communists.
How so?
Right. He should let someone else decide what his experiences mean to him. In the name of personal honesty I suppose.
All this has some basis in fact, yet is completely inconclusive evidence. It is conclusive to you because you wish it to be so. {sound familar?} The point is that it is up to the individual to decide the meaning of his experiences and the appropriate actions that result.
Really? I doubt it. J Smith was more likely simply a charlatan.
Because of the subjective nature of the spiritual experience it’s easy to believe that people in many cases will misinterpret the meaning or even the nature of the experience. Sorting it out is all part of the process. Giving some examples is no more conclusive than the testimony of a hundred or so people who claim to have witnessed a miricle. We each must decide what those experiences mean for us.
Don’t beat me! I’m not a debater, but I want to share my thoughts.
The one thing that stood out for me was that he “knew the signs” of hallucination, and based his conclusions largely upon that. Hallucinations present in many ways, and are quite individual in their manifestation, I believe. I think this is his weakest argument.
I did some searching around and can’t find the cite ( :eek: :cringes:) but in reference to this, he said that he had a religious experience plus 3 visions, which were too personal to reveal. I don’t think he was “unable” to describe them, as a previous poster suggests.
If you follow the link to the Catholic site, then to the source, you get a “forbidden” message. But you can get there through stumbling around the SF Signal site.
As an agnostic, I envy him his powerful personal experience and the resulting certainty he now holds. As a person with rational/intuitive strengths, I have learned that there is a great deal of truth within subjective experience that the rational mind can’t readily access. If one uses “apple” logic to test “oranges” truth, something is likely to be missed. I guess under it all, I believe that contradictory truths might co-exist.
These threads on faith and belief have been really interesting to read - I find my thoughts about such topics difficult to verbalize, so I don’t really have anything to add…but in a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik wrote an article about C.S. Lewis, and Sentient Meat’s post reminded me of this passage: :
I think the man had a genuine religious experience. I don’t think he is deluded. Of course some atheists are going to expect a level of scientific rigor from him that they wouldn’t expect from themselves or a fellow atheist. For some reason theists are expected to be of a higher level of rationality than atheists by certain types of atheists that like to argue. So many atheistic arguments are recursive and decided by consensus.
I have a nitpick on the word “super-natural” and find that it is too often used as a convenient excuse to disbelieve something. God is NOT super-natural. God IS natural. It is easy to come up with a term, then define it in a way that disproves itself, but the problem lies with the semantics, and not the inherent truth of the matter. Just because an EEG can pick up chemical and electrical impulses does not make the experience any less significant, true or divine.
The basic difference I have found between the atheist and theist position when broken down is whether or not the universe is a living breathing entity (theist) or it is not (atheist). For me, I find it to be sheer vanity for the atheists to believe that they are sentient, but that the larger whole is not. We are all looking at the same thing, we all see it from different angles, and some of us are behind one of the curtains and see the workings back there, and others are observers for that piece of the show, but are behind curtains of their own seeing the inner workings over there.
Atheists do not even know what the word God means, yet they are fairly confident in denying God’s existance. This is quite silly. As John C. Wright says, how do you explain falling in love to someone who has never experienced it? Of course it would be rational to say that it is a series of chemical impulses, but it is not rational to say that it is “JUST” a series of chemical impulses. There is clearly more to it than that.
The ‘rational’ atheist will come at you with talk of Occam’s Razor and testability and verifiability, but the basic assumption is that because it is not testable that it is not true. There is no reason to believe this, as there were many things that would be completely untestable by scientific methods 100 years ago, that are quite testable now, just as there will be many things testable 100 years from now that are not testable now. They so often act as though they hold reason up to this high standard, but they make the primitive mistake of assuming a negative when there is merely a lack of evidence. Just because something has not been verified as true, doesn’t make it untrue.
God is everything, and the complete consciousness, and knowing of everything, all at once. It is all of existance with no particular, size, shape or position, it exists at all points in space and time simultaneously. It is difficult to explain because words are derived from THE word, and atheists consistently want to approach the question from the wrong direction. You have to start from THE word, you can’t start from multiple words and get to THE word from which all other words are derived. As long as people try to seperate things into false dichotomies such as natural vs supernatural, or science vs mysticism they will not have any hope of understanding it, and will always be working with a woefully incomplete and arbirtarily limited data set. The paradox exists within the language being used to describe the object, the object is singular, it has no opposite, there is no paradox, God does not care for our mathematical difficulties, God integrates empirically.
Caveat: If anything that I have said does not apply to you or someone you know, then I was not talking about you or that person, so please refrain from wasting the board’s time with useless posts about how what I was saying does not apply to you, and how I am painting people with a broad brush.
To deny God as you define him would force the atheist to deny all of existence, time and space. My problem with this definition is that it is unnecessary - wea already have the word existence.
I didn’t limit my definition of “natural” in the same dimensional terms as it seems you did. All things are natural, even an escape from this system to another system. I can see where people may think that I am defining the word “natural” too broadly, but I think most people define it too narrowly.
As for physical vs metaphysical, I read a good interview with Richard Susskind today where they talked about the difference being that metaphysical is that which is beyond verifiability. So the metaphysical DOES exist, because not everything that exists is verifiable at our current level of understanding. There is too much assumption going around, and these arguments are often based on too narrow a definition of God.
Something that happens in these debates a lot is that people will tell me that my conception of God is not the Judeo-Christian conception. What they don’t realize is that in Judaism you are not supposed to define God, because God is broader than we can conceive of from our limited vantage point. Basically, it’s like we are taking our portion of intelligence and trying to understand what ALL intelligence can understand.
You have a definition of god that works for you, yet you persistently attack atheists (who do, indeed, hold a concept of god) for not understanding your private definition of god. Your definition appeares to be a modified pantheism that is not distinguishable from existence in any way that you have explained on these Fora. That is fine, but you then try to run around to the front of the discussion and claim that atheists who do not accept any of the various standard definitions of god are somehow “illogical” for failing to deny existence, just because that is where you have hung the label “god.”
If you wish to put forth your understanding of reality, have at it, but your persistent attempts to attack a non-existent form of atheism simply because you cannot get atheists to join with your view of reality is simply silly.
Nah, that’s an oversimplification. I don’t have a problem with atheists as whole, and if I painted with a broad brush in the past I am sorry. I have learned a lot from these discussions, however, there is a lot of atheist dogma, that is ironically very Christian based that applies their limited conception of God based upon some tiny little notion of what they think the Christian God is supposed to be, and then they apply it to all theists and happily call theists idiots.
As I pointed out I made a distinction between SentientMeat’s atheism, and Der Trihs’ atheism. SentientMeat is not an idiot, though I disagree with him, whereas Der Trihs, is an idiot. The difference is that Der Trihs just paints with the broad brush and leaves it at that ignoring any argument put before him. SentientMeat’s version is a whole lot more complex, and harder to deal with because it requires a very broad body of knowledge. However, SentientMeat still trucks with the idea that his reality is “correct”.
Now, I have no given a definition of God that is synonymous with Existance, I have tried very hard to explain to people what I am talking about without defining God for them. If you took it as a synonym for Existance then that’s fine. I even said when making the comparison to existance that it was insufficient and that I would never ever define God for people.
The problem I have is that people deny others their metaphors without bothering to try to understand them. Aeschines Dark Christ thread is the best example. People rejected outright what Aeschines was trying to explain, because he put the word “Christ” into it. What I have a problem with are people who choose keywords that give them a convenient place to shut down and keep out new ideas. This is fine on a day to day basis, but if a forum claims to be fighting ignorance, I am going to hold it to this claim.
John C. Wright quite eloquently outlined many of my complaints about atheism, and the faction on the straight dope came in here and immediately started tearing him apart when it is quite clear that they had NO IDEA what he was talking about. It is so easy to claim that one’s experience is merely a hallucination, when you say that a hallucination can appear AS real as reality, or even MORE real than reality. Well that certainly makes it easy to pigeonhole people now doesn’t it? What’s to say that all these atheists aren’t hallucinating that they are rational? What’s to say that they aren’t hallucinating that they know what Occam’s Razor is? Should we accept the consensus that multiple people believe what they believe? Why should we accept their views on consensus? There is a constant claim that there is a certain religious attitude that ‘others’ engage in but not our stalwart atheists, no they are dedicated to logic and reason, but of course I see them engaging in the same kind of groupthink and mindless repetition as any other group. They can claim Nazism and Communism are religions, but should you say that about the way they treat atheism they start gnashing their teeth as bitterly as any fundamentalist Christian when you claim that Christ wasn’t a real person.
The reason that many jews type G-d rather than God is because typing God is defining God, and while they are attempting to discuss it locking God into one particular definition is futile. I believe atheism is a semantic mistake quite simply because it 1) presupposes a definition of God and applies it universally and 2) It requires the root word theism even to be a word. God exists for certain. The question isn’t “Does god exist?”, it is “What is God?” God might simply be a three letter catchall phrase for the unexplained, or it might be more than that. We can argue about what God is, but that’s different from arguing whether or not God exists, because God most certainly exists.
Why is it you expect me to take seriously the type of person who would tell someone that their experience might have been a hallucination? What I have a problem with is people selling their subjective experience and trying to act like they have a greater view of the objective simply because they’ve applied a few shallow monikers to themselves in order to impress their peers.
To put it bluntly, one would have to know EVERYTHING in order to deny that God exists, and be correct. Agnosticism is perfectly rational, if you don’t know, say you don’t know, but if you are going to continue to scoff at people who believe in something you have no frame of reference for, I am going to continue to make fun of you. It’s pretty much that simple. Agnosticism has some basis in reason, atheism does not, because atheists don’t even know what it is they don’t believe in, at least an agnostic says “I don’t know.”
The creative force is all around you it’s obvious it’s there it’s observable, we see it everywhere. To deny it’s existance is absolutely ludicrous, and I have absolutely zero respect for anyone who claims to be a person of reason and yet is obsessed with limiting things into manageable chunks so that they will obstinantly deny the existance of something they can’t even define.
I don’t respect atheism because it doesn’t deserve respect, it is antithetical to reason and requires semantic paradoxes and ad hoc interpretations as John C. Wright correctly puts it. It’s a blight on the language nothing more, it exists simply to confuse people.
Of course I doubt any of the atheists here care whether or not they have my respect, so what should it matter? If they want my respect, they can tell me they are agnostic, that’s a perfectly admirable position to take, but atheism, well it’s just silly because Theos is the root word of their belief system.
I do believe that there is such a thing as reason and truth, I just don’t think it will be found anywhere in atheism. Atheism is a deer trail being passed off as a road by bandits, I might go down it to see what’s down there when I am in an adventurous mood, but I’m not going to be fooled into believing it’s any more than a deer path. I find that too often they are unable to answer questions effectively, and will scoff when asked them, as was evidenced by my “How can you know God does not exist, if you don’t know what the word God means?” thread.
The thing I would be most interested to find is what a self-professed atheist thinks about the fact that mystics from all over the world tend to curiously agree on things, if of course mysticism is such BS.
And of course, I am not showing them any greater disrespect than they show theists on a regular basis. If an atheist shows me respect, I show them respect, but in the end I think that atheism is simply, incorrect.
If you want to tell me that you find that the word God is not an useful term, I am more than willing to accept that. There might be some atheists that break the mold, and have some interesting things to say, but don’t pretend that there aren’t numerous atheists on this very message board that fit my description, because there are, and to claim otherwise would be…dishonest.
I think what he’s saying is that the depth and significance of their arguement wasn’t meaningful to him.