[QUOTE=AHunter3]
Do you SEE thread after thread popping up on the SDMB arguing “Rocks do not exist” or “Rocks are real: a PROOF!”? No, of course not. As you said, the vast, vast majority of things observable in life indicate that there is an underlying reality that is perceived approximately the same by all people.
There are exceptions.
You find the exceptions in those aspects of reality where the perspective of the perceiving person makes the biggest difference in what is perceived: social reality, questions of human behavior, politics, and so on. And yeah, religion.
The observable fact that we have reached an accord on vast areas of existence doesn’t change the fact that we each construct our reality out of lekatt’s legos. We have little bits and pieces of empirical data (about 1/10,000th as much as we tend to think we’ve got) and how we make sense of it is a cascading sequence of models of reality which influence how we model yet more of reality and so on, in our heads. (Even the interpretation of empirical data depends unavoidably on pattern-recognition, of saying inside our own heads ‘aha, this is another one of THOSE things’)
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see thread after thread popping up arguing “Human behavior does not exist” or “Politics are real: a PROOF!” either, in case you hadn’t noticed. There is debate about various aspects of human behavior and politics, but most of that seems to be based on disagreements about causes or predictions, or on gaps in the knowledge of the participants, or subjective responses to actual things in the objective world. It is not the case that the realities being discussed vary from person to person based on their emotional reaction. Their reactions to the realities do vary (occasionally to the point of denial), but the reality is unaffected by the emotion of the debater.
Nobody’s denying that people have emotions, or perceptions. In fact I entirely agree that not only does every person interact with their own internalized world; I’ll go further; they deal exclusively with two personal worlds each; the image of objective reality as imparted to them by their limited senses, and the mental image of the world as they understand/imagine it to be (based on their analysis of those senses mixed with their other thoughts and feelings on things). Both of these ‘worlds’ are distinct from the objective reality.
Of course, unless somebody around here can read minds, those personal realities are just that: personal. They are not accessable to other people and other people cannot access or alter them. Instead all interaction with other people and creatures and unicorns and dieties takes place in the objective world. If it’s not in the actual world, but instead in a personal world, then other people are not going to experience it; it’s not real to them. (In fact, by the usual definition of ‘real’, things that are not in the objective world are not real at all, with the exception of the people’s actual thoughts and feelings.)
The problem here is that lekatt wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants God to be something real, in the objective world; he even specifically describes it in his computer analogy as being ‘constant in reality’. This would therefore not be something that changes subjectively to accomodate each individual viewer, he says; this is something with objective reality. Something real.
Then he posits that the reason it seems to be totally subjective is that everyone reacts to differently based on their emotional state. He presents this reaction as being so powerful that it almost seems like nobody actually notices the actual properties of the objectively real object at all; people notice nothing but their own emotional reactions. (He of course committs the Theists’s Hubris of assuming that his perception of God is the one unclouded by emotion and preconception, and therefore he has the one accurate perception. But then all theists do that, so you can’t fault him overmuch for it.)
Now, a real object to which everyone reacts only subjectively is somewhat bizarre but not entirely impossible. Everyone’s mental image of the world is colored somewhat by their emotions and thoughts. If observing God did sufficient damage to a person’s rational mind that they become unable to see past their emotions and preconceptions, then God would be approximately as lekatt describes; everyone would get back only what they brought to the party, or perhaps some permutation based on those preconceptions. (Possibly excepting the rare few that God presented itself accurately to, either by its choice or as an automatic effect of them bringing the right emotions.)
Of course, since there’s not exactly mass worldwide agreement about, well, anything about God, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of people are in the category of not being able to see this God thing accurately (if it exists as described above). If fact, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that anyone percieves it accurately.
And worse yet are the atheists, agnostics, theists struggling to find God; everyone who does not detect the God thing. lekatt describes these people as ‘deciding not to come’, which not only dismisses the struggling theists, but also ignores the fact that people having God experiences are everywhere; if God really does exist outside of people’s minds then you don’t have to go looking; that computer would be on every street corner and stacked in piles in every street, room, and hallway on the planet. However, despite this, the atheists and uninspired theists detect nothing. God is wildly subjective for persons with the right believing mindset, but remarkably constant -absent- for people who are not surfing the ‘right’ emotional waves.
Add to this the fact that time and increased knowledge have gradually eradicated the places where a god seemed necessary to explain other aspects of the objective world (lightning, seasons, sunrises, etc) and we are left with a supposedly real, objective thing that perfectly emulates an effect of the personal, subjective mind. (The emotion-colored one, specifically.) There is literally no discernable difference between this God and one that is only imagined to exist.
Does this mean that there isn’t some thing out there that differs massively from every other real thing, pretending not to exist for some people, and putting unrecognizably distorted images of itself on the minds of most or all others? Of course not. Anything that isn’t actually impossible could maybe exist, and there’s very little that’s impossible once you embrace the idea that there could be mass deceptive mental manipulation going on.
Of course on the other hand, if it looks like a loose descriptor for a wide variety of subjective imaginings, and it waddles like a loose descriptor for a wide variety of subjective imaginings, and it quacks like a loose descriptor for a wide variety of subjective imaginings…