I know God

Great Debates
81

6000 Angstroms.

(Assuming you meant “EEG” here) … There’s still one difference that I consider important.

Just as we can detect certain types of brain activity when people say, “I’m experiencing God,” we can also detect certain types of brain activity when people say “I’m seeing the color yellow.” However, in the case of seeing yellow, we can go further than that. We can use frequency-sensitive photodetectors to show that, almost every time a person sees yellow, there are photons with a wavelength of approximately 5500 Angstroms impinging upon that person’s eyes. (I say “almost always” because people also experience hallucinations, negative afterimages, etc…)

However, there’s no external stimulus we’ve (yet) figured out a way to detect that coincides with the sensation of “I’m experiencing God.” It is as though all of the experiences of God are the equivalent of hallucinations or negative afterimages.

Now, of course, it may be that there is some external stimulus that has a high positive correlation with both the subjective experience of God and the EEG measurements that correspond to “spiritual” brain activity, but we simply haven’t found out what it is yet. It may be ultraviolet light or gamma rays. It may be vibrations in the Earth. It may be certain chemicals in the air. Or it may be a disembodied sky god throwing His righteous thunderbolts (which we also have not yet found a way to detect) into the brains of the faithful.

Or it may be that the human brain isn’t a perfect instrument of detection, and tends to give “false positives” as a kind of survival mechanism. For example, if there is no predator lurking in the bushes but you think there is, so you run away, this doesn’t have much of a negative impact on your chances of survival (other than that you’ll waste energy running needlessly). If, however, there is a predator lurking in the bushes but you think there isn’t, so you just stand there and allow the predator to pounce on you, this has a severe negative impact on your chances of survival. Therefore, our ancestors would have had a lot of selection pressure against failing to detect things that are there, but very little selection pressure against detecting things that aren’t there.

Perhaps the detection of a spiritual presence is one of these false positives.

82

cuahametoc, the more I see of you, the more I like you. Sorry if I’ve misspelled your name, by the way.

Look, I was raised by an engineer and learned the scientific method around the time I learned to walk. I’ve built a circuit board from scratch and spent wonderful evenings discussing quantum physics. I know the rational arguments against the existence of a god or gods or godesses, and I can certainly understand why people agree with those arguments.

And yet . . .

And yet, there have been coincidences in my life which I cannot rationally explain. And yet, I have seen at least two miracles and while I’m aware that there are rational explanations for the chains of events which made up them, I don’t know why those chains of events should happen at those particular times. I can’t explain why, when I said half-jokingly to God on my way to look at an apartment when I wasn’t really ready to move, “OK, if the bathroom has blue wallpaper to match my bathrugs, I’ll take it as a sign.” only to find that what turned out to be the perfect apartment for me does indeed have blue wallpaper. I can’t explain why just as I was starting to define myself as mundane and ordinary I should meet two people who pulled me back out of the ordinary and into myself. I can’t explain why, minutes before I was laid off, a prayer of “God, I’m scared.” got the answer, “It’ll be all right” and two weeks later, as I started my wonderful new job, it was all right.

I am a Christian, specifically Episcopalian, and that is the church I was raised in. I’ve also studied Buddhism and Wicca actively, and been interested in other religions, including Islam at the moment. I’ve got my reasons for prefering Christianity, and I’ll even grant that the fact that I was raised Episcopal is one of them. It’s not the most important one, and I could easily have wound up non-Christian.

I’m the daughter of an engineer and a computer programmer, but I was a poet before I was a programmer, and I still am one. There is something which I cannot define in terms of the physical world, but which is as real to me as this message board, in fact moreso, as I said in another thread recently. Since my German is better than my French, it isn’t something which I can weiss* with my head, as I weiss that I’m typing black letters on a grey screen. It’s something which I can kenn with my spirit just as I kenne that my family loves me, even when they’re driving me nuts. As always, I admit I could be wrong. I just don’t know how I could be other than what I am.

CJ
*For those of you who do want to look this up, the infinitive of weiss is wissen, and the infinitive of kenne is kennen. Don’t you just love irregular German verbs!

83

Tracer wrote:

But without your cones, that is only your favorite shade of gray. Color is outside your frame of reference.

Why would you expect anything else of a nonmaterial presence? In fact, the discovery of a material stimulus would negate that experiencing God took place.

In some instances, that could be the case. But certainly not in the case of predators who respond to flight as a signal to chase, and who can outrun you by a factor of 2 to 5 times.

Perhaps. Sometimes, a knock on the door might be a stick blowing in the wind. The easiest way to find out is simply to open the door.

84

Apologies, cuauh, but I am suspicious of your comment that, for as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been aware of something and that eventually people started talking about God. I suspected they might be referring to this nameless thing because they said it was everywhere and that it was good.

Are you saying that you have a memory of having an awareness of this something before you were ever exposed to a socially accepted concept of God/gods?

Similarly, I thought some of what passed for as criticism of the 13 year old in the other thread was misplaced. Same for the defense. Folks said, What do you expect? You’re being to hard on him. He’s just a kid. Yet, IME many religious folk feel it is never to early to start influencing the future generation.

I often wonder what the distribution of beliefs would be if folk would refrain from proselytizing to kids before - say - age 13.

85

—Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and others have measured spiritual activity in the brain.—

That’s a remarkabe way of putting it, seeing that “spiritual activity” is only one interpretation of it given by some of the experiencers, and certainly calling it “God” in a theistic sense is not what many Buddhists, who report the same experience, see it as. It clearly changes many people’s worldviews, from Christians to non-thesitic students of Eastern oneness, from atheists to Christians. And for others it merely re-inforces their worldviews. Whatever it is, it seems to trigger responses in people that command that they grant it deep significance.

—The point you are missing is that the experimenters were intelligent interventionists. It proves that intervention by intelligence may affect brain activity.—

I would suggest that anything that most anything can be done without intelligent intervention in the context we’re discussing, can be done by intelligent interventions. That’s certainly what seems to be the case here: scientists were trying to crudely activate whatever portion of the brain sometimes activates for other reasons (which are generally unknown, but are at least in part predictably associated with intense concentration and repetative actions like prayers, chants, etc.). Those other reasons have not been demonstrated to REQUIRE intelligent agents, rather we simply have shown that intelligent agents can figure out how to trigger them (which is not a very startling conclusion at all).

Whether this is an emergent quirk in the way other brain systems work (one system overloading another), something god designed into humans (into apes too? It would certianly be interesting if we could figure out if they can experience the same states), something that was evolutionarily useful, or whatever, we can’t really say. Explanations that rely on no functional explanation whatsoever other than giving a name to the intervention can never be conclusively ruled out except by deductive logic.

86

Not cuauh, but can answer from my knowledge. God is not a concept, He is a reality. We come from the spirit world into the physical and gp back to the spiritual. Small children often see and talk to unseen friends from the spirit world until they are told they can’t do that by adults. Knowing God is always and forever. But sometimes in the physical we forget.

Love
Leroy

87

It was my sincere intention not to return to this thread, but as people are still addressing me I feel it only appropriate to respond.

Dinsdale, you are right to be skeptical. I had a strict Catholic upbringing, and was baptized at around 8 days old. So no, it wasn’t that “eventually, people started to talk about God” so much as it was that the traditional concept of God was always there, yet it didn’t quite fit with my experience of something I felt. Hence, my confusion.

It also wouldn’t be completely honest of me to lead you to believe that I never for one instant wondered if it couldn’t just be my imagination, if there was nothing for me beyond what my senses could perceive and that everything and everyone I knew was just so much dust. I did. But I thought a lot about it, and it didn’t make sense, for reasons I’m not really prepared to go into here. Part of it was the “first cause” thing, and part of it was just this vague feeling I had. Suffice it to say that “nothingness” didn’t make any more sense to me than the God that created the world in seven literal days and would burn you for all eternity if you were Hindu, gay, Catholic, etc.

lekatt, thanks for your contributions. I don’t know too much about NDE’s but my first reaction to what’s being said here is that of course there’s measurable brain activity. Otherwise, how would you even remember the experience? If you’re alive, you need a brain to make sense of your experiences, remember then, and communicate them to others. That’s a given. These clinical experiments with EEG’s are not done so we can sit around talking about God, they’re done to better understand what happens to the brain during death.

I’m not so sure that NDE’s can properly be considered proof of God. I can see how someone can have an extremely unfamiliar experience and have his brain interpret it as something more than it is. However, what more is required if you consider the very existence of the brain in the first place to be miraculous? Familiar experiences don’t remind me of God. The smell of rubber, the taste of yogurt - these things do very little for me spiritually. But if I had an NDE, and if they’re how people describe them, I’d probably be reminded of the miraculousness of the universe in a way that would affect the rest of my life.

But like I said before, what irritates me is the ridicule. It’s just not necessary.

cjhoworth, you made my day. :slight_smile: And don’t worry about mispelling my name (Damn, that’s why my vanity searches always come up empty!), just remember it starts with a ‘cuauh’, ends with an ‘oc’, and has a ‘tem’ in the middle. Easy as pie! :smiley:

88

You didn’t address ME.

READ BISHOP SPONG. Or at least some Paul Tillich. Please?

89

I’m sorry, Apos, I wasn’t intentionally ignoring you. I’ve heard of Spong and Tillich, and they do sound interesting. I do want to check them out when I get a chance. Thanks for the suggestions, they are appreciated.:slight_smile:

90

Thanks for the responses. In my mind, it is easy for me to assume your beliefs were largely the result of socialization. From the time you were 8 days old, you had folk performing rituals with you as the focal point, and undoubtedly making mysticism very much a part of your upbringing. Prayers at bedtime and meals, church attendance, childhood stories and religious overtones to holidays. I can imagine it being very difficult to overcome that kind of indoctrination. (Note, I am not suggesting that every believer holds their beliefs due to such early socialization.)

My suspicion is that you have chosen to underemphasize the significance of such events, in favor of the “spiritual history” you have chosen. But so what? If it gives you happiness, comfort, solace, or any other desirable sensation or experience, good for you!

Same with Lekatt’s suggestion that kids’ invisible playmates are actually manifestations of a deity. Wow! Strikes me as ludicrous. But then I am free to simply choose what I consider any of the more rational explanations for myself. I have no responsibility to disavow cuauh or lekatt from their beliefs, no matter how wacky I consider those beliefs. What is lib’s line about peaceful law abiding people…?

Had a similar experience last weekend. 2 couples were over from dinner. One of the guys is a really diehard natural humanist. The woman from the other couple is a kinda fuzzy lutheran. Some wine was drunk, and she started to tell a very emotional story of how she communicated with her deceased father. The example she gave was when she chose to return to church after a prolonged absence, and the choir sang a really obscure hymn that had been her father’s favorite. She KNEW that her father ws communicating good thoughts to her.

Of course I KNOW that is laughable. People all too often are willing to underestimate the power of coincidence. But what is it to me? Am I going to mock or deride one of my best friends who I have invited into my home to share a meal and conversaion with me?

My buddy kept harping on that she “bore the burden of proof.” Bullshit! She doesn’t bear any burden with respect to her own personal beliefs, other than whatever burden she elects to self impose. And if her belief gives her comfort, more power to her. As my friend, I am happy that she is happy.

Same way I am happy for anyone who derives comfort from their chosen beliefs. Its just that darned proselytizing - from whatever direction - that bugs me.