This. Let’s say that one afternoon all of the children under the age of 12 in your town disappeared. Would your first reaction be, “Oh Joy! Our children have gone off to a better place! Praise God!” I don’t think you would get this reaction from very many people, including Christians.
And there are people who ARE this far gone, who DO live so far in their own delusions and there are even names for it and medications for it, etc. Again, this is something we see and something there’s evidence for, which makes it a hell of a sight more likely than something we’ve never seen before for which there has never been evidence.
I’d stick with the plausible and the possible before leaping into the impossible. I don’t think that’s some horrible statement about my personality.
Bigfoot existing is plausible. God existing isn’t. Bigfoot doesn’t defy the laws of physics. God does. Sue me for having a pretty high standard of evidence for the latter that the former doesn’t need to meet.
ETA: If you introduced me to the IPU, I’d assume a delusion, too. Because the IPU, being both invisible AND pink, also defies the laws of physics. Introduce me simply to a horse with a single horn and I’d say, “Wow, a unicorn.”
Maybe I’m not as die-hard rational as you, but overnight mass abduction by aliens strikes me as being every bit as magical.
We know that lifeforms can exist in our universe. We are the evidence for that. We know that intelligent beings can be assholes. We are also the evidence for that.
We don’t have evidence for spirits or magic creators. Why do you think they are equally likely?
A better thread might have been;
You are raised to be religious from a young age. After awhile it dawns on you that you have seem zero evidence of a god. At what point do you say" this is stupid, I want out".
Perhaps a person raised to believe in blind faith isn’t looking for evidence?
It’s not.
To put it another way, you have to rule out natural explanations before youi consider supernatural ones. Aliens are a natural explanation, which means aliens are exponentially more likely than a sky god.
I think this is the case for most religious people. It isn’t that they are delusional or irrational or stupid, so much as they just never really examine what they were taught. Richard Dawkins speculates that there is an evolutionary reason for this - that as young children, we are wired to believe to what adults (especially our parents) tells us without question. That means the garbage gets programmed and believed right along with the important stuff like, “don’t go swimming with the crocodiles.”
Really? There are people who believe that everyone else is hearing God’s voice, or have similar delusional beliefs about other people’s minds? I’ve encountered plenty of crazies, but they tend not to be concerned about what’s going on in other folks’ minds–it’s this difference that in the hypothetical would make me take the second scenario more seriously than the first.
I have long suspected this is the case for the OP. He was raised in a house with certain beliefs that as a smart young person he is starting to question. I’m sure that’s a scary place to be as a young adult.
This reminds me of the thread that where the OP was (apparently) trying to come up with a disproof of ghosts. Yes, if there were overwhelming scientific proof of God we would all believe. The problem is there is zero proof. Throwing a bunch of hypotheticals at the situation won’t make it better.
Of course it is.
Aliens can’t make people vanish and telepathically communicate with the entire world unless they’re also wizards, which I don’t think makes it any more logical than if the alien wizards were just regular wizards.
How do you know? At one time people would have said that humans couldn’t fly through the air without magic. You would still have to assume that the aliens just had some kind of superior - perhaps incomprensible to us - technology. Not that they were using magic.
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How incomprehensible does something have to be to us before you say a wizard did it?
That’s a totally wrong scale–it’s like saying, how incomprehensible does something have to be before I say a unicorn did it. I don’t believe in wizards, so if something happens, I pretty much believe it was done by something other than a wizard. Unless, of course, whatever happens is sufficient to change my mind about the existence of wizards :).
The same could be said about God.
That’s what “God-fearing” means, I suppose.
I was just wondering if Dio could imagine a phenomenon for which the supernatural was the only explanation. Then I will wonder what makes it supernatural but not aliens and telepathy.
I understand that. But the ‘knowing’ side of things will effect people’s responses. Even if we take it as a given that the One True God is speaking to folks on Earth via a mysterious disembodied voice, and people felt that they ‘knew’ that this was so, once we allow one supernatural entity it’s perfectly possible that there can be two, or eighty nine billion. And humans would have no real way to differentiate authentic ‘knowing of God’ versus any other magical being making them feel really, really certain so that they ‘know’ that it’s God, even when it’s Demon Number 72330.
After all, people have been certain that they were communing with God and have brought back mutually exclusive and/or contradictory messages from others who had a similar experience. There’s nothing to suggest that, even in a universe where there was a God, that people couldn’t simply be tricked into thinking that He was talking to them. Especially if someone hasn’t had authentic communication with God, how would they know the difference between “yep, that’s the Big Guy” and “well, this certainly feels transcendent, it must be real.”
- Hallucination
- Aliens
- Aliens