I would identify myself as a skeptic. As with most skeptics, I refuse to believe in something if there isn’t any reliable evidence for its existence. I don’t believe in a God because there seems to be no evidence for it.
What I’ve been thinking about recently is what if one day in the future I have some kind of significant experience that suggests that God exists (for the sake of example, let’s say that God appears to me and speaks to me directly)? ** I’d** never believe in God just because **someone else **has this type of experience. Using Occam’s Razor, an explanation that requires the fewest new assumptions would be that person experienced a hallucination. Or even the explanation that he or she was unknowingly inserted into a virtual reality simulation with the intent of tricking him/her, actually requires fewer new postulations than the existence of God.
But what if it were to happen to me? What would be the correct thing to believe? I know that requires a definition of “correct”, but how to proceed? I suppose if I find myself having personal conversations with God, as a non-believer, I should seek medical or psychiatric help. If tests show that everything else about me is normal, what then? I’m a subscriber to the concept that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but isn’t a personal experience pretty extraordinary?
Now that I’ve written all this, it occurs to me that it might be more productive to think about the same question in regards to belief in alien visitation of Earth (which I also don’t believe in). If something extraordinary were to happen to me, do I believe in it then? As a skeptic, exactly how much personal evidence should I require in order to believe in something.
Sorry if this is a stupid question or is otherwise unclear. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.
It can be pretty extraordinary, but it’s also pretty personal: it’s open to subjective interpretation. How do you know it’s god you’re talking to? The problem here isn’t with your having the experience, it’s with your interpretation of it. If you’ve already got a deity filter in place, then your interpretation is more likely to be biased. Christians always seem to talk to god, Muslims always seem to talk to Allah, Indians Vishnu, etc.
Making factual claims about a personal experience without corroborating evidence is where it breaks down. Do you have any evidence that leads you to believe that it is god, and not Zeus or Ahura-Mazda or Satan or maybe just a compromised and interpreted memory of something totally different? Medical science has demonstrated how the senses and the brain can be fooled, how unreliable memory can really be, etc. We don’t seem to have any objective evidence for god. So if you try to assert that it was in fact god you were talking to, your first hurdle is not remembering what color hat he was wearing, but showing that he exists at all.
You didn’t ask this question, but I’m going to answer it anyway, since it’s what I thought you were going to ask after reading your thread title.
If I were to experience what is generally considered a profound religious experience (let’s say a vision of Christ appearing before me out of nothing), I would think it more probably that I was experiencing contact with an advanced alien race as opposed to contact with a supernatural being.
How does one distinguish “God” from some arbitrarily advanced alien race?
In order to be convincing, evidence needs to be repeatable. Seeing Jesus in my tortilla one morning means nothing. But if I see him every morning, and hundreds of other people see him in their tortillas too … that’s a significant anomaly that needs to be accounted for. Then we can proceed to study the phenomenon, form hypotheses, test them, etc.
There is literally no single piece of evidence that would convince me that God exists. However, there are certainly constellations of evidence that might cause me to entertain the hypothesis.
The thing to do is to test your visitor. Ask him or it some question to which you don’t know the answer, or, better, for which no one knows the answer but can be verified. My favorite the important issue in complexity of algorithms, does P = NP, with either a counterexample or a proof. A god should be able to insert the answer in my mind - an alien can write it down. A cure for AIDS would be another. Some horse race results would be cool also, but my choices are a bit less greedy.
Now, if all your visitor can say is that we should be nice to each other and protect the earth, I’d say you were hallucinating or its a phony.
And if you remember yourself not being able to think rationally, if it was dreamlike, then it probably was a dream.
Someone, either Gould or Sagan, wondered why no one ever bothered to ask God or an alien something useful.
To be fair, a flying saucer kook from the fifties, whose name escapes me at the moment, did ask the aliens, and got a detailed description of Venus. Totally wrong, of course, but at least he tried.
A personal experience seems to me quite ordinary. Indeed, I can think of few things more ordinary.
That is to say, let’s take the librarian who’s currently sitting at the front desk twenty feet away from me. To me, the claim that the librarian is there seems quite ordinary, while the claims that I’m hallucinating the librarian, or that aliens have abducted me and are tricking me into believing that I’m seeing and hearing a librarian, seem extraordinary.
Cite please? The claim that Christians “always seem to talk to god” is false. Some Christians have no direct communication with the divine, and others have communication with the Virgin Mary, a Saint, and angel, or many others. Muslims have a personal revelation from Allah seems extremely far-fetched to me, given that the entirety of Islam centers on the belief that the prophet Mohammed delivered the ultimate revelation from God. At least in many places in the Muslim world, anyone who claimed that they were getting personal messages from Allah would likely be subject to violence. Indians talking to Vishnu? Perhaps, but I’d like to see evidence. Also, what about Christian Indians and Muslim Indians? Who do they talk to in your experience?
That experience seems quite ordinary cuz is it. There’s nothing special about it, it’s happened before, you can easily make it happen again, it can be repeated by others, etc. No one claims you hallucinated seeing a librarian, and I don’t know why you would make this claim. It’s not an extraordinary experience, and equivocating it with one doesn’t make any sense.
If you claimed that, instead of seeing a librarian, you saw a blindingly bright winged figure carrying a book and telling you that ‘You Are Next’ in an unearthly voice, now we get into extraordinary territory. This is special, it hasn’t happened before (hopefully), you can’t make it happen again, it can’t be repeated by others, etc. So now the choice is between ‘you really saw all that and no one else did and we have no other evidence than your word’ or ‘you may have hallucinated, or remembered incorrectly, or outright lied’. Quite simply, the second choice is much more likely, especially given that you don’t have any corroborating evidence.
Really? Cite? You do realize that my point here was that people interpret subjective experiences through existing biases right? So a person who is Christian and hears a voice will most likely interpret that as having come from god, as opposed to Zeus or Thor? Do I really need a cite for that? Ok, herearethree. What the hell, here’sthreemore. Please notice in each case that what you have is a Christian interpreting subjective input and concluding, without objective evidence, that the input is Christian in nature.
No I don’t have any examples of Muslims hearing Allah or Hindus hearing Vishnu, and I’m not even going to bother looking. They included merely as extensions to the example, so it wouldn’t look like I was picking specifically on Christians.
You have completely missed his point, which is that people relate religious experiences to their own cultural preconceptions. The Virgin Mary or a saint are effectivey the same things.
Anyway, he said Hindus talk to Vishnu, not Indians. Direct visions of the divine are largely unknown in Hinduism, possibly because very few Hindus subscribe to literal interpretations of their faith.
I am a skeptic and agnostic tending towards atheist, and if I “saw” anything like the quoted example, I would first assume I had dreamed it and let it go at that.
Perhaps it would be an amusing story to tell friends.
If it were a repeating phenomenon, I’d get myself tested for mental/emotional disorders.
If then it were discovered the absence of any medical “proof” that I was actually crazy or mentally impaired, I would then chalk up the experience to the fairly unsensational “human minds are complex and we don’t quite understand what causes everything we think we experience or sense” premise, rather than immediately jumping to God or aliens.
I don’t know that I would even think to test the vision for relevance or outside knowledge - I would automatically begin from the premise that it was something created by my own mind, rather than an outside force.
I have a hard time imagining what would impress me to the point that I would consider it possible to be an actual “real” event rather than random synapse firings, but it would have to be pretty impressive, and instigated by the visitor, rather than by me.
I suppose if the winged whatsit told me unprovoked that Charley Boy was to place 5th in the next race and that I should check him/her/it/them on that, then I might be bothered to check it out, and then if there were sequential non-related accurate future-predicting sessions = well, then I might be inclined to start considering other alternatives. They for sure wouldn’t be where I go first.
On a lightly related note, I do believe in the possibility of alien life, although the idea that it would be necessarily complex, intelligent, findable by humans, or in any way analogous to human (or even terrestrial) life is a bit far-fetched.
The value of such experiences depends entirely upon the actual experience. I have never seen images in my toast, nor would I put much weight on them if I had such experiences precisely because they do have meaningful ordinary explanations. Similarly, seeing an apparation could be a dream or a hallucination and, moreso, are incongruous with my belief in the nature of God.
Personally, I have had what I believe are such experiences precisely because they defy any reasonable explanation. I have experienced precognition with regard to major events in my life, and sometimes in others, for which there was no way I could have known when I had them. Of these experiences, I’ve often had other individuals present when it happened and can corroborate my story, so I know it’s not just me.
However, an inability to explain experiences alone isn’t reason to believe it God. Instead, for me, it is the repercussions of these sorts of events and how they align with my perception of God. In the past, these had seemed incongruous with my understanding of his nature, but reevaluation later led me to my current perspective with which they do align.
So, I guess my answer really boils down to the idea that it isn’t something that can be generalized, but the sort of thing that needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
First of all, how are you defining “special”? I recall a study saying that only about five percent of people in my age group have gone to a library in the past year, so it could certainly be argued that the experience of me seeing a librarian is quite special. The fact that I’ve seen a librarian before and can make it happen again doesn’t prove anything, since my brain runs excellent simulation software that often erroneously assembles random data into the image of a human face or body. This is more than enough to account for my observations. The fact that others can repeat the experience also doesn’t prove anything because it might be the result of a gene inherited from our caveman ancestors. Alternately, it could just be that a thought virus has invaded all of our brains and made us interpret certain experiences as the presence of librarians.
Well, he did says “Indians” and not “Hindus”, but that was no doubt an inadvertent mistake. On the larger point, it seems to me that if he were right that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus have nearly identical visions and members of each group describe those experiences in ways corresponding to there religious beliefs, that might be an argument that the visions are a psychological phenomenon. On the other hand, if he was making up the claim of religious visions by Muslims and Hindus being interpreted as Allah and Vishnu, then the argument falls apart.
Well, I’ll tell you what. We have objective evidence of librarians. When you can find objective evidence for those other things, we’ll consider them. Until then, we’ll just have to accept yet another ‘You were in a library and saw a librarian’ data point.
But our visions are inherently a function of our beliefs and experience. I trust you don’t believe in alien abductions. This experience is caused by reasonably well understood mental phenomena. In the middle ages demons (succubi) did terrible things to you in your bed. Today little gray men do. I wonder if late Victorian people thought it was a vampire. These people are not seeing something else they interpret as an alien, they are seeing an alien - or at least their brain convinces them that they are.
You have to decide if you are going to define your own reality or let someone else do it for you. Are you going to think for yourself draw your own conclusions based on your observations, or assume you are not qualified to do so and going to let others do so for you and in the process let them define you as somehow mentally deficient and let them tell you what they assume you observed.
It’s really that simple, are you capable of thinking independently of what the world is saying and base that independent thinking on what you personally are observing. Well you are capable, but do you believe you are and are you willing to challenge the powers that have defined your thinking to gain back control over your own mind.
I’m prepared to admit the possibility that a brain-damaging car accident may get me interested in God. I’ll try to avoid it and wear my seat-belt and such, but you never know.
We all vary, of course. I have a world view built partly around evidence and reasoning, and try to fit everything into it. This view also includes very old childish beliefs (I realize the Easter Bunny isn’t real but can never know for sure I’ve spotted every lie). It includes unwarranted impressions produced by human instinctive reactions (changing lanes will make traffic slow down in the lane I change to, whether on the highway or at the supermarket checkout). It includes all sorts of other flawed bits and pieces. I try to weed those out, but the process is imperfect.
It would probably work better to doubt the literal truth of a significant religious experience and build it into the world view as an odd experience, than to change the deeper elements of the world view. I took PCP as a teenager and spent an amazing evening being two feet tall but still having feet about one foot long; I could lean forward or backward by bending at the ankles, and touch the ground in front of me or behind me with my fingers without falling all the way over. This fits into my world view not as an alteration of physical geometry but of perception.
And there is no doubt that perception, which is partly an electrochemical and biological process inside one of my organs, can go weird, either temporarily or permanently. In fact it is happening right this moment in, I don’t know, more than thousands of places. But it would be awfully difficult to have had a moment of magic work once, anyplace in the universe at any time since the big bang.
Here’s a troubling bit, though: Like Arthur C. Clark said (IIRC), “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So, assuming (as appears to be the case) the universe is infinite in size and has an infinite number of technologically advanced civilizations, there are infinitely many technologies I could not distinguish from magic, and an an infinite subset of those that have a religious or godlike overtone to the way I would interpret them. I think this means that one or the other of two unappealing situations would have to be true: 1) if I had the proper exposure to real experiences, to be intellectually honest, I would have to eventually admit that God was real, or 2) no matter what my exposure and how much evidence and explanation piled up before me, I would still refuse to believe in God, meaning that atheism was basically a faith for me rather than a reasonable treatment of evidence.
On the contrary. He’s saying that people have religious experiences within their own frame of reference, which means they’re psychological. If a Hindu with no prior knowledge of Christianity sees a beardy man in a white robe with a halo and bleeding palms, that might be some sort of evidence that it’s not a hallucination.
