Wishful thinking and the Science of Religion

[mswas]

@SentientMeat

Well then, that was really the point I was making in my first bullet. Yes, angels might exist, and finding them would be only the start of our scientific investigation into them. But angels are supernatural beings by definition, which is why they’re so interesting in the first place. I think we’re saying the same thing, ultimately: finding gods or afterlives would expand science immeasurably, whatever we labelled our new discoveries.

I am not going to go back line by line because I think we were getting sidetracked. I don’t disagree with either of your bullet points. I just disagree with the context of your second one, because I don’t think that seeking an emotional state is what drives the truely religious person. Whether that be happiness or satisfaction. The question that may never be answered drives the religious person, that’s the essence of faith. That they are not wandering through the darkness without making any progress, even if they never see the fruits of their own labor. That is what’s important.

Even if both were somehow “outside” the physical universe, the interface between the two would be accessible to science.

This is the part that intrigues me the most about your OP. In the Qabbalistic text, ‘The Sefer Yetzirah’, or ‘The Book of Creation’ or ‘The Book of Formation’ depending on how you want to translate it, there are some interesting corrolaries to cognitive science. For instance, there is a meditation where you hold a character in front of the eyes in the back of your head, or the eyes that see darkness. IE, you hold the character in your visual cortex. Now, in the terms of this book, it talks about Angels as the ‘machinery of God’. They would be that interface that is accessible between that which exists outside of the natural world, and the natural world. So, it would seem to me that any sort of examination of such phenomena would be the examination of angels. The problem here is that angel means something very different than the idea of winged messengers. There are many different angels with many different purposes. Within different areas of mysticism you will see different levels of sophistication used to describe such beings. The mainstream perception is the most vulgar interpretation, an anthropomorphic chimera that one sees oneself in, but only in terms of appearance not deeper levels of abstraction.

This goes into why I was attempting to discuss our relationship. How you and I can comprehend one another as words on a screen. Your name is SentientMeat, but for all I know, you could merely be a really smart computer in a university somewhere, without meat at all. The only point of reference I have that you are not, is Maeglin vouching for you as a real person. I have experience of him as a real person, so that gives it an extra layer of authenticity that you actually are a human being like me. So, if you study the phenomena from a deeper level, you would have to go to the deeper source texts within the religious study, where the anthropomorphization is at a more sophisticated level. Where the angels are being described in terms of purpose rather than in terms of appearance. This is where the phenomena becomes more observable. In otherwords the Angel appears to a person at the level which the person is capable of conceiving of it. We place our own gloss over how the angel is perceived.

Now how you would figure out how to prove whether or not one is communing with higher intelligences, ie those aliens manipulating the matrix, I don’t know. It seems to me though, it’s an issue of appearance, how does the being appear, when physical form is the least relevant of all its attributes. Like a computer with a holographic avatar. The computer doesn’t really identify with its avatar, that’s not the essence of its being, but to communicate with sentient meat, that’s how it appears.

It is the definitions we apply, the glosses we place over the phenomena that make it difficult to study. How do we tell the difference between studying the avatar and studying the intelligence itself? From humans on up, there are layers of appearance stripped away and layers of abstraction revealed. I conceal to reveal, or I reveal to conceal etc… The angel covers up its true nature in order to appear to the housewife in a form she will find pleasing and comprehensible, thus concealing to reveal. The angels themselves however are layers of abstraction covering up the ain soph or endless light which is beyond knowing, because there are no limits to separate it into comprehensible entities.

I think the difference here between Magick (with a k to denote a difference in sophistication) and science is that Magick creates limits, Science uncovers them. The perception from Science being that the limits were already there. To the Hermeticist the limits are created by an intelligence that creates them to serve a function. None of the limits are real in and of themselves, they are only immutable to lesser beings whose existance depends upon those limits remaining intact.

[ITR_champion]

@SentientMeat

Would you characterise this position as a God of the Gaps argument?

Nope. I really care very little about paleontology. Investigating whether God stepped in to influence salamander genes three hundred million years ago just doesn’t hold any interest for me. I am interested in human beings and my conclusions about God follow only from my experiences and what I’ve seen and heard among other human beings.

[SentientMeat]

@mswas

I am not going to go back line by line because I think we were getting sidetracked.

Agreed, though I hope a few of the lines were helpful nevertheless.

I don’t disagree with either of your bullet points. I just disagree with the context of your second one, because I don’t think that seeking an emotional state is what drives the truely religious person. Whether that be happiness or satisfaction.

That’s heartening to hear. For the record, the second point isn’t really about what “drives” religious people as such. It is solely and wholly about assessing how likely or unlikely it is that gods and afterlives exist, which you seem to agree is not affected by what might be “gained” (I’m trying to describe this as generally as possible here in order to meet your objections) by inflating that likelihood. Also, beware of No True Scotsman fallacies in distinguishing “truly” religious people – that way lies division and strife.

This is the part that intrigues me the most about your OP. In the Qabbalistic text, ‘The Sefer Yetzirah’, or ‘The Book of Creation’ or ‘The Book of Formation’ depending on how you want to translate it, there are some interesting corrolaries to cognitive science. For instance, there is a meditation where you hold a character in front of the eyes in the back of your head, or the eyes that see darkness. IE, you hold the character in your visual cortex. Now, in the terms of this book, it talks about Angels as the ‘machinery of God’. They would be that interface that is accessible between that which exists outside of the natural world, and the natural world. So, it would seem to me that any sort of examination of such phenomena would be the examination of angels. The problem here is that angel means something very different than the idea of winged messengers. There are many different angels with many different purposes. Within different areas of mysticism you will see different levels of sophistication used to describe such beings. The mainstream perception is the most vulgar interpretation, an anthropomorphic chimera that one sees oneself in, but only in terms of appearance not deeper levels of abstraction.

Note that it is always possible to find scriptural or religious correspondences with modern science (Buddhism and quantum mechanics can be surprisingly resonant, for example) – that still doesn’t mean such correspondences are significant. Here, it sounds like you’re suggesting that we could call neural processes “angels” – is that what you’re getting at? If so, I’d hope you understood why I don’t think such language is particularly helpful.

As for our relationship with regards to you ascribing to me a personal intelligence, and whether one might ascribe the same to an “angel”, I would like to explore a mirror-image of this. Schizophrenia (a rather outdated term these days, but it will suffice for now) is sometimes characterised by people perceiving Voices. In your opinion, are these “angels” (or “devils”), or are these solely neurophysical phenomena which it is backwards, insensitive and even a little sinister to attribute to some “external” source? And if such “negative” phenomena are misattributions, surely “positive” phenomena probably are, too?

@ITR

Nope. I really care very little about paleontology. Investigating whether God stepped in to influence salamander genes three hundred million years ago just doesn’t hold any interest for me.

But you said that “scientific materialism is not adequate by itself for dealing with the world”. Surely you are therefore positing gaps which science cannot fill? And, again, why don’t you agree with my bullet #1? You have so far only stated that you don’t.

[mswas]

SentientMeat Your posts have been good and quite useful. The place where I think there is a misunderstanding between us is not that I am trying to argue after the science comes into play that there is a direct 1-1 correlation between that and previous eras’ cosmologies. What I am saying is that the previous era found something that was useful, models that worked for them. So the question for the scientist that wants to study religion would be to ask, “What were they describing?”

In terms of angels, I am not arguing that they are neurological phenomena, though, there is something to be said for that point of view, I just don’t want to go there right now. What interests me more is the inter-subjective nature, that many people from different walks of life had compatible experiences. To look for the syncretic nature in the subjective experience to find unifying themes, in order to examine those.

Also, just as an FYI, it was you that sparked my interest in cognitive science. You recommended some books, that I have yet to finish, but I have since taken neurology and other anatomy courses and such. I’ve read some Dennett and Pinker though based on your recommendation. I just didn’t finish them because I felt I needed to delve into some other basics. At this point I need to firm up my neurology understanding because I learned it well enough to pass the course, but haven’t retained it terribly well.

For me, I think the ancients were on to something. I do not know enough about various schools of mystical thought, or the science to draw any corrolations in a way that I’d argue it with you. I’m just on too shakey a ground, but it is a topic that fascinates me. I know where I want to go, but the foundational knowledge required is going to take me quite some time to acquire.

[Voyager]

@mswas

I was responding to the bit about:

(rather than merely a natural neurophysical episode which they attribute to such)

Why is say an acid trip, or a sudden release of a higher dosage of Di-Methyl Tryptamine or a surge in electrical traffic across the Corpus Collosum not a valid religious experience? Why make the caveat ‘merely an natural neurophysical episode’? How does one tell if one neurological event is ‘merely natural’ vs another one that is supernatural in origin, when to the person reading the EEG it looks pretty much the same?

Maybe you can define what you mean by valid religious experience. I’ll just repeat what I said (which I think is what you said at greater length) - we can alternative explanations for religious experience, but this does not mean they are not supernaturally induced. It certainly doesn’t mean that they are. It only means that they don’t have to be.

Certainly. Though, Acupuncture in terms of case studies can show individuals getting better, yet in various threads you’d ascribe that to a placebo effect. The anecdotal evidence of billions of people who will swear that Acupuncture has made them better is not enough. Even if you can show the case study that shows people getting better. Corrolation is not causation, but there seems to be a bias toward the idea that corrolation is irrelevant.

I don’t have much of an opinion on acupuncture. We do know that the placebo effect exists, and so any claim that something works must consider it. That goes for regular medicine as well as alternative medicine.

But, the basic premise is that God created the universe and all of it’s rules, so why can he not act through the physical rules as an intermediary? Why does it have to be some sort of singular and unique event?

If you are a deist, then you are immune from disproof. But all western religions have god speaking from burning bushes and the like, and has god or prophets making predictions. If your world with god if functionally identical to one without god again you can’t be disproven, but we generally like the simplest explanation that fits all the facts, which is in this case the natural one. The problem is that some religious people go smoothly from “it is a matter of faith. You can’t disprove god” to “God wants you not to do this. Let’s pass a law.” if religious people considered their view on god equivalent to their view on ice cream flavors, it would be a much saner world.

I’ve experienced bouts of synchronicity where I’ve asked for something and literally within a minute or two that thing shows up for me. This is enhanced by being in an environment where the concentration of people who believe in synchronicity is higher. “I really wish I had a…” Now, I know this has happened, and it has happened multiple times, and I have had the experience with other people who commented on it, and have heard many other anecdotal stories from others with similar experience.

Million to one chances happen nine times out of ten. There is tons of literature explaining this. If you want to measure it and prove it can’t be explained by chance, go right ahead. It happens to people who believe neither in god nor synchronicity also.

[SentientMeat]

mswas, many, many thanks for your kind words and your beautiful dedication to new knowledge. It is truly rewarding to be told that one as thoughtful and intelligent as you finds my input useful. Apologies for not gleaning your points here more quickly.

All the best with your introduction to cognitive science - I’m no expert myself, but I’ll help with any General Question or Great Debate in any way I can. If anything, the best advice for CS is that it’s easy to lose sight of the wood for the trees. Its fundamentals are startlingly simple: that you are an arrangement of neurons just as a computer is an arrangement of logic gates, which reacts to, and acts upon, a continual input stream of information. The details get hugely complex, but keeping this broad view clear makes them manageable.

[Voyager]

@mswas

The problem with the materialistic approach is all it does is tell us about the elements, and how the elements are acting. It tells us absolutely nothing at all about what those elements mean, or from where meaning derives.

I think this is the attitude that truly divides atheists from theists. Why do the elements have to mean anything beyond what we as intelligent beings make them mean? If you assume meaning before we existed, then you must assume something that provides meaning, and that something is god or something like god.

What is the meaning of a supernova? What is the meaning of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? Isn’t there the possibility that these things just happened?

I’ve observed that people who have a hard time with the lack of meaning in the universe become deists, at least. Those who don’t have a hard time with the concept sometimes become atheists.

We as humans create plenty of meaning and purpose, and that is good enough for me.

[RedFury]

@mwas

…The question that may never be answered drives the religious person, that’s the essence of faith. That they are not wandering through the darkness without making any progress, even if they never see the fruits of their own labor. That is what’s important.

Given that I am out of my depth in most of the debate going on in this thread I also have to say that I am not exactly shy in exposing my knowledge or lack thereof. Or better yet, things that totally scape me.

Having said that, mwas, what, exactly has “faith” brought in the way of progress to human understanding of simply being/existing? I mean "if they never see the fruits of their labor,’’ who does or will? Seems like a completely arid argument for the scientific method of proof. And how, again, does that differ from SM’s assertion of willful thinking? If you’ll pardon me saying so, it reads as “covering your ass and hoping that future generations will make my wishful thinking come true.” Yet not a scintilla of evidence is provided

I may posit an afterlife and a myriad of supernatural religious claims and experiences to back said assessment, but how does that make me different from someone locked in a padded-wall cell who asserts he/she is an extra-terrestrial or Jesus-reincarnate? The way I see it the only difference is the claim – whether it’s accepted mainstream or not.

Trust you’re not offended by my rather unpolished post and queries contained therein. As I said I am rather unqualified to delve deeper into the subject – though I certainly don’t shy away from saying “I don’t know,” when many of this questions come up.

Strong atheist when it comes to human religions/cults, weak agnostic when it comes to science having all the answers. For classic agnosticism strikes me as a sheer contradiction: how can anyone plainly state what we can and what we can’t know? That’s an unsupportable assertion right there.

[mswas]

@Voyager

Maybe you can define what you mean by valid religious experience. I’ll just repeat what I said (which I think is what you said at greater length) - we can alternative explanations for religious experience, but this does not mean they are not supernaturally induced. It certainly doesn’t mean that they are. It only means that they don’t have to be.

It’s strictly results oriented. If the experience results in a palpable change in behavior it is a religious experience. The Epiphanic nature is what matters. I would be perfectly amenable to an explanation such as a new neural pathway forming, being the religious experience. The mystical nature of it is as described in the subjective experience. It is in the subjective that the experience acquires personhood.

I don’t have much of an opinion on acupuncture. We do know that the placebo effect exists, and so any claim that something works must consider it. That goes for regular medicine as well as alternative medicine.

Well, some might claim that all experience is purely in consciousness. One of the bases of Chinese Medicine is that physical and emotional components are intrinsically linked. You cannot heal someone physically unless you heal them emotionally. So the idea of a psychosomatic result doesn’t change the end result, because the basis is rooted in a psychosomatic framework. (As far as trying to corrolate the eastern system to western system can go anyway.) One of the things I want to get into studying is neurological referral zones. How pain in one area can trigger pain in completely another, or how dermatomes can relate to viscera. This seems like the way to approach the same sorts of issues addressed by Chinese Medicine but from a Western framework. The Shiatsu/Acupuncture/Acupressure points correspond to the Travell/Simons trigger point model to a high degree. Of course, the impact of how the relations correspond from there are different, but it’s interesting that the common myofascial adhesion spots, as well as Golgi Tendon Organ locations highly correspond to the location of the Chinese meridian points. Many of the Meridians also from a western perspective follow what are called, “Fascial Trains”, which are lines of tension that hold the body in place. IE, how tightness in your trapezius or pectorals can lead to tightness in your gastrocnemius or vice versa.

If you are a deist, then you are immune from disproof. But all western religions have god speaking from burning bushes and the like, and has god or prophets making predictions. If your world with god if functionally identical to one without god again you can’t be disproven, but we generally like the simplest explanation that fits all the facts, which is in this case the natural one. The problem is that some religious people go smoothly from “it is a matter of faith. You can’t disprove god” to “God wants you not to do this. Let’s pass a law.” if religious people considered their view on god equivalent to their view on ice cream flavors, it would be a much saner world.

Well, the issue is that miracles are singular events. If we did not observe the event we have no way of measuring it in any real way. Maybe a burning bush talked, maybe it didn’t. Could not a being of sufficiently advanced technology make Moses hear the speaking from a burning Bush? With tech that I can acquire at any surveillance tech store, I can make a burning Bush talk to you. Wireless speaker, gasoline soaked bush with a wireless ignition system? I reckon I could make a Barbarian do anything I want him to do. I’m not saying this is the true explanation, only that I am not going to render it impossible. The result however, is thousands of years of social cohesion that has been a major force in history. As I’ve argued many times, religion is about the people, the social cohesion, the narrative. It is the narrative IMO that is the single property of anything resembling a religion, not the belief in the supernatural. This is why many people will consider Communism to be a religion of the state. It is a narrative with a higher power, the state.

Million to one chances happen nine times out of ten. There is tons of literature explaining this. If you want to measure it and prove it can’t be explained by chance, go right ahead. It happens to people who believe neither in god nor synchronicity also.

Fair enough. It is not the synchronous events that I find interesting. Coincidence happens. Corrolation is not causation and all that. The thing is, I have observed replicable results. The problem with proving it is that manipulating synchronicity is a skill. I personally have not mastered it. I know people who have. A guy I met at Burning Man hitchhiked from Guatemala to Burning Man in two car rides, one from Guatemala to Austin TX, and one from Austin to Burning Man. It’s no mean feat to hitch from Austin, but from Guatemala to Austin, that’s impressive. This guy was an impressive dude. He was asking me personal questions about things that I have no idea how he would know to ask me.

I think this is the attitude that truly divides atheists from theists. Why do the elements have to mean anything beyond what we as intelligent beings make them mean? If you assume meaning before we existed, then you must assume something that provides meaning, and that something is god or something like god.

They don’t. The question is how did a random configuration of elements come to be aware that there was any meaning to the pattern and to value on configuration over another? Yes, I do believe in God.

What is the meaning of a supernova? What is the meaning of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs? Isn’t there the possibility that these things just happened?

Well, what does, ‘just happened’ mean? Yes of course we supply the meaning, that’s not what I am arguing against. I don’t believe meaning is imposed by an external entity but that meaning is supplied by something larger than ourselves, in which we participate. You and I are engaging in the participation of the creation of meaning. We are part of something larger, this thread and its participants are all part of something bigger than ourselves that is seeking meaning. The best description of this is the term, Egregore. Judeo-Christians would not approve of me reducing God to a mere Egregore, I’d likely be accused of paganism for doing so. For me it is merely a model, useful within its limits. So, lets not take this metaphor as far as God, but it’s useful for describing organizational groupings.

I’ve observed that people who have a hard time with the lack of meaning in the universe become deists, at least. Those who don’t have a hard time with the concept sometimes become atheists.

That’s the problem. You view this as some sort of malady. Every way this is described is in terms of a negative. You assume from the outset that belief in God is a crutch. The universe has meaning. That’s self-evident, otherwise why would we be talking? When you look at a star and describe it, that’s meaning, that means something. Movement through time and space is specifically about our relationship to the other matter in the universe. Without other matter, there is no time or space. That’s meaning. I just know that my participation in it is not just my creating of meaning but it’s a dialogue with other dynamic elemental patterns.

We as humans create plenty of meaning and purpose, and that is good enough for me.

Sure. But how did we as humans become more than the sum of our elemental constituencies?

[mswas]

@RedFury

Having said that, mwas, what, exactly has “faith” brought in the way of progress to human understanding of simply being/existing? I mean "if they never see the fruits of their labor,’’ who does or will? Seems like a completely arid argument for the scientific method of proof. And how, again, does that differ from SM’s assertion of willful thinking? If you’ll pardon me saying so, it reads as “covering your ass and hoping that future generations will make my wishful thinking come true.” Yet not a scintilla of evidence is provided

That’s because you are looking at the issue incorrectly. Faith provides people the ability to move forward. Your sort of atheism is a relatively recent development, or when it has existed in history it has done so in minority iconoclasts. Religion is about the narrative as much as anything else. The proof may never come to you as the individual but you can see it in the course of history. At least that’s the theory. You call it ‘covering your ass’, but the reality is that there is a possibility that one might be wrong. There is also a possibility that YOU as the atheist might be wrong.

I may posit an afterlife and a myriad of supernatural religious claims and experiences to back said assessment, but how does that make me different from someone locked in a padded-wall cell who asserts he/she is an extra-terrestrial or Jesus-reincarnate? The way I see it the only difference is the claim – whether it’s accepted mainstream or not.

Well in Christian terms it is supposed to make the community more moral. It’s not simply about the after-life rewards, but also about the moral transformation of the individual. The Christian narrative is about the role in civilization. You have to understand the context of Christianity Judaism and Paganism to understand how it has manifested in history. Before Christianity it was individual tribal Gods where the only real method of joining tribes together was by conquest or marriage. Christianity was an attempt to universalize the community so that it wasn’t linked directly to one’s genetics, ie the blood. The attempt was to make people see a broader notion of blood, a connection to people who are not your kin. Christianity made Western Civilization possible. It is inextricable from Western Civilization. Judging history by modern standards is to criticize the way the foundation was built by your ancestors. Human beings are what they are, and religion is the attempt to understand what we are, and just as importantly, how we should be. Your system of thought is post-Christian. Christianity is inextricable from the way you, a westerner view the world. Certainly you have cleaved the parts you deem as unecessary from the way you apply it to your behavior, but underneath all that, the religions of your ancestors inform upon your system of thought. You are not separate from history. Religion ultimately is about the story. If you look at Judaism, they canonize books, not people. They canonize the books of history and law, contained within is the story of civilization. Christianity was an attempt to make Gentiles canonize the ideas rather than people also. Western history is a progression of a narrative that moves us away from the rule by individuals to a rule by law. The struggle between Democracy and Autocracy is enshrined within the religious narrative. Judaism has no God King, Christianity has Christ, the Dead and Risen God King who is absent from daily affairs. In Gentile Europe you can see the attempt to make it about tribal blood by justifying the rule of Kings by divine right. This was passed down from the pagan traditions of their ancestors. Christianity has worked Creative Destruction upon that idea and led us to where we are today.

Now you may be skeptical about what I am saying, but that is the narrative, those are the keys to understanding Christianity from a sociological perspective.

Trust you’re not offended by my rather unpolished post and queries contained therein. As I said I am rather unqualified to delve deeper into the subject – though I certainly don’t shy away from saying “I don’t know,” when many of this questions come up.

That’s fine. I think the key to it is the narrative. We put too much importance upon the supernatural events, and not enough on the mundane events that create the narrative.

Strong atheist when it comes to human religions/cults, weak agnostic when it comes to science having all the answers. For classic agnosticism strikes me as a sheer contradiction: how can anyone plainly state what we can and what we can’t know? That’s an unsupportable assertion right there.

Well the modern narrative is a sort of religion of the state, to which you are not immune. You are not separate from history, but a part of it. Your comment on agnosticism doesn’t make sense to me. How is it a contradiction to say, “I don’t know.”? Like I said, if you focus on the narrative, you will understand more about what religion is and does, whether or not you buy into the finer points of its dogma. Because religion is real, it does impact you, and it’s not going to simply be wished away.

Nothing you said offended me. I hope nothing I said offended you.

[ITR_champion]

@SentientMeat

But you said that “scientific materialism is not adequate by itself for dealing with the world”. Surely you are therefore positing gaps which science cannot fill? And, again, why don’t you agree with my bullet #1? You have so far only stated that you don’t.

My Christianity is an all-encompassing worldview. (Or, to be perfectly exact, in encompasses everything that I have ever encountered or dealt with.) And as it is therefore larger than science, my God is not a God of the gaps within science.

I view Dawkins’ philosophy as a philosophy of the gaps, in a sense. To me, it seems that he finds the few small corners of the human experience that scientific materialism can explain and puts great emphasis on those. Everything all he either ignores or else tries to cram it into one of those small corners.

Now as to why I don’t accept the idea that science is fit to study religion, let me first define science. I use Richard Feynman’s definition: in science, the only possible test of a hypothesis is experiment. A proper scientific experiment must meet certain qualifications: the procedure can be completely explained, the results can be quantitized, the experiment is comprehensible to everyone in that field of study, and the results can be replicated by anyone who repeats the experiment. With that understood, there are many reasons why some parts of the human experience are outside the range of science. Some of them are fundamental, while others occur because of the current state of the scientific community.

• If a certain event occurs only once in human history, then it can never be replicated.

• Certain events may occur in settings where labratory study is impossible.

• Certain events may occur without prior warning, making systematic study extremely difficult.

• Certain experiences may involve only interior mental experiences, which cannot be quantitized.

• There are some fields of study where modern scientists simply don’t have the background knowledge necessary to do proper experiments.

• Certain experiences may only happen to people who have devoted a great deal of their life to religion, and that’s a category that doesn’t include many scientists.

• There are certain types of knowledge that are not taught during a scientific education, so most scientists don’t have them.

-etc…

All of that is abstract, but all of those possibilities have happened in certain cases relating to religion.

[mswas]

ITR champion Fabulous post.

[Voyager]

@mswas

It’s strictly results oriented. If the experience results in a palpable change in behavior it is a religious experience. The Epiphanic nature is what matters. I would be perfectly amenable to an explanation such as a new neural pathway forming, being the religious experience. The mystical nature of it is as described in the subjective experience. It is in the subjective that the experience acquires personhood.

Okay, by that definition I agree that religious experiences exist. In fact, I have had some religious experiences also by that definition.

Well, what does, ‘just happened’ mean? Yes of course we supply the meaning, that’s not what I am arguing against. I don’t believe meaning is imposed by an external entity but that meaning is supplied by something larger than ourselves, in which we participate. You and I are engaging in the participation of the creation of meaning. We are part of something larger, this thread and its participants are all part of something bigger than ourselves that is seeking meaning. The best description of this is the term, Egregore. Judeo-Christians would not approve of me reducing God to a mere Egregore, I’d likely be accused of paganism for doing so. For me it is merely a model, useful within its limits. So, lets not take this metaphor as far as God, but it’s useful for describing organizational groupings.

I’ll certainly agree that we impose meaning collectively, even retroactively. But sitting here tens of millions of years later claiming that the meaning of the asteroid was to enable us is far different that claiming it had meaning at the time.
A believer in theistic evolution, who accepts everything about evolution but thinks there was a purpose - perhaps an invisible and undetectable godly intervention, would say the asteroid was planned from the beginning of the universe in order to enable the development of humans, who are created (slowly) in god’s image. Some one accepting nontheistic evolution says it just happened, and that we’re the accidental result. Theistic evolutionists impose a goal on the process, and thus a meaning to each step. They do this in a way to be unfalsifiable, but I see no justification until God comes down and tells us what he did. So that’s how I see the diference, and Egregores in any sense has nothing to do with it.

That’s the problem. You view this as some sort of malady. Every way this is described is in terms of a negative. You assume from the outset that belief in God is a crutch. The universe has meaning. That’s self-evident, otherwise why would we be talking? When you look at a star and describe it, that’s meaning, that means something. Movement through time and space is specifically about our relationship to the other matter in the universe. Without other matter, there is no time or space. That’s meaning. I just know that my participation in it is not just my creating of meaning but it’s a dialogue with other dynamic elemental patterns.

Sure. But how did we as humans become more than the sum of our elemental constituencies?

You demonstrate my point. How do you get from the fact that we are talking to the universe having meaning? Since intelligence seems to have a selective advantage, more and more intelligent species evolved, through the usual random walk, until we got here. And then we say how clever of the hole to have been just big enough to fit us! How would your perception of the purpose of the universe change if a nearby star went supernova and fried us, or if we fry ourselves?

I don’t view either position as being positive or negative, as long as they don’t lead to bad things. My wife is a deist because she really wants to feel there is a reason. We never have arguments because the deistic position is unfalsifiable. I brought this up to be descriptive, since this kind of nonrational feeling (both sides are nonrational) I think accounts for whether someone becomes an atheist or not. I wouldn’t be surprised if the meaning finders outnumber us, which might explain the prevalence of religion.

As for your last comment, lots and lots of things are more than the sum of their elemental parts. Interesting, but not surprising and certainly not representative of some greater meaning.

[Voyager]

@ITR champion

Now as to why I don’t accept the idea that science is fit to study religion, let me first define science. I use Richard Feynman’s definition: in science, the only possible test of a hypothesis is experiment. A proper scientific experiment must meet certain qualifications: the procedure can be completely explained, the results can be quantitized, the experiment is comprehensible to everyone in that field of study, and the results can be replicated by anyone who repeats the experiment. With that understood, there are many reasons why some parts of the human experience are outside the range of science. Some of them are fundamental, while others occur because of the current state of the scientific community.

Could you give a cite for that comments, because I’d like to see the context. I suspect you are misreading him.

• If a certain event occurs only once in human history, then it can never be replicated.

No, but we can examine the impact of the event, the differing reports about the event, and dig up evidence of the event. Trivially, any important event in history happened only once. But here are some examples disproving your contention:

• The asteroid hit only once, but we are able to discover evidence that it did. Even better, we can make predictions on what we will find as a result of the hypothesized impact. I saw Luis Alvarez talk about it, before the Yucatan site was found, and he predicted that we would find the impact site.

• The Big Bang. The epitome of one time irreproducible events. Yet we can predict what we should find based on different theories of it, and of course reproduce observations.

Maybe no one hears a tree falling in the forest, but we can sure find the downed tree.

• Certain events may occur in settings where labratory study is impossible.

Like the asteroid and the big bang? I’m sure archeologists and cosmologists will thank you for defining them out of science.

• Certain events may occur without prior warning, making systematic study extremely difficult.

Well there goes CSI anywhere.

• Certain experiences may involve only interior mental experiences, which cannot be quantitized.

The experiences themselves can’t be, but our reports on them can be. Psychology joins cosmology and archeology on the trash heap.

• There are some fields of study where modern scientists simply don’t have the background knowledge necessary to do proper experiments.

Such as? Now any particular scientist does not have the background to do experiments in 99% of the areas out there, of course, but I assume that this isn’t what you meant.

• Certain experiences may only happen to people who have devoted a great deal of their life to religion, and that’s a category that doesn’t include many scientists.

A sociologist can study a tribe without being a member. Irrelevant, unless the religious people won’t talk.

• There are certain types of knowledge that are not taught during a scientific education, so most scientists don’t have them.

Do you think every scientist gets the same education? Anyhow, some examples?
-etc…

All of that is abstract, but all of those possibilities have happened in certain cases relating to religion.

Do you think it is just as impossible to study Greek religion as yours?

In any case, you are 100% wrong. I’ve read quite a bit of Feynman, and I suspect he’d have been very amused by your points. Really, I don’t know how many facts of science you have in your possession, but you are totally innocent of the process and philosophy of science.

[Voyager]

@mswas

ITR champion Fabulous post.

You thought that was good? :eek:

[mswas]

@Voyager

You thought that was good? :eek:

I thought you made some good rebuttals, but generally he’s right about the studying of religion.

1. Anthropologists think they learn more about a religion than they actually do.
2. Psychology is a pseudo-science at best. Try reading some Lacan for a while. He’d have us all being dead husks, our passion disconnected completely from action.

Some things you can only learn about by being directly immersed in it. Science values objectivity too much to study certain things. To know them would be to taint the results. Generally these things are considered irrelevant to the scientifically minded because they are only interested in things they can verify or measure.

The very western dogma of science is that we are capable of knowing the universe objectively. You have to accept this premise implicitly when embarking upon a scientific study.

If there is such a thing as Christ’s salvation that is only realized in death to the material world, how much will a detached scientist be able to tell us about it really? Ultimately the only way to know for sure is to go through it successfully.

Generally one of the weaknesses of those who have chosen to study religion is that they go from the outset thinking that it’s a bunch of superstitious nonsense. Dennett and Dawkins can study it from an evolutionary biology angle for their entire lives and they’ll never really know religion, because religion is about what’s in it, not about what one can observe from the surface. They do not have the respect of the subject they are studying. If real breakthrough work is to be done on this, it will be done by a religious scientist who has spent as much time involved with the faith as they have involved with the science, and then of course there will be debates about whether or not he is capable of being objective.

The examples of psychology and anthropolgy are the perfect cases. They tend to diminish the subject by putting them under the microscope. One of the most fascinating lectures I ever attended was at a conference on psychoanalysis. It was two psychoanalysts, a man and a woman. They were talking about the, ‘dream’, as part of the culture of the Native American ‘Crow’ tribal culture. The differences in perspective were stark. He completely diminished the nature of what he was studying as something quaint and backward, a queer psychological aspect around which the group gathered. She took it to be much more meaningful and valid. Right now the field is dominated by his side of things, which is where Dawkins and Dennett exist. Unless more people are willing to accept that there might be something actually going on for which science has yet to account, there can be no valid study of the topic.

That is what ITR champion was getting at.

To you, the belief in a deity is merely the fulfillment of an emotional necessity. The possibility that God is really real doesn’t really enter into it for you. Sure you will concede that God might be real in order to be tolerant to others and further the debate, but your mind is pretty much set on that question.

Christianity is a full and complete cosmology in and of itself, sitting alongside science, coexisting. The attempts to fit it within a scientific cosmology are at this point in time awkward and crude. I applaud the attempts, but the man’s got a point.

[Aquila_Be]

@SentientMeat

[url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461236]
[list][li]Religion, both in its claims and in its phenomenology, is a legitimate subject for scientific study. [/li]The fact of the matter of whether there is a presence or absence of a divine personality or an afterlife is of utmost scientific importance in our quest to understand our predicament. If some people actually experience a god or gods directly (rather than merely a natural neurophysical episode which they attribute to such), or if some people actually wake up after their physical death, then these are revolutionary data points which must be accommodated into our investigations. That they seem to be difficult subjects for experimental study (especially if said entities remain as coy as currently) is irrelevant: an extant god or afterlife would make the universe a scientifically different place, and radically so. Even if both were somehow “outside” the physical universe, the interface between the two would be accessible to science. I always had reservations about SJ Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” spiel, and now reject it completely.

Why do you conflate belief in god with belief in an afterlife? It’s not all that uncommon for a person to believe in an afterlife yet not waste a second thinking about or believing in a deity.

The two beliefs do not necessarily belong together.

[Aquila_Be]

@begbert2

Religion’s claims and phenomenonology are a valid course of study; and in the course of that study, the evidence so far available has been examined and found wanting. Especially once one realizes that the various goddish-feelings found in people the world over do not limit themselves to the support of any particular god, and thus they’re not valid evidence for any god at all. So, when new evidence emerges, the study can resume, at least long enough to examine that evidence too. In the meantime the game is called on account of a shortage of playing equipment.

Except that the so called evidence or, more accurately, claims and assertions made by believers in the so called supernatural have never been examined by any scientists in an honest manner, as far as I’m aware.

Contempt prior to investigation appears to be the standard approach by the scientific community to anything connected to the so called supernatural.

To take a really easy one to ‘debunk’ or ‘prove’ using modern sound technology is the so called EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). It would be easy to set up a simple protocol for this. (Hint: the involvement of graveyards is definitely not needed here).

Here is an alleged phenomenon that an accredited group of non superstitious James Randi type researchers could, at very little cost, prove or disprove as existing or non existent using modern technology.

Why hasn’t it been done? Because scientists dismiss it out of hand.

Contempt prior to investigation.

[SentientMeat]

@ITR

I view Dawkins’ philosophy as a philosophy of the gaps, in a sense. To me, it seems that he finds the few small corners of the human experience that scientific materialism can explain and puts great emphasis on those. Everything all he either ignores or else tries to cram it into one of those small corners.

Well, to call the 13.7 billion worth years of universe and 5 billion years of evolution, including the emergence of the fabulously complex biorobots called humans “small corners” shows a formidable hard-to-please attitude, and to suggest that cognitive science can tell us very little about human experience strongly implies that you’ve never tried to learn much about it. I urge you to follow the excellent example of mswasin that respect.

Of course, some questions cannot be answered by science because they are category errors (what colour are furiously sleeping ideas?, for example), and science cannot be used to explain eg. Beethoven, Picasso or the Gospel of Thomas since “explanation” is once more something of a category error in such subjects. Nor can science ever provide perfect answer in a reductionist sense, which I once set forth in detail here. But that is not to say that science (especially neuroscience) is completely irrelevant in music, art, history or any other human endeavour either. In any case, this rather gets away from the OP’s bullet points which are the main focus here.

Now as to why I don’t accept the idea that science is fit to study religion, let me first define science. I use Richard Feynman’s definition: in science, the only possible test of a hypothesis is experiment.

OK, let’s work with this. I posit that the hypotheses of gods and afterlives are testable by experiment.
For gods, we could observe the entire universe as best we could and try to find examples of phenomena for which natural explanations fail, leaving the supernatural “explanations” (note that I agree with Dawkins that they don’t really constitute explanations anyway, but that’s a bifurcation here) of gods. And gods could certainly bring the experiment to a dramatic and instant conclusion themselves – since you’re appealing to the authority of Nobel laureate physicists, I’ll in turn offer Steven Weinberg who wholeheartedly agrees that gods are a scientific, falsifiable hypothesis.

And afterlives are as falsifiable a hypothesis as they come, since every single one of us will carry out the necessary experimental observation when we die. Some predict that I will wake up afterwards (in which case, you can bet I’ll be keen to investigate whatever I find as rigorously as possible – as I say to Lib, you’ll easily spot me in heaven as the one going around looking for holographic projectors), while I predict that there’ll be no more “I” than there was in the 13.7 billion-year “Beforelife”.

A proper scientific experiment must meet certain qualifications: the procedure can be completely explained, the results can be quantitized, the experiment is comprehensible to everyone in that field of study, and the results can be replicated by anyone who repeats the experiment.

I’ve read plenty of Feynman – are these his words (including “quantitized”) or yours? In any case, I’ve just explained the procedure for gods and afterlives, the results will be exclusively binary (either there is afterlife or not), the experiments as simple as can be and anyone can look for naturally inexplicable phenomena or just go ahead and die.

With that understood, there are many reasons why some parts of the human experience are outside the range of science. Some of them are fundamental, while others occur because of the current state of the scientific community.

Such as? Maybe I could direct you to a scientific paper on the subjects you suggest?

• If a certain event occurs only once in human history, then it can never be replicated.

• Certain events may occur in settings where labratory study is impossible.

• Certain events may occur without prior warning, making systematic study extremely difficult.

• Certain experiences may involve only interior mental experiences, which cannot be quantitized.

• There are some fields of study where modern scientists simply don’t have the background knowledge necessary to do proper experiments.

• Certain experiences may only happen to people who have devoted a great deal of their life to religion, and that’s a category that doesn’t include many scientists.

• There are certain types of knowledge that are not taught during a scientific education, so most scientists don’t have them.

-etc…

All of that is abstract, but all of those possibilities have happened in certain cases relating to religion.

As Voyager says, this strange and arbitrary list leaves “science” as little more than school chemistry. You appear to be rather preoccupied with the methodology of harder sciences without touching on the fundamental philosophy of science at all, which is testable predictions. Science is not necessarily about predicting things correctly – that’s just the science which wins awards and gets into textbooks. Most of science is finding out that you were wrong, somehow.

@mswas

2. Psychology is a pseudo-science at best.

I won’t intrude on your dialogue with Voyager, but this is simply incorrect. Look in the back of any of those books I recommended and you will find literally hundreds of scientific papers detailing carefully constructed psychological experiments which can and do refute false hypotheses about how the mind works. Feel free to pick one at random, or choose a random paper from a respected journal of psychology or anthropology, and we’ll explore its scientific credentials. I assure you that they’re every bit as rigorous as “hard” science papers, and sometimes even more so. Freudian psychoanalysis has been considered fatally flawed as a science for decades, and to characterise all of psychology and anthropology so is unbecoming in one as thoughtful as you.

[SentientMeat]

@Aquila Be

Why do you conflate belief in god with belief in an afterlife?

Where do I do this? Read the OP again carefully, noting numerous instances of the word “or”.

And what is this EVP? If you claim that is a demonstration of the supernatural or paranormal, why don’t you submit it to the JREF or other body? Scientists won’t investigate claims unless someone actually makes them.