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Author | Topic: God says this, and God says that | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: True, but it does mean that personal "spiritual" experiences alone do not constitute proof of, or even evidence for, the supernatural. PE
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Gene,
We're making the same point from two different sides. The fact that certain "spiritual" responses can be elicited using electrodes in the brain does not, as you rightly point out, mean that God is not behind any spiritual experience - it may even be his mechanism for elucidating one. BUT it does mean that we shouldn't take it for granted that just becasue somebody's had a religious experience it provides any evidence whatsoever for the existence of God. It could just be a freak chemical reaction in the brain and you wouldn't know the difference. We have to consider the naturalistic explanations first, I'm sure God would have wanted it that way
quote: I don't understand the question. Can you rephrase? PE
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Even if it is completely naturalistic, does it justify hard atheism? Is there anything actually wrong with it? If not, why the intolerance from hard atheists? By hard atheism, I take it you mean the belief that there is no God (as opposed to lack of belief in God)? I'm not aware of anyone who would use the fact that stimulating electrical impulses in your brain can provide spiritual experiences as their sole justication for believing there is no God. But I can see how it might sway the balance somewhat. Hard atheism seems difficult to fathom at first - it appears to require as much of a leap of faith as a belief in God (given that you can't disprove a negative)...but on thinking about it further I'd imagine a hard atheist to be closer to someone who thinks the existence of God is about as likely as the Invisible Pink Unicorn e.g I can't prove it, but I believe strongly that there isn't a Goblin outside my front door who's invisible to everyone else and disappears whenever I look outside. My own experience is that I have met people who believe in God purely because they've had a religious experience and as we've seen, a spiritual experience doesn't prove anything. Just as someone who has a firm conviction that they're Napolean are unlikely to be the real thing, its important to weed out all the natural causes first. PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Gene,
quote: Heh....I forgot to mention that the goblin leaves no footprints . I think we've misunderstood one another here, let me try and restate my analogy more clearly: If you were to ask me if there was a Goblin outside my door, I would say no. You could then argue, quite successfully, that I "couldn't prove it" and you'd be quite right, I couldn't. But the point is, I still don't believe there's a Goblin outside the front door. Now, does this take an act of faith? Kind of, but not really. I don't go through all the possibilities in my head and discount them, obviously. But, I say it again, if you asked me whether there was a Goblin outside my door, I'd say no. If you substitute the notion of "Goblin outside the door" with "God" you've pretty much got an internally consistent hard atheism model. Another interesting way to approach this is to use your idea that what separates the God and the Goblin idea in plausibility is "strong feelings and a lot more testimonies". We can represent this on an Axis of Plausibility, such that if you find the strong feelings and testimonies utterly convincing (e.g an Ayatollah or the Pope) you would score 100, whereas if you find the feelings / testimonies utterly unconvincing (e.g Dawkins, Bertrand Russell) you'd score 0. You now have a continuum of belief in God based upon how seriously you regard the evidence. The point I was wanted to make with the Axis if Plausibility is the fact that spiritual experiences can be artificially recreated would, in the minds of many, reduce the weighting for the feelings and testimonies and slide down the scale towards 0 - not always into atheism, admittedly.
quote: Again I don't follow your reasoning, the example I chose was deliberately set up to allow no observable physical manifestation - so we could in fact have had God herself at the door.
quote: I sense a recurring theme....the sense in which atheism should be logically allowed (if thats the right word) to ridicule those who believe in God. I'm just going to have to shrug my shoulders on that - I don't know what should and shouldn't be ridiculed. One position is to ridicule nothing, but then life becomes a little dull. Another is to ridicule absolutely everything, but then you don't tend to hang around for very long As humans, we tend to ridicule some things and not others. If your God is a God of forgiveness and understanding, and you can see that, for an atheist, belief in God is the same as a belief in Santa or the Tooth Fairy, perhaps you'll understand why God believers are sometimes subject to ridicule by atheists - they simply don't understand where your belief in God comes from. And besides, many atheists have been subjected to hours of endless preaching by religionists who call them stupid for not accepting God's word or lazy for not doing enough to accept God etc Its a two way street. PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Gene,
quote: If it was modern art, I don't think anyone would be surprised if there was nothing in the box , but I understand the analogy. The point is, whatever is in the box, it may astonish them in an artistic and cultural context, but it would take something special to defy all the laws of nature or be something completely outside the realms of the audience's physical experience and worldview. Your analogy only works within an artistic context. How many people are thinking that there could be a supernatural entity inside the box? As you've argued, you've no reason, other than experience to think there there isn't a supernatural entity inside the box, but our brains don't work like that. It takes something else to anticipate the extraordinary else it wouldn't be, well, extraordinary. Simple example, if I told you I had a pet iguana, you probably wouldn't be that surprised. If I told you I had a pet gorilla, you probably wouldn't believe me but if I showed you a photo and ownership documents you might. If I told you I had a pet velociraptor then you'd probably want to check it out for yourself, and even if you saw it, you'd probably be checking for robotic components. And even then you'd think I must have drugged you....you'd go through and eliminate every single natural cause to convince yourself that what you were seeing was for real. Now if I were to ask people who didn't know me what sort of pet I had, how many would think I had an animal which no longer exists? Would they be laughed at? Should they be laughed at? Its a cliche, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof - thats why the empty box vs full box is not a fair analogy - neither scenario is extraordinary enough. Whether that gives justification for goading, I leave to the philosophers. PE PS What do the superscripts refer to? ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan [This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 12-08-2002]
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Hi forgiven,
quote: Unreasonable wasn't the word I chose, rather extraordinary, and I didn't even mean it in quite that sense. If you want to convince me of something outside of my sensory perception (e.g that air has weight) then you have to provide evidence (like weighing a balloon before and after inflating). The more outside of my own direct experience that is, the more direct evidence I'll require. If the argument is that the notion of God (or more mysteriously "that which we cannot know") is just as, if not more likely than no God then you have to explain to me why more likely or different from the Goblin outside my door. (Gene hinted at it with his strong feelings and testimonies comment, but it seemed more like a throwaway comment in context). (Mind you, the analogy seemed to be centred on what whether it was ok for atheists to feel intellectually superior, not really a topic I feel qualified to comment on....depends on who you are really, I guess).
quote: The debate takes a flight into the esoteric! I have to admit, I didn't follow much of this - I think you must have written it when you'd already warmed up and you're catching me cold. From reading following posts, you seem to be saying that I am using reason, which is inherently a Christian worldview, and that I have no way of knowing that reason is "right". Much of what you say centres around the concept of materiality, or what is immaterial or not so I'm first going to examine what that might mean. To me, material means "something you can touch", to put it crudely, or, in an accounting sense "something of non-trivial importance", or to a fundamentalist materialism may be something to do with rampant consumerism. Later on you describe a property of a material universe as "occurring by accident", and then "something existing in nature". Aha, but looking at the philosophy dictionary it defines it as:
Belief that only physical things truly exist. Materialists claim (or promise) to explain every apparent instance of a mental phenomenon as a feature of some physical object. Prominent materialists in Western thought include the classical atomists, Hobbes, and La Mettrie. So I'm learning something... Well, logic certainly isn't something you can touch (does this make it immaterial?), but I can't see how you make the leap to :"an atheist should not be interested in logic". This is getting almost too esoteric here, but I don't see the problem in having concepts per se be you atheist or theist - for example are you saying that an atheist should not use concepts like charge or gravity without an external logocentral absolute to pin them down onto? I'm also very troubled by your notion that using logic is a Christian worldview. Did you really mean to write this?
quote: Even if this were true (which I don't accept), I'm not sure what it means - after all, Christians use toasters, thus implicitly bringing science rather than faith into their lives Would a true materialist say that electric charge "existed", or quark colour? These concepts, like words can only be described in terms of other concepts, or words. Does that make them immaterial? PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
hi forgiven,
quote: We're starting to arrive at an answer to my common theme - what are the reasons for believing in God over believing in the Invisible Pink Unicorn, or Goblins or whatever? Amalgamating yours and Gene's comments the principal reasons (i say principal as these are the ones you've offered up first) would appear to be:
I don't buy the "internally consistent" method of differentiation as the IPU is completely internally consistent (for more on the IPU see here).
quote: I think I'm finally beginning to understand your point (again ). To paraphrase, you're saying that a materialist is being inconsistent in that he uses transcendental objects to deny the existence of transcendental objects. To demonstrate what you mean, you use the fact that logic is a transcendental object, so we can specify your argument to "materialists use logic to deny the existence of logic", or even more sharply to "if only physical objects can be said to exist then logic does not exist". By "physical objects", you would include gravity, electric charge and quark colour because they are "suspended in space and time". Can you explain what you mean by this? Take the example of gravity - gravity is what makes masses attract. And what makes masses attract? Well, gravity. Does this make it a thing, or an explanatory tool? If you look at a logic gate or a computer, then isn't logic also physically suspended in space time? Or are you saying that a materialist doesn't accept the existence of gravity etc either?
quote: As did the Jews before the Christians and many cultures before that - to claim that materialists are borrowing from a Christian worldview is a major distortion.
quote: You have to define exactly what you mean by logic before I can answer this? Why would it be surprising if it was a human invention? Did the concept of "humanity" exist before life? Again, you'll have to differentiate the two transcendental concepts for me. PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: Aha, so she's not using Christian in the sense of "religion founded by Jesus Christ" but in the sense of "a prehistoric absolute"?PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: The second one I agree with you. I'm not sure about the first (open to persuasion tho') - it seems to me to lie within the definition of "logic". If you define logic as that which comes out of a logic gate, then logic becomes a tangible measurable quantity, like charge or gravity. If you define logic as a method of assigning relationships between things, then it only exists before life inasmuch as "methods for assigning relationships" existed before life. It does smack a little of "how many angels can dance on a head of a pin?" to me tho', I must admit. Maybe I haven't had the relevance properly explained to me? PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan [This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 12-10-2002]
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: I don't have the same problem. One way of measuring the force of gravity on Earth is by the distance two suspended heavy balls move towards one another. You're measuring distance, but you're inferring gravity from it. That said, to define logic as that which comes out of a logic gate does seem like a pretty unusual idea, kind of like bootstrapping a physical quantity - I claim that one for myself PE ------------------Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense - Carl Sagan
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
quote: Can you explain the difference? Every experience is always more "real" to the person experiencing them. PE [This message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 12-23-2002]
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Primordial Egg Inactive Member |
Funkster,
I think this was my original question to you, something along the lines of how a genuine religious experience differed from an emotional reaction. I was assuming you had first hand knowledge of religious experiences. Given that you don't, and you share my skepticism, its probably best asked of someone who has had a religious experience. Apologies. PE
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