not unreasonable, no. however, going around and telling my coworkers that i'm crazy might be.
Well, we might very well diagnose you with a mental disorder that caused auditory hallucinations if we couldn't detect the sound, and if the other characteristics of tinnitus weren't present.
I mean, people have mental illnesses. You might be one of them. I agree that it's generally an insult to call someone "crazy", but there does come a point when a person's behavior and experiences are clearly indicative of mental illness. That's probably not a conclusion to jump to immediately but it's not one that should be ruled out without investigation, either.
er, no, i'm saying that the inability to find evidence doesn't mean there isn't a teapot in orbit.
But that's exactly what it indicates. With absolutely no reason to believe in the teapot, it's much less reasonable to assert existence than non-existence. Non-existence is the much more reasonable conclusion.
Absence of evidence
is evidence of absence, because that's exactly what it looks like when things are absent. Absence of evidence is a successful prediction of absence.
if there's a teapot in orbit, then your inability to find evidence for it is irrelevent.
But that's nonsense. The actual existence of the teapot
must be relevant, because its existence should be the determining factor for whether or not we say that it exists. Otherwise we're constructing models that have no basis in reality. And indeed if there
is such a teapot, finding evidence of it is only
difficult, not impossible. The lack of evidence is not irrelevant; it's the determining factor in regards to whether or not a reasonable person should maintain its existence.
...well, be careful there.
You did specify a crazy person, remember. I can only draw inferences from your examples as you present them.
have you ever been to a pentecostal church? the kind that lays on the hands, and people fall over, and often hallucinate, "speak in tongues" and shake, and such? it's actually quite an interesting point of fact how common those sorts of experiences are.
I feel like you're not reading all that closely. Let me repeat what I said:
quote:
It's a characteristic of fictional or illusional experiences that individual accounts differ dramatically when people don't have a chance to confer.
You're talking about a situation where everybody is doing the same thing because
they've all seen each other do the same thing.
That wasn't what I was talking about at all. It's no surprise when people who have a chance to get their stories straight with each other wind up telling the same story. The question is, what do they report on their own?
On their own, nobody's religion seems to agree with anybody else's. That's why there's 30,000 individual denominations of Christianity alone.
they all have the same basic hallmarks. similarly, alien abductions.
Interestingly, people who reported alien abductions only started having the
same abductions - grey, almond-eyed aliens, pseudosexual probing/experiments, beams of light, conscious paralysis, etc - once stories of "Greys" abducting people for experiments became popular in culture. Previous to that there was something like 200 different "alien species" - men in black, bat-people, lizard-men, etc - abducting human beings. Now it's just greys, pretty much.
That's what I'm talking about. There are already societal narratives telling people what an abduction is "supposed" to be like. Similarly, people in the Pentacostal church have an established template of what being "filled with the Holy Spirit" or whatever is supposed to look like, and they play the role.
But people whose church doesn't offer that framework don't do the same things. Catholics don't get up and start speaking in tongues in the middle of the benediction. They're rarely slain in the spirit or whatever. You don't see Methodists handling snakes. (Except for Methodist herpetologists, of course.)
so i don't think the ability to replicate an experience is a good test for whether or not it's a delusion.
But that's exactly the best test - in the proper environment. The environment where people are getting cues from each other on how to all act the same way is an invalid environment. When you take people out of the Pentecostal church, they rarely keep speaking in tongues.
That's why replicatability is the hallmark of the scientific method - because that's how you distinguish the real results from the mistaken or delusional ones.
Honestly I'm not sure what to make of the fact that you keep ignoring crucial qualifiers in my statements. Can you help me understand that?
er, you mean by defining god as supernatural?
No, I meant defining God as someone who never takes action, and therefore makes no effect on the universe.
"Supernatural" doesn't have anything to do with it; indeed, that's a word that has no meaning (outside of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.)
that's just the definition of what god is
I know you're talking about "supernatural", but I'm not. It has nothing to do with God being supernatural. It has everything to do with God being interventionist. If God intervenes, then he has an effect on the universe that can be detected. Answered prayers, etc.
And I would venture to say that only a minuscule number of believers posit a God who takes no interest or intervention in his universe. Most people believe in a God of answered prayer, and that God can be dismissed by the fact that no God is actually answering prayer.
you cannot demonstrate god through scientific means, by definition.
quote:
Main Entry: 1god
Pronunciation: 'gd also 'god
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English; akin to Old High German got god
1 capitalized : the supreme or ultimate reality: as a : the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe b Christian Science : the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind
2 : a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality
3 : a person or thing of supreme value
4 : a powerful ruler
I don't see where "undemonstratable" is any part of that definition. I know that God is often
held to be undemonstratable, but that position is inconsistent with the properties of God as defined by most.
Only the completely non-interventionist God is truly non-demonstratable, and there's sound philosophical reasons to reject
his existence, which I have described above.
Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.
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