The Brain Structure Argument Agaimst Religious Experience

Skeptics argue that the experiences have a commonality because they are all produced by human brain structure. In other words the names from the various religions are the constructs but the experiences that unite the subjects and that transcend the individual cultural filters are the same because they are products of a shared structure that of the human brain. Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser state the argument:

Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for cooperation, whereas an alternative proposal views religion as a by-product of evolved, non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach, explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background, individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from pre-existing cognitive functions, but that it may then have been subject to selection, creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.[1]

In other words, the discussion about origins of religion there are two genetic choices, a specific gene, or spandrels. The weight of the evidence, accordimg to Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser, leans toward the latter (spandrels: pre-existing cognitive functions based upon combined genetic functions from other areas). The deeper level of complexity comes with the finding that religion evolved from spandrels and yet it is still subject to adaptation manifesting in a system for cooperation (religion). What their findings really suggest is that moral motions are more basic than religious doctrine and that moral decision making transcends social structure or organization. Religion is perpetuated because its conducive to cooperation but there is an underlying sense or moral motion that's tied to the specific religious affiliation. Moral reasoning is not the same as mystical experience. Religious experience is a passive apprehension and moral decision making is an active use of deductive reasoning. Moreover, in finding religion is not original adaptation they are really negating the brain structure argument for uniformity of reoigious experiences. Their findings show that moral decisions transcended the religious background, thus the religious symbols, ideas, and presumably experiences are not reducible to moral motions since the latter transcends the former.[2] If religious experiences are of the same nature because of the state of human brain structure we should expect to find a conformation between moral motions religious experience. Frederick Schleiermacher argued that religious religion is more than just enhanced ethical thinking.[3] This has led to the widely accepted theory of the religious a priori. Religion is understood as it's on discipline separate from ethics. The a priori is seen as a “special for of awareness which exists alongside the cognitive, moral and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them.”[4] 

Pyysiäinen and Hauser, are working under the assumptions of reductionists such as Daniel Dennett.[5] Since religious experience is linked to brain chemistry it must be the result of brain chemistry, thus there’s no reason to assume it’s indicative of any sort of supernatural causation. This view has become standard in the scientific community. Tiber and McGuire state:

Religion as a process generates remarkable action, countless events, numberless provocative artifacts. Yet what factual phenomenon except perhaps slips of ancient holy paper underlies and animates one of the most influential and durable of human endeavors? We've an answer. Shivers in the moist tissue of the brain confect cathedrals our proposal is that all religions differ but all share two destinies: they are the product of the human brain. They endure because of the strong influence of the product of the human brain. The brain is a sturdy organ ith common characteristics everywhere. A neurosurgeon can work confidently on a vatican patient and another in mecca. Same tissue, same mechinisms. One such mechinnism is a readiness to generate religions.[6]

As an argument about the origin of religion, the genetic aspects would only be the proximate cause. It doesn't rule out a distal cause in the divine. As an argument about the origin of religion, the genetic aspects would only be the proximate cause. It doesn't rule out a distal cause in the divine. Andrew Newberg, one of the pioneers in researching neural activity of religious experience and God talk tells us that none of the research disproves God, nor could it:

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.[7]

Just being connected to brain chemistry is not enough to disprove the universal experience argument.

The problem with the brain structure argument is that even though we all have human brain structure we don’t all have the same kinds of experiences. We can’t assume that universal experiences come from brain structure alone. First, not everyone has mystical experience. Even though the incidence rates are high they are not 100%. We all have human brain structure but not all have these experiences. Secondly, even among those who do there are varying degrees of the experience. William James saw it as a continuum and Robert Wuthnow, one of the early researchers who did a modern scientific study on the phenomenon also theorized that there is a continuum upon which degree of experience varies.[8] If the brain structure argument was true then we should expect to always have the same experience; we should have the same culture. We have differing experiences and even our perceptions of the same phenomena vary. Yet the experience of mystical phenomena is not identical since it is filtered through cultural constructs and translated into the doctrinal understanding of traditions that the experiencers identify as their own.

The brain Structure argument is based upon the same premises reductionists take to the topic of consciousness and brain/mind. They assume that any subjective experience is ultimately the result of brain chemistry. There really is no reason to assume this other than the fact that brain chemistry plays a role in our perceptions. There’s no basis for the assumption that any mental phenomena must originate in brain chemistry alone. In those arguments a sense usually emerges that any involvement with the natural cancels the supernatural. I suggest that this is the ersatz version of supernature. The alien realm, juxtaposed to the natural realm and brought in as a counter to naturalism, this is the false concept of Supernatural that Eugene R, Fairweather spoke about.[9] The original concept of supernature is that of the ground and end of the natural. Thus it would be involved with nature. The ground/end of nature is the ontology of supernature and pragmatic working out of the phenomenon would be the power of God to lift human nature to a higher level, as discussed by Fairweather and aslo Mathias Joseph Scheeben.[10] How can human nature be elevated without supernature being involved with the realm of nature? Thus, if it is true that bonafide experiences of God are mediated by brain chemistry, then the fact that supernature works through evolutionary processes and physiological realities such as brain chemistry is hardly surprising.

Some studies have explored questions about brain function and the texture or mechanics of mystical experience. Van Elk et al find that the sensation of supernatural presence is an adaptation from the need to over-detect presences of predictors in the jungle.[11] In other words if one sets out on a jungle trail, and there is darkness, sensing a predictor and turning back from the trek would be helpful. If the sensation was wrong and there was no predictor the mistake of being wrong would be less graven that of being right but ignoring the sense. Thus, the sensation of presence is selected for. This might be used by a skeptic to answer the argument from mystical experience. Elk has five experiments that that seek to explore weather processing concepts about supernatural agents enhances detection in the environment.

Participants were presented with point light stimuli representing kinds of biological motion, or with pictures of faces embedded in a noise mask. Participants were asked to indicate if the stimuli represented a human agent or not. In each case they used three “primes,” one for supernatural, one ofr human, one for animal. They found that supernatural primes facilitated better agent detection.[12] So the argument is that the perceived presence of agents in threatening situations and tendencies to anthropomorphizing leads stronger belief in ghosts, demons, angels, gods and other “supernatural” agency.[13] They point to a body of work consisting of several studies showing that particular paranormal beliefs are a reliable predictor of illusory perceptions of faces and agency detection. These studies include Willard and Norenzayan (2013), Reikki et. al. (2013), and Petrican and Burris (2012).[14] “[A]...lthough these studies provide tentative support for the relation between agency detection and supernatural beliefs, the notion that reigious beliefs are a byproduct of perceptual biases to detect patterns and agency has been challenge by several authors...” (Bulbulia, 2004, Lisdorf 2007, and McKay and Efferson, 2010).[15]
 

While it may be true that some aspects of mystical experience are genetically related, and may be related to agent detection, that is no proof that mystical experience originates wholly within a naturalistic and genetic framework. First, because these studies only demonstrate a correlation between supernatural beliefs and agency detection. There is no attempt to establish the direction of a causal relationship. If there is a connection between supernatural and agent detection it could as easily be that awareness of supernatural concepts makes one more sensitive to agent detection. Secondly, of course just being genetically related doesn't reduce the phenomenon wholly to genetic endowments. Thirdly, there is a lot more to mystical experience than agent detection. Both involve sensing a presence beyond that point the differences are immense. I am not even sure that facial recognition and sensing a predator are similar enough to count for anything. In sensing being observed one is not usually aware of visual ques as one would be in facial recognition. There's no guarantee that the quality of the sensing is the same. Feeling the divine presence is much more august and involves levels and textures. Such an experience is, overall, positive, life changing, transformational (even noetic) but merely feeling one is being observed could be creepy, negative, or even trivial. The vast differences can be spelled out in the tiebreakers I discuss in The Trace of God.

[1] Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser, "The Origins of Religion: Evolved Adaption or by Product." Science Direct: Trends in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, (March 2010), 104-109.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661309002897

[2] Ibid,. 105=106.

[3] Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, Hugh S. Pyper. The Oxford Companion to Christian Though:Intellectual, Spiritual and Moral Horizons of Christianity, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000, 483

In the Trace of God I do two chapters defending Schleiermacher's notion and the religious a priori against reductionist based attacks by philosopher yne Proudfoot. (Hinman, Trace...op. Cit., 179-241).

[4 ]David Pailin, “The Religious a priori,” Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Louisville Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, Alan Richardson and John Bowden, ed.,1983, 498.

[5]  Daniel Dennett, Consciousness explained, Boston, MA. Back Bay Books 1992, 31-43.

[6] Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire, God's Brain, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010. 11.

[7] Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, 37.
 

[8] Robert Wuthnow, “Peak Experieces, Some Empirical Tests,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 183 (1978) 61-62.

[9]Eugene R. Fairweather, “Christianity and the Supernatural,” in New Theology no.1. New York: Macmillian, Martin E. Marty and Dean G. Peerman ed. 1964. 235-256

[10]Mathias Joseph Scheeben in Fairweather, Ibid.

[11]  Michiel Elk, Bastiaan T. Rutjens, Joop van der Pligt,& Frenk van Harrveled (2016) Priming of Supernatural agent concepts and agency detection, Religion, Brain and Behavior, 6:1, 4-33, DOL: 10.1080/2153599X.2014.93344

[12]  Ibid., 4

[13]  Ibid., 5.

[14]  Ibid., 5. A.K. Willard and A. Norenzayan, “Cognative Biases Explain Religious Belief and belief in life's purpose,” Cognition 129 (2013), 379-391. T. Reikki, M.Litterman, et. al. “Paranormal and religious believers are more prone to illusary face perception than skeptics and none believers.” applied cognitive psychology 27 (2013) 150-155, and R. Petrican and C.T. Burris, “Am I a Stone? Over attribution of agency and Religious Orientation,” Religion and Spirituality 4 (2012), 312-323.

[15]  Ibid., 6. J. Bulbulia, “The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” Biology and Philosophy 19, (2004) 655-686, A. Lisdorf, “What's HIDD'n in the HADD,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 7, (2007), 341-353, and R. McKay and C. Efferson, “Subtitles of Error Management,” Evolution and Human Behavior, 31 (5)(2010) 309-319.


 

Atheist chance to debate me:Thomas Reid argument (or From Epistemic Judgment)

Thomas Reid 1710-1796

This is my own original God Argument and it is my favorite

If you want to debate, I promise I will be nice, and we can debate here in the comment box. Christians/ theists please comment what do you think of the argument?

Reid never made this argument he just inspired it.

Argument:

(1) No empirical evidence can prove the existence of the external world, other minds, or the reality of history, or other such basic things.

(2) We do not find this epistemological dilemma debilitating on a daily basis because we assume that if our experiences are consistent and regular than we can navigate in "reality" whether it is ultimately illusory of not.

(3) Consistency and regularity of personal experience is the key.

(4) religious experience can also be regular and consistent, perhaps not to the same degree, but in the same way.

(5) Inersubjective

RE of this type has a commonality shared by bleievers all over the world, in different times and diffrent places, just as the exeternal world seems to be percieved the same by everyone.

(6) Real and Lasting effects.

(7) therefore, we have as much justification for assuming religious belief based upon experince as for assuming the reality of the external world or the existence of other minds.

*We assume reality by means of a Jugement

*we make such jugements based upon criteria

*Because RE fits the same criteria we are justfied in making the same assumption; ie that these experinces are idicative of a reality.

The criteria: If our experiences are:

*Regular
*consistant
*inter=subjective
*navigational

Then we assume our eperience3s reflect reality.

VIII. The Thomas Reid Argument.

A. How do we Know the external world exists?

Philosophers have often expressed skepticism about the external world, the existence of other minds, and even one's own existence. Rene Descartes went so far as to build an elaborate system of rationalism to demonstrate the existence of the external world, beginning with his famous cogito, "I think, therefore, I am." Of course, he didn't really doubt his own existence. The point was to show the method of rationalism at work. Nevertheless, this basic point, that of epistemology (how we know what we know) has always plagued philosophy. It seems no one has ever really given an adequate account. But the important point here is not so much what philosophers have said but what most people do. The way we approach life on a daily basis the assumptions we make about the external world. Skeptics are fond of saying that it is irrational to believe things without proof. I would argue that they, an all of us, believe the most crucial and most basic things without any proof whosoever, and we live based upon those assumptions which are gleaned with no proof of their veracity at all!

B. Consider Thomas Reid's Common Sense Philosophy of Foundatinalism and Fallibalism.

The point of departure here is Reid's discussion of Hume and the problem of justification of the external world. This is discussed in lecture notes of a contemporary philosopher, G.J. Mattey, in his lecture notes.

1) Skepticism about the External World

Thomas Reid, Theory of Knowledge lecture notes.G.J. Mattey
Philosophy, UC Davis

"Consider the question whether we are justified in believing that a physical world exists. As David Hume pointed out, the skepticism generated by philosophical arguments is contrary to our natural inclination to believe that there are physical objects." "[T]he skeptic . . . must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, tho' he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left this to his choice, and has doubtless esteem'd it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations. We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?, but 'tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasoning." (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Section II) "Nonetheless, after considering the causes of our belief in the existence of body and finding them inadequate for the justification of that belief, Hume admitted to be drawn away form his orignal assumption that bodies exist. 'To be ingenuous, I feel myself at present . . . more inclin'd to repose no faith at all in my senses, or rather imagination, than to place in it such an implicit confidence,' because ''tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses." His solution to these doubts was "carelessness and in-attention,' which divert the mind from skeptical arguments."

2) Reid's Defense of Commonsense Beliefs.

Mattey again:

"Thomas Reid, who was a later contemporary of Hume's, claimed that our beliefs in the external world are justified.'I shall take it for granted that the evidence of sense, when the proper circumstances concur, is good evidence, and a just ground of belief' (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). This evidence is different from that of reasoning from premises to a conclusion, however."

"That the evidence of sense is of a different kind, needs little proof. No man seeks a reason for believing what he sees or feels; and, if he did, it would be difficult to find one. But, though he can give no reason for believing his senses, his belief remains as firm as if it were grounded on demonstration. Many eminent philosophers, thinking it unreasonable to believe when the could not shew a reason, have laboured to furnish us with reasons for believing our senses; but their reasons are very insufficient, and will not bear examination. Other philosophers have shewn very clearly the fallacy of these reasons, and have, as they imagine, discovered invincible reasons agains this belief; but they have never been able either to shake it themselves or to convince others. The statesman continues to plod, the soldier to fight, and the merchant to export and ijmport, without being in the least moved by the demonstations that have been offered of the non-existence of those things about which they are so seriously employed. And a man may as soon by reasoning, pull the moon out of her orbit, as destroy the belief of the objects of sense." (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX)

"Here Reid shows himself to have foundationalist tendencies, in the sense that our beliefs about physical objects are not justified by appeal to other beliefs. On the other hand, all he has established at this point is what Hume had already observed, that beliefs about physical objects are very hard to shake off. Hume himself admitted only to lose his faith in the senses when he was deeply immersed in skeptical reflections. But why should Reid think these deeply-held beliefs are based on "good evidence" or "a just ground?" One particularly telling observation is that a philosopher's "knowledge of what really exists, or did exist, comes by another channel [than reason], which is open to those who cannot reason. He is led to it in the dark, and knows not how he came by it" (Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, Chapter XX). Philosophers "cannot account for" this knowledge and must humbly accept it s a gift of heaven."

"If there is no philosophical account of justification of beliefs about the physical world, how could Reid claim that they are justified at all? The answer is the way in which they support common sense."

"Such original and natural judgments [based on sense-experience] are, therefore, a part of that furniture which Nature hath given to the human understanding. They are the inspiration of the Almighty, no less than our notions or simple apprehensions. They serve to direct us in the common affairs of life, where our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark. They are part of our constitution; and all the discoveries of our reason are grounded upon them. They make up what is called the common sense of mankind; and, what is manifestly contrary to any of those first principles, is what we call absurd. (An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chapter VII, Section 4)"

"One might say that judgments from sense-experience they are justified insofar as they justify other beliefs we have, or perhaps because they are the output of a perceptual system designed by God to convey the truth. (Of course, if the latter is what gives these beliefs their justification, the claim that we are designed in this way needs to be justified as well.)"

C. In other words, We accept the existence of the external world as a matter of course merely because we perceive it.

1) Acceptance of Perceptions about the world.

But it is not merely because we percieve it that we accept it. It is because we perceive it in a particular sort of way. Because we perceive it in a regular and consistent way. This has been stated above by Reid. The common man goes on with his lot never giving a second thought to the fact that he can no more prove the veracity of the things around him than he can the existence of God or anything else in philosophy. Yet we accept it, as does the skeptic demanding his data, while we live out our lives making these assumptions all the time.

2) Consistency and Regularity.

If every time we woke up in the morning it was in a different house, with a different family, but one which make the assumption that we did nevertheless belong there and always had, and if the route to work changed every morning, if we never went to the same job twice, if our names and our looks were always different each day, we might think less of direct observation. But because these things are always the same from moment to moment and they never differ, we learn to trust them and we trust them implicitly as a matter of course. We do not try to prove to our selves each day when we get up "I am the same person today that I was yesterday," precisely because we learn very early that we always are the same person. We observe early on that we cannot penetrate physical objects without leaving holes and so we do not try to walk though walls; we know that doesn't work because it never works.

Hume observed that when we see two billiard balls we do not really see the cause of one making the other one move. What we really observe is one stopping and the other one starting. But, in practical terms, we do not observe the causality of a car running over the pedestrian as causing the pedestrian to fly across the road, but we know from experience that these two factors usually go hand in hand and so we don't play in the street.

a) Empirical proof?

In making this argument on boards many skeptics have argued "I see that the world is real with my own eyes." That's the point, why trust your eyes? You cannot prove they are seeing things properly. Everything could be an illusion everything we observe could be wrong. We cannot prove the existence of the external world, we assume it because it is always there. Some try to claim this direct observation as empirical proof. But they are confusing the notion of scientific empiricism with epistemological empiricism. Before we make the assumption that scientific data is valid we first make the epistemological assumption that perception is valid. Otherwise there would be no point in assuming the data. So epistemological empiricism is prior to scientific methods. In fact we have to simply make this assumption a priori with no proof and no way around the problem in order to able to make the assumptions necessary to accept scientific data. WE do usually make these assumptions, but they are assumptions none the less.

b) Science cannot prove reality.

Still others try to content that empirical scientific evidence proves the reality of the external world. But of course if the world were an illusion than any scientific evidence we gather would be part of the illusion as well. So there is no other way to demonstrate the truth of the external world, the existence of other minds, or the reality of our own existence except through the consistency and regularity of our sense data.

D. Religious belief Justified prima facie based upon Religious Experience

1) Prima Facie Justification.

Mattey again:

"Far from concluding that our senses are "fallacious," Reid placed them on the same footing as memory and reason, though they are "undervalued" by philosophers because "the informations of sense are common to the philosopher and to the most illiterate. . . . Nature likewise forces our belief in those informations, and all the attempts of philosophy to weaken it are fruitless and in vain."

"Reid pointed out that when we fall into error regarding the objects of sense, we correct our errors "by more accurate attention to the informations we may receive by our senses themselves." So the "original and natural judgments" that are made on the basis of our constitution lose their original justification in the presence of additional information. Contemporary philosophers call this kind of justification "prima facie," a term from law which describes an initially plausible case that could prove to be entirely implausible given further evidence. A belief of common sense, then, is justified "on the face of it."

"According to the doctrine of prima facie justification, one is justified in accepting that things are the way they appear, when

* it does appear to one that they are that way, and
* there is no reason to think that something has gone wrong.
[Ibid]

"But if there is such a reason, one's justification is "defeated." Thus prima facie justification is "defeasible."

"For Reid, our beliefs about physical objects are justified by sense-experience, which he took to be a product of the interaction between the senses and physical objects. Twentieth-century philosophers have been somewhat more cautious, however, and have followed more closely the account of perceptual knowledge given by Reid's predecessors such as Descartes, Locke and Hume: that what justifies our beliefs about physical objects is a mental state such as:

* looking like something is red
* a sensation of red
* seeing red-ly"

"For example, what justifies a person in believing that he sees something red is that it looks to him as though there is something red. The mental state of that person is one in which there is an appearance of red, and just being in this mental state is enough to give prima facie justification to the belief that he really sees something red. On the other hand, what confers justification might be a belief about how things appear."

2) No contradiction to prmia facie case.

But I will argue that such further evidence is not forth coming. This is because no amount of evidence can ever prove the basis of the external world. If the world is an illusion everything we have access to as evidence of its veracity is always going to be inside the illusion. This is because we can never break out of the epistemologist dilemma, we cannot step outside of our own perceptions to check them. The consistency of experience itself is no guarantee of their truth content, but we live as though it is because we cannot live otherwise.

3) Prima Facie justification for Religious experience

Religious experience is "properly basic," it is built upon experiences that are regular and consistent in the same way that our experiences of the external world are, and thus they are justified prima facie. observe the two criteria:

E. Objection: Is The PF case is overturned with further examination?

1) Is religious experience consistent and regular?

Skeptics have argued that religious experience is not regular or consistent because such experiences are all different. Not only do you have so many different religions, but even from mystic to mystic things differ.

a) Consistency and over time.

Over the years as one develops a disciplined life of prayer, one does encounter growing diversity and newness, but a certain sense of the familiar as well. Experiences become regular and consistent in that the presence of God is usually found in prayer, the sense of the presence is always the of the same quality (although varying intensity) and the sense of God can become familiar enough that it is always recognized as the same.

b) Times millions of believers.

This sense of the familar is communicable and can be recognized form one believer to another. The mystical and devotional literature presents a kind of ordered sameness. One can read accounts as different form one experiencer to another as those between St. Augustine and A.W. Tozer and still find passages that seem to be talking about the same things. This is amplified times millions of believers in the history of the church who have experienced the same things. Even though there is diversification and difference there is still a sameness. This is not even confined to mystics. The same can be said of conversion accounts, that the same aspects keep pooping up. Once can recognize the work of God from one person to another, form one time to the next, from one culture to all cultures.

c) across traditions.

But what about the vast aray of different religions? These differences are due to cultural constructs. One experiences God beyond words, and when one tries to speak of such experiences one must encode them in a symbolic universe, that is to say, in culture. These differences in symbolic universes over time have spelled out the differences in the many religions. But there is a cretin unity even between all the differences in religion. The data presented above on long term effects represents typologies which can be used to compare "peak experience" with that of other phenomena. The Peak experiencers can be grouped together into a collection of those who have experiences X. They are not isolated assortments of differing phenomena. These studies do represent differing cultures and times. Thus, religious experience has a consistency to it even between cultures.

Atheist Propaganda and Religious Experience: Daren Brown

 

 

 

 

Perhaps nothing scares atheists like feelings. They scared to death of religious experience arguments. Nothing raises their hatred like talking about religious experiences. Daren Brown is some sort of British stage magician who has a new stage act supposedly inducing religious experiences. Atheists waste no time in arguing that this is proof that such experiences are just accidents that mean nothing. He states "I examined the Placebo effect and proved just how powerful fear and faith can be." Of course he assumes that because there is a psychological process that produces faith that then there's no object of faith beyond that process that has any real bearing on life. This is really no different than the one's who claim to stimulate parts of the brain to induce religoius experiences.

In calling it "placebo" he's trying to set up the suggestion that it's unreal, it's unnecessary, God is the great cosmic sugar pill. Then he totally ignores the nature of real placebo. It's only for medicine, there's no evidence that such suggestive keys can manipulate us apart from expectation. All the things that he does in relation to evoking the psychological process are manipulative means of setting up the association. Yet most religious experience of the sort called "mystical" is not expected. In about half the time it's experienced in childhood, and much of the time mystical experiences contradict the doctrine of the experincer. If it was a real placebo it should confirm expectations. Placebo work by expectation. They don't work by challenging expectations. Calling it a placebo is wrong and improper and it's probably only done to evoke the concept and prepare the atheist to inoculated against emotion by making her suspicious of religious feelings.

He sets up several incidents before the main show (the phony atheist conversion) that are intended to get across the idea that suggestion works powerfully and most such feelings as one associates with the supernatural are also just manipulation. He makes people feel afraid by putting them in a room alone after reading to them some satanic right supposedly form the eleventh century. People are turned on by a sense of dark mysterious and ancient.  He gave people a fake drug which is no more than a sugar pill and by getting them to believe in it I got them to make dramatic changes in their lives. Of course he doesn't follow them in their lives or do a longitudinal study to determine if the changes are really transformational (dramatic, positive, and long term). He has no real control and no real way of determining if he's given anyone a real experience. Empirical study has demonstrated that religious experience is real, that's transformational, and that there is a way to determine real experiences from phony ones. No there is no proof direly that it's caused by God but this can be argued successfully by paying attention to what can be proved and using it with logic. It is the M scale that provides us with that means of verification for religious experience and it's been validated by a half dozen studies around the world.

His psychological explanation for the process is typically convoluted and not well throughout. He does an experiment that shows people in private when not watched lie about their mistakes. The idea is tp show that there's a presence in the room no one cheats. If people are given a idea of supernatural presence they act more moral. It is asserted that there are evolutionary reasons why we developed the idea of a supernatural presence. Don't want to be outcast form the tribe so we can reproduce. divine presence would ensure the sense of being cought out. God is made up to make us be moral. In other words like Foucault's take on the Panopticon the prisoners are learning to watch themselves. The problem here is he's convoluted several different reasons in to one.

First of all, if we feel a sense of presence that in itself is reason to assume we feel it. It doesn't have to be the result of needing a moral campus and inviting an invisible God. the illustration itself shows cave men ostracize a guy because he lied. So the fact of how people treated each other would be the reason for moral behavior and the fear of being rejected by the tribe and not being allowed to make would be enforcement enough, why make up an internal watch dog to do the job as well? If one has not felt experiences one doesn't know what they are. why invent a psychological process to evoke them then try to explain them. The fact that one has had such experience itself the reason to believe in the reality of such experiences, then the need to explain it comes out of having the need. The idea of ancient cave men trying to produce a sophisticated psychological technique for evoking some experience they haven't had is ridiculous and if they had it, it has its own reality.If they had it prior to producing the process of evoking it then it is real.

 Brown is certain that the experience explained by psychology. He asserts that these kinds of experiences come from big religious rallies with hyper suggestibility but there's no basis for that assumption. He's not using M scale studies to determine what percentage of religious experience is privately induced and percentage comes out of the big hyper rallies. Here's a clue, with half coming in childhood they are not coming form big rallies.

Then he goes through an elaborate production to produce a fake conversion in an atheist woman. He dose this indirectly without mentioning God. He uses several techniques such as tapping his fingers while they talk about her father to make her associate emotions the sound of the tapping with feelings of fatherly love. In several ways he evokes feelings of powerful father figure to bring atheist to believe. Establishes rapport. learns about her father. The woman is unconsciously processing, core religious belief evoked that God has plan for us and pulls strings to help us. No direct mention of God was made the woman made the connection to God herself through feelings of the father figure (tap tap tap). Brown says things that imply a grand plan, talk about things going wrong for a reason. sense of awe and wonder. Talks about the stars and space, evokes being cherished with awe. The woman describes her experience as "all the love in the world had been thrown at me. I pushed it away by not letting it into my life." Now she sees it's so stupid and she sees through it.

He says "I feel douty bound to make sure you understand that the postive stuff you got through this is not religious belief." This is what he tells her latter after they brought back befoer the audiecne. She's already been debriefed. He says explicitly "it certainly didn't come form God." The result of this elaborate dog and pony show is that we are supposed to come away with the grand feeling religion has been totally exposed and deconstructed and unraveled we see close up who fake it is there's no need for it. Of course the Brit media is opporating from the assumption that atheism is the standard, the grounding for society, the status quoe. The Audience is pre slected to reflect this idea. So one's going to challenge it.

It is a dog and pony show, he has no longitudinal study, no double blind, no control, he has no scale to measure the nature, depth, or effect of experience. He has no theory of religious experience to play it off of. That is all very crucial without that he's proved nothing. He can't guarantee that what she experienced is even a religious experience. One clue to that question is she says nothing about undifferentiated unity. she didn't say that she felt an all pervasive presence. She felt there's a plan and a purpose and she's cared for but that doesn't prove that it's the same religious experience that W.T. Stace talked about (see my link above on M scale).

The real problem is without a control there's no way to know if he isn't just evoking the we are given by God to be able to find him. The fact that he's evoking some of them doesn't prove that they are merely a matter of manipulation. There was no guy tapping when I got saved. Any associations that were evoked alone in my living room had to be coincidental or accidental rather than arranged. To say that there's a psychological process that enables to internalize the value of belief in God is hardly a denunciation of the reality of validity of that process. So there is a psychological process and we can manipulate it. I also had a need for a father figure, and guess what, I had a father. Saying that having a psychosocial need disproves the reality of the solution is just foolish.

That's like saying you have proved that love is just a psychological trick becuase when you when you do  things to make them think they are loved they respond emotionally. He's giving all the ques that God would give us to guide into a relationship with him, thus they respond becuase it's put in them to respond. The only real test of the validity of such feelings is the long term change and production of positive experiences and behaviors resulting from it. Plenty of studies establish that this is the case with mystical experience. It's not been proved that it is the case with phony evoked experiences.

 Essentially there is a psychological process to conversion. it make sense that there would be becuase if God wants us to have  a personal relationship with him then there must be affects which would draw us into a psychological state that is conducive to that relationship. Those affects are not hard to find because we all know  about them, the they things that motivate us and turn us on. So he merely found them and induced them in cleaver ways.

oct 13

My Debate with Occam On CARM

Occam is an atheist posting on CARM not hte original William of Occam. We recently had a 1x1 debate over the issue: resolved that belief in God is rationally warraned. I made my favorite God argument, my own argument from epistemic judgement (aka the Thomas Reid argument). I'll just hit the highlights. The fill debate can be found here.

I want to point out I am not putting this up to show that I won or how I'm so much smarter. Occam is not someone I would make fun of, he's a sharp thinker and one of the atheists I respect the most over there.


My argument was:


(1) No empirical evidence can prove the existence of the external world, other minds, or the reality of history, or other such basic things.

(2) We do not find this epistemological dilemma debilitating on a daily basis because we assume that if our experiences are consistent and regular than we can navigate in "reality" whether it is ultimately illusory of not.

(3) Consistency and regularity of personal experience is the key.

(4) religious experience can also be regular and consistent, perhaps not to the same degree, but in the same way.

(5) Inter-subjective

RE of this type has a commonality shared by believers all over the world, in different times and different places, just as the external world seems to be perceived the same by everyone.

(6) Real and Lasting effects.


(7) therefore, we have as much justification for assuming religious belief based upon experience as for assuming the reality of the external world or the existence of other minds.


So we habitually compare our experiences to a criteria that we set for reality. If they stack up we assume they are real and valid. Religious experience fits that set of criteria and thus we can trust it. That makes it a good reason to assume that God exists. Because he is given in a certain set of experiences which affect us in ways we would expected to be affected by the divine.

The real argument is the long term positive effects of the experiences. These are the experiences known as "mystical" and that conform to those set by W.T. Stace for his theory. Moreover,the acuity of these judgements about the experiences can be known in a more accurate way now due to the work of Ralph Hood on the M scale and other researchers working in the Vain of people like James and Stace.


I also brought up a second argument in the next speech that was the univeral arguement, based upon the one above. The argument says that all the mystical experinces around the world are the same once we take out specific names and doctrines, that implies that there is objective reality behing experinced.


We each made three speeches. This is excerpts form the last speech I made.


part 1 of speech 3



Occam

... Metacrock says that the experience of God is analogous to our experience of the external world. The problem with this claim is that it's plainly false. People do not have reasonable disagreements about whether or not the external world exists, and there are no major social movements based on the belief that there is no external world. You don't have to be crazy to disbelieve in God like you have to be crazy to disbelieve in the external world. So, the claim that the two are analogous is wildly implausible. 

Metacrock:
Here he's just equivocating between a difference sense of what was meant. I said the criteria by which we decide the reality of our experiences is met by religious experience. thus it is believable and trust worthy. It's false to say that there are not questions about experience and reality. we have them allt he time. ON a trivial level we say stuff like "Is it hot in here." we we may not think about it when we say that are asking "is this subjective or objective,. is it part of reality or just my illusion that I'm hot?"

then of cousre there are instances where people have strange experiences that they don't understand. True documented story, two women driving on a highway at night. They see what they think is an old man who might be seeking help, a long haired hippe types, they pull over to him and almost stop and looking closer and see it's an animal when it stands up to it's full stature is huge and is covered in hair all over its body but a human like face. so one screams and they drive off real fast. One says "did you see that?" they don't know what they say but the are conferring. why are they conferring why don't they just say "we didn't see that because science types say it doesn't exist so we must not have?" Because they thought they did see it. that's why they have to check it. they check by accessing the shared nature, the regularity and the consistency of it.

when the skeptic says "It was just a bear that they misidentified" then he's really saying "they didn't get the criteria right. it was really regular thing that people see but they mis identified it." He's using the criteria too.

There's a lot of lea way between those two examples, feeling hot in a room and seeing a Bigfoot, there's a lot of middle ground there where we check our perceptions all the time. So that criteria is used it is important. The battle field, crimes scenes, strange situations, when being robbed, all kinds of times when we need to check reality.

Occam wants us to think that epistemological issues are unimportant becuase there are no social movements that question reality; all social movements question reality. The issue here is epistemology is important for a thinker even if there's no social movement to redefine the nature of the real. If we are asking questions about the reality of God are asking about the roots of reality. we asking about the basis of the nature of things. God is not just another fragment in reality God is th basis of all reality. To consider the existence of God is to consider the basis of metaphysics and epistemology.



Occam:

Next, Metacrock objects that I am undermining theism as a properly basic belief by pulling on other beliefs. There is actually nothing illegitimate about this procedure, and I'm not sure why Metacrock would think otherwise. If someone holds a belief in the basic way, it is legitimate to undermine it by showing that it is inconsistent with other beliefs he holds, rendering it no longer properly basic for him.

 

Metacrock:

No first of all I didn't even argue that. he has misunderstood my basic thrust. I said I don't accept PB as a paradigm I argue for Prima facie so if I make a prima facie case I've met by goal. He says nothing about that. I have made a prima facie case. it's his burden of proof now to show that my PF case isn't enough.

more importantly, he's obfuscated between the original issue which was that he expects a theist to argue or PB nature of God beilef, now he's turning it around and saying it's legitimate to undermine God belief by showing that it's inconsistent with other beliefs he holds. That was not his arguemnt. he is shifting argumetns. Shift because the original argument merely used the other beliefs as a means of defining properly basic. PB means it's not dependent other beliefs. Now suddenly he puts it in terms of contradicting other beliefs. he has not said that before. So that's a shift it's not kosher in debate.




Occam:

Metacrock objects that we cannot get outside of our experience to check it in any case. But I am not objecting to religious experience on the grounds that we cannot get outside religious experience to check it, I am objecting to religious experience on the grounds that it is inconsistent with our scientific knowledge and, indeed, with the very spirit of science. Religious experience can be shown to be unreliable on independent grounds, so I'm not just perversely asserting that it might be wrong with no evidence.

Metacrock:




(1) he never shows that religious belief is any kind of contradiction to scientific knowledge. for that to be the case scientific knowledge would have to disprove god we all know there is no such disproof. The only kind of alleged "disproof" any atheist has is absence of proof not an actual disproof.

(2) he totally misconstrued my argument. I said we can't get outside of our perceptions to check them becasue he said:

Occam (last time)

The second problem with this position is that in the age of science, we have learned not to trust in basic beliefs that were not arrived at by a reliable methodology. The methodology that the theist relies upon to form a basic belief in a god will invariably be religious experience or the testimony of Scripture, both of which have been discredited as sources of information.

Metacrock
I am saying you can't establish this methodology since the issue more primitive and more epistemological than scinece can handle. you have to do scinece through your perceptions. science can't enable you to get outside your own perceptions.

that's why I call th argument "epistemic judgement." we have to make a judgement at the level of epistemology we can't assert a scientific answer. We have to make a judgment and we use that criteria (regular, consistent, shared) to make the judgment call. that's at a more basic level than science.

(3) when scinece comes into it we have a scientific methodology that's better validated than any other in the field the M scale. that enables us to understand when we are dealing a real mystical experience. that enables us to compare experiences.

In terms of science we meet his criteria. but the issues are more in depth than science. They are philosophical at the core.




part 2 of speech 3



Occam

Metacrock appeals to Hood's surveys to show that religious experiences are veridical. I think it's just obvious that a survey cannot prove that God exists. Sorry my argument does not turn on Hood proving God. 

Metacrock
Please try to follow along. If you are actually wiling to read the whole debate then you might as well get the issues correct. The turning point of the argument its the criteria. tha'ts what makes it valid and that's wakes it "proof" to the extent that it proves a warrant. It warrants beilef because the fitting of the criteria makes it a good reason to believe that God is real. it fits the criteria we use to prove reality.


what did I say he study does? look up there and see. It enables us to know the unified nature of the experiences and that they fit the criteria. you can't say this type of experience fits a criteria if you don't know what type that is. so the studies show that. the M scale is a way to say "this si that type of thing."

once we can say "this is that type of thing" then we can say "it fits the criteria." Because he does not answer that he's not answering the argument. he's made up his own straw man argument that he got form listing to the people who dont' read all the posts. you are listening to the people who don't read the posts they quite after the first line so you are not getting the question issue.

Occam

Even if all of the people taking the survey are telling the truth, which is not guaranteed, people could have experiences of God with profound transformative effects without God actually existing. The inference is a simple non sequitur. 

 

 

Metacrock

that is a statement not in evidence. he has no way of knowing if that is true. He can't prove it, but there's a good reason to think its' not true. He there is no evidence of any kind that shows an untruth that is unexpected leading to long term transfomative effects. why don't delusions do it? they don't. mental illness id debilitating over time.

The only thing that comes close to answer is placebo. there is no evidence that placebo is long term, and it has to be expected. In half the cases mystical experience is not expected.

(a) it's a conversion experience a large portion of the time.

(b) contradicts cherished doctrines

(c) it's in childhood half the time when there no doctrinal attachment.

it's can't be a placebo. therefore it can't be that unreality leads to long term transformation.


I leave it to the reader as to who won.

Atheist Propagadna and Religious Experience

 

 

 

 

Perhaps nothing scares atheists like feelings. They scared to death of religious experience arguments. Nothing raises their hatred like talking about religious experiences. Daren Brown is some sort of British stage magician who has a new stage act supposedly inducing religious experiences. Atheists waste no time in arguing that this is proof that such experiences are just accidents that mean nothing. He states "I examined the Placebo effect and proved just how powerful fear and faith can be." Of course he assumes that because there is a psychological process that produces faith that then there's no object of faith beyond that process that has any real bearing on life. This is really no different than the one's who claim to stimulate parts of the brain to induce religoius experiences.

In calling it "placebo" he's trying to set up the suggestion that it's unreal, it's unnecessary, God is the great cosmic sugar pill. Then he totally ignores the nature of real placebo. It's only for medicine, there's no evidence that such suggestive keys can manipulate us apart from expectation. All the things that he does in relation to evoking the psychological process are manipulative means of setting up the association. Yet most religious experience of the sort called "mystical" is not expected. In about half the time it's experienced in childhood, and much of the time mystical experiences contradict the doctrine of the experincer. If it was a real placebo it should confirm expectations. Placebo work by expectation. They don't work by challenging expectations. Calling it a placebo is wrong and improper and it's probably only done to evoke the concept and prepare the atheist to inoculated against emotion by making her suspicious of religious feelings.

He sets up several incidents before the main show (the phony atheist conversion) that are intended to get across the idea that suggestion works powerfully and most such feelings as one associates with the supernatural are also just manipulation. He makes people feel afraid by putting them in a room alone after reading to them some satanic right supposedly form the eleventh century. People are turned on by a sense of dark mysterious and ancient.  He gave people a fake drug which is no more than a sugar pill and by getting them to believe in it I got them to make dramatic changes in their lives. Of course he doesn't follow them in their lives or do a longitudinal study to determine if the changes are really transformational (dramatic, positive, and long term). He has no real control and no real way of determining if he's given anyone a real experience. Empirical study has demonstrated that religious experience is real, that's transformational, and that there is a way to determine real experiences from phony ones. No there is no proof direly that it's caused by God but this can be argued successfully by paying attention to what can be proved and using it with logic. It is the M scale that provides us with that means of verification for religious experience and it's been validated by a half dozen studies around the world.

His psychological explanation for the process is typically convoluted and not well throughout. He does an experiment that shows people in private when not watched lie about their mistakes. The idea is tp show that there's a presence in the room no one cheats. If people are given a idea of supernatural presence they act more moral. It is asserted that there are evolutionary reasons why we developed the idea of a supernatural presence. Don't want to be outcast form the tribe so we can reproduce. divine presence would ensure the sense of being cought out. God is made up to make us be moral. In other words like Foucault's take on the Panopticon the prisoners are learning to watch themselves. The problem here is he's convoluted several different reasons in to one.

First of all, if we feel a sense of presence that in itself is reason to assume we feel it. It doesn't have to be the result of needing a moral campus and inviting an invisible God. the illustration itself shows cave men ostracize a guy because he lied. So the fact of how people treated each other would be the reason for moral behavior and the fear of being rejected by the tribe and not being allowed to make would be enforcement enough, why make up an internal watch dog to do the job as well? If one has not felt experiences one doesn't know what they are. why invent a psychological process to evoke them then try to explain them. The fact that one has had such experience itself the reason to believe in the reality of such experiences, then the need to explain it comes out of having the need. The idea of ancient cave men trying to produce a sophisticated psychological technique for evoking some experience they haven't had is ridiculous and if they had it, it has its own reality.If they had it prior to producing the process of evoking it then it is real.

 Brown is certain that the experience explained by psychology. He asserts that these kinds of experiences come from big religious rallies with hyper suggestibility but there's no basis for that assumption. He's not using M scale studies to determine what percentage of religious experience is privately induced and percentage comes out of the big hyper rallies. Here's a clue, with half coming in childhood they are not coming form big rallies.

Then he goes through an elaborate production to produce a fake conversion in an atheist woman. He dose this indirectly without mentioning God. He uses several techniques such as tapping his fingers while they talk about her father to make her associate emotions the sound of the tapping with feelings of fatherly love. In several ways he evokes feelings of powerful father figure to bring atheist to believe. Establishes rapport. learns about her father. The woman is unconsciously processing, core religious belief evoked that God has plan for us and pulls strings to help us. No direct mention of God was made the woman made the connection to God herself through feelings of the father figure (tap tap tap). Brown says things that imply a grand plan, talk about things going wrong for a reason. sense of awe and wonder. Talks about the stars and space, evokes being cherished with awe. The woman describes her experience as "all the love in the world had been thrown at me. I pushed it away by not letting it into my life." Now she sees it's so stupid and she sees through it.

He says "I feel douty bound to make sure you understand that the postive stuff you got through this is not religious belief." This is what he tells her latter after they brought back befoer the audiecne. She's already been debriefed. He says explicitly "it certainly didn't come form God." The result of this elaborate dog and pony show is that we are supposed to come away with the grand feeling religion has been totally exposed and deconstructed and unraveled we see close up who fake it is there's no need for it. Of course the Brit media is opporating from the assumption that atheism is the standard, the grounding for society, the status quoe. The Audience is pre slected to reflect this idea. So one's going to challenge it.

It is a dog and pony show, he has no longitudinal study, no double blind, no control, he has no scale to measure the nature, depth, or effect of experience. He has no theory of religious experience to play it off of. That is all very crucial without that he's proved nothing. He can't guarantee that what she experienced is even a religious experience. One clue to that question is she says nothing about undifferentiated unity. she didn't say that she felt an all pervasive presence. She felt there's a plan and a purpose and she's cared for but that doesn't prove that it's the same religious experience that W.T. Stace talked about (see my link above on M scale).

The real problem is without a control there's no way to know if he isn't just evoking the we are given by God to be able to find him. The fact that he's evoking some of them doesn't prove that they are merely a matter of manipulation. There was no guy tapping when I got saved. Any associations that were evoked alone in my living room had to be coincidental or accidental rather than arranged. To say that there's a psychological process that enables to internalize the value of belief in God is hardly a denunciation of the reality of validity of that process. So there is a psychological process and we can manipulate it. I also had a need for a father figure, and guess what, I had a father. Saying that having a psychosocial need disproves the reality of the solution is just foolish.

That's like saying you have proved that love is just a psychological trick becuase when you when you do  things to make them think they are loved they respond emotionally. He's giving all the ques that God would give us to guide into a relationship with him, thus they respond becuase it's put in them to respond. The only real test of the validity of such feelings is the long term change and production of positive experiences and behaviors resulting from it. Plenty of studies establish that this is the case with mystical experience. It's not been proved that it is the case with phony evoked experiences.

 Essentially there is a psychological process to conversion. it make sense that there would be becuase if God wants us to have  a personal relationship with him then there must be affects which would draw us into a psychological state that is conducive to that relationship. Those affects are not hard to find because we all know  about them, the they things that motivate us and turn us on. So he merely found them and induced them in cleaver ways.

Discussion with Darth Pringle on miracles

 No his real name is not Darth Pringle. He's a poster on CARM and one of the better atheists. He had a different name for a long time, I've known him for years. He's very intelligent and I'm not putting this up to put him on the spot or show how uninformed he is. This is an example a good challenging discussion.

I had accidentally misspoke and said something to the effect that it was his burden of proof to show that there  is no mind behind the universe. Of course I know better than that I'm not sure what the original statement was. It was probably brought on by having twenty five yapping  idiots criticizing my personality and saying I never went to school that made me just blurt something out without thinking.


Originally Posted by Darth Pringle

Response to (a):

No, we wouldn't have to demonstrate that there is no mind behind the universe. The person claiming that there is a mind behind the universe must demonstrate it. That is how the burden of proof works. We don't believe in things merely because they're possible and put forward to explain something.

Meta:

Yes that's right. I misspoke. I went beyond my usual incomprehensibility and actually said something totally stupid. I meant to say you have to show that there no good reaosn. even that's not true, I'm just getting polarized form the animosity.

guess I've been doing this too long.

DP:

There are several reasons for rejecting such a notion also. You argue yourself that it is a fallacy to take a known contingent (eg, a rabbit) and place it in the position of a necessity simply to furnish the answer to a problem (eg, where the universe came from) because it creates an arbitrary necessity. It can simply be argued that you are doing the same thing when you place "mind" in the position of a necessity to explain where the universe came from because minds (like rabbits) are only known to exist contingently. Like a rabbit, we have no clue how a mind could be thought to exist outside of time. It results in incoherency and for that reason, it can be dismissed. Now you could reply (as you have done) with "You can't prove that a mind can't exist necessarily" but that is an argument from ignorance and is just as fallacious as me responding with, "You can't prove a rabbit doesn't exist necessarily" to defend the other claim. It isn't a valid objection.

Interject an editorial comment: This is not such a brilliant idea. Trying to elinate mind by turning into an arbitrary necessity by showing analogy between that and other arbitrary necessity. There's a lot wrong with that idea.

(1) I never said God is a great big Human mind up in the sky. I said God is analogous to mind itself. The concept of mind. That's not arbitrary necessity at all because it's not putting a contingency in place of a necessity it's putting the concept on a Platonic scale appealing to it as an ideal. Obviously it's not just a big human mind but only analougs to a mind.

(2) I have long ago and many times said that all God Talk is analogy. So clearly it's not saying God is a big human mind but that God is in some sense like mind, or in some way we can appraoch the notion of God by relating it to mind. Not a mind or anyone's mind but mind itself. The concept of generating thought, organizing, planing, purposing, perceiving and generating thought.

(3) It's not an arbitrary necessity to liken a universal or ultimate ideal to some analogs thing we can understand. tha'ts not the same as putting a contingency in place of a necessity. An example of that is oscillating universe. Each big bang/crunch is a contingency, it's in nature, it's made up of contingent things, and it's asserting that this is on the eternal level. That's hardly the same as positing the idea that God is in some way analogous to mind.


DP's Response to my piont (b).

Mind is a property. If God is not a property then he cannot be identical with mind (which he can't be if he is being itself because being is not a property). Also, see response to (a).

 Meta:

Right. I am not saying that mind is property I'm saying the evdience that people use to argue that mind is a property can also be used to show there's mind behind it all. It's not a property of nature but the "brains behind Nature."

Meta:
that's for pointing that out. I must remember to be clear about that.

More commentary:  I don't know why I let him get away with that I guess I was tried of posting. The above answer about analogs takes out that first line.

DP

P1. For any X, if X is a property then God is not X.
P2. Mind is a property.
C. Therefore, God is not mind.

that has been sorted out.

That's a formal, prima facie disproof of your position. But again, "You can't prove minds can't exist necessarily" is an invalid argument from ignorance (so you can't use it to defend your position.

Commentary:  That's not a proof of anything. He's just asserting that mind and that God  can't be a property. If light can be a wave and a particle why can't God be a property?

That's not really even my position. I've said that the relation of God to mind is metaphor. Everyone one says about God is metaphor.

Response to (c).

Meta:

Time can't emerge from non-time. Either time is eternal (it has always existed) or it began to exist uncaused. Events can be thought to happen in any order unless they are in a casual relationship. Some the cause of time would have to exist before time and that's impossible. Placing minds in the position of necessities does not solve that problem either. 

DP

you are assuming causes can only be time bound.

 Meta: 

we know causse can only be time bound! I have in past shown a huge array of physicists and other thinkers who say this. Its' a standard assumption in sophists no change in a timeless void. Where there is no sequential order there be no cause and effect.

So when time emerges it has to be written in at the level of a rules change. What could do that but the thing that writes the rules in the first place?

moving to the miracles.

DP

We no more have to disprove every single miracle prior to disbelieving than we have to prove there are no unicorns on any planets anywhere prior to making a belief that they don't exist our working assumption. That's simply fallacious. You've been presented with this counterargument before ... 

Meta:

that's right I didn't mean to imply that. I don't think that's what I said. I said cast doubt on the process is what I meant.

DP

1. If miracles do occur, they are statistically unlikely events.
2. Natural events are very likely (we see them occurring constantly).
3. Some miracle claims are mistaken.
4. Therefore, any particular miracle claim is more likely to have an unknown and natural cause.

you can't assume that it does and write off all miracles claims on that basis that's begging the question. If natural law is just s descriptive then the fact that some people different descriptions has to alter your description somewhat.

Meta: Commentary

All the miracles claims connected with Lourdes exceed this criteria. They are well documented, they examined by experts they backed by modern diagnostic equipment and so on. Atheists are sweeping them aside based upon past examples of sweeping them aside.

Meta:

you can't just assert any particular event you can't explain can be written off becuase it's not in line with your preconceived notion of probability.

DP

The usual response to this is, "You're just biased against the supernatural!" The best response to that I've seen is, "Why are you biased against the natural, especially when natural events can be observed to be involved with just about everything going on around us?" 

 Meta

Not just biased but actually losing the phenomena writing past evidence on the basis that we didn't accept it before so it must not be true now. that shows you have a deterministic notion of probability. You can't go case by case.

DP

I think it was Kant who said (or was it Hume?), it is only reasonable to accept a miracle has occurred when the only other explanations would all be more miraculous still.

Meta:

It would be more miraculous to assume that Charles Ann's lung grew back over night by an act of nature alone without divine intervention. But I dont Believe that Kant said that because it doesn't make sense and it's stained with the kind of bravado as the BS ECREE idea.

DP

Everyone rejects miracles all miracles which do not correspond to their beliefs. For example, a dispensationalist would reject the Lourdes miracles and put them down to error or Satanic influence. A non-catholic would reject claims that Mary has appeared to certain individuals and so on. You must reject the idea that God hasn't fooled lots of people miraculously and only fooled them into thinking that we have viewed miracles. 

Meta:

(1) irrelevant

(2) not true. I'm not a Catholic. I don't Mary is the immaculate conception.

Commentary: this is moving into the discussion of my argument from epistemic judgement. Is say we habitually use certain criteria to judge the reality of experiences and religious experience fits that criteria.

DP

Yes, they did Meta. Experiences that are known to be false are known to fit the criteria. For example, the sensation that you are still when laying on a bed is ... 

 Meta

doesn't make any kind of difference becuase it's the only criteria we have and what we use. you can't pick and choose when you go by the rules and when you don't.

a)regular
b) consistent
d) shared (inter-subjective)
c) enable navigation in the world or in life

DP

With regard to C, how do you think you would cope if you had the sensation that you were spinning on a globe (which is what is actually happening) every time you tried to lay down to sleep? The sensation that you are still remains an inaccurate perception of reality. 

 commentary: that is really very irrelevant and odd that he should say that. It makes no sense becuase the criteria applies to experiences we have not hypothetical one's we don't have. It's not a matter of conviencing anyone ot have an experience they could have that we don't have.

Not only that but people are always trying to say that the criteria might lead to accepting wrong things. We use it anyway. It's the way we do understand reality so if there is a harm to using it it's not unique. It's not as though I'm trying to urge to accept a new criteria.

Meta

Given the perceptions of past centuries before Columbus nothing illogical about assuming flat earth. When get the information to un do that and understand what's really going con we an see that it doesn't violate the criteria to move into a paradigm with a round earth. round earth is not irregular, inconsistent nor does it contradict shared perceptions.

such an odd way to argue, trying to undermine the basis for epistemic judgement which undermines scinece and the reason you are so proud of waving about like a badge man of reason smart atheist can think and reason but without that criteria that reason is nothing.
you can't make a single assumption based upon science or reason without assuming the validity of the criteria.

when it supports what you don't like you say "O that could justify belief in aliens." when it doesn't support your ideas then you rare a man of reason.

Science could support aliens! it could it could support Bigfoot. you better abandon scinece.

Furthermore, assuming that something is caused by God when it possibly isn't, isn't enabling navigation of the world / life.

yet RE does enable navigation so it must be caused by God hu? Navigation is enabled by the experiences so we must assume it's from God. that it might not be is of no consequence since the navigation is enabled.

Go with what works. truth works.

DP

Your argument assumes that we are better able to navigate the world when we have a better understanding of it. If we agree with this then finding a natural explanation for spiritual experiences (if they have one) is the best thing we can do, not simply assume that it must be God and question no further.

Meta

that makes no sense. those who don't have the experiences fare worse across the board. you are trying to cover up the fact that the experiences work. when you dont' have them you don't do as well that means attributing everything to nature is always for the best.

DP

Meta, this is another argument from ignorance. Even if someone else can't explain a phenomena, this is not proof that your explanation is the correct one. Yours still has to be corroborated and objections to it dealt with. But this is just appeal to RE again. If a person has an experience and there is no verifiable external cause then we are right to be skeptical of anyone who claims there is one.

Meta

This is another argument from ignorance. none of them are. not one. you have demonstration that they are. you have no reason to think so.

Commentary: All he says here is that RE must be intrinsically wrong. Why? I guess because it's religious. If the explains we take to those experiences (RE is not the explanation it's the phenomena that needs explaining) explains them and more then that's the explanation to use. I've eliminated naturalistic explainations. They don't work for RE. So this is the logical thing to use.



DP

The strength of your position does not rest upon someone else's failure! If you are making the claim that natural phenomena can't have infinite causal regression then it is down to you to demonstrate it. Most appear to be based on misunderstandings of infinity and a failure to grasp that a God would suffer the same problem (X is supernatural is not a magic word that somehow sweeps away conceptual difficulties in an argument).

Commentary: I don't know what means by someone else's failure. I think he's just saying just because we have not answered yet it doesn't mean we wont some day. Faith in scinece to someday save us form the angry God. He's supposed to using reason. I'm the faith guy remember? He's expressing faith in his ideology!

Meta:

X is supernatural is the atheist kings X. it's a way of saying "we get to abolish x because it's sanctioned by our ideology." The same circular reasoning as your argument against miracle. we covered up the claims in the past with this assumptino that the one's before weren't true so those weren't true so these aren't' true.

btw Darth most of these arguments you made did not come out in the previous threads. This is a case of how dialectic brings out new ideas. I forced you to dig for new material. 

 There at the last he's assuming I use his version of the SN becuase doesn't understand the real on, the one I harp on all the time.