Atheist IQ Clalims Based upon Racism And False Assumptions

 

There is a new major IQ study out (Zuckerman, Silberman and Hall, not Phil Zuckerman) this is an older peice i did on Metacrock's blog. The information is applicable to the new study, although it has nothing to do with that study. I post it here in lue of having the analysis of the new study finished. When I finish analyzing it I'll do an article on AW for that one. In the mean time this one will have to do. Here's a clue, the data of some people discussed here is used in the new study.

On Atheistwatch I've written about the New Attempts of atheist to prove that they have higher IQ's than religious people: Atheism's Psychology Today Scam, and, The Atheist IQ Scam (part 1)
(see part 2). Today I find an article by Andrew Brown in the American Guardian (Andrew Brown's Blog) where he demonstates the racist background of the atheist assumptions. He also discusses the idea that IQ tests are not measuring intelligence but cultural norms.

First of all I originally wrote about Atheist IQ claims (that atheists are Smarter because they ahve higher IQ's) on Doxa. This was roughly somewhere in the early ought (2001-2004). At that time the atheist website making the claims put up a bunch of old studies that pre dated the 60s. they had small samples and their basic assumptions where veg. they used the term "liberal" interchangeably with atheism and most of them never made clear that they had any atheist in the study. My criticism was "liberal" might as well mean theological liberal. They didn't have data that shows that people who identified themselves "I don't believe in God or gods" score higher on IQ tests than "I believe in God but in a liberal theology sense." I think for this purpose we can assume that "liberal theology " is broad and can include "new Evangelicals." I had some basis to suspect that the studies used were of liberal ethological believers. Studies done after the 60s, which the atheist sight didn't include, showed uniformly no correlation between intelligence and religious belief or that religious believers were smarter. These studies all used bigger samples and data bases. There had not been a study done showing atheist were smarter since the early 60s and there three in the 1990s (by Leslie Francis) showing no correlation.


The Brown article demonstrates the truth of my basic criticism. The atheist are doing a bait and switch to identify "liberal" with atheist when in fact it includes theological liberals.
Brown, "Brown's Blog"
on Guardian

OK, it's a naughty headline, but no less true than the one put on this survey at the aggressively atheist Sandwalk blog, which said "Atheists are smarter than agnostics". Both readings are justified. A large-scale analysis of the religious allegiance and measured IQ of a representative sample of 3,742 American adolescents found a clear trend: the more fundamentalist denominations had the more stupid believers, so that the bottom four places were occupied, from the bottom, by Pentecostalists, Baptists, Holiness churches and "Personal Philosophy", which I presume means a new-age-ish syncretism, while the top four places, again in ascending order, were taken by agnostics, atheists, Jews, and Episcopalians (Anglicans). So, atheists are smarter than agnostics, Jews are smarter than atheists, and Anglicans the smartest of the lot

...

The atheist came back on it in the late ought with a whole new batch of studies. They have three major researchers: Helmuth Nyborg, Richard Lynn and Satoshi Kanazawa (from psycholoy today). Now I find the Andrew Brown article blows the lid off of that research. I already hinted at big problems with those guys in my previous articles. Nyborg has been criticized as a racist. Brown took at look at his work:

The research was done by a retired Danish professor of psychology, Helmuth Nyborg, and he really does believe that he has found the explanation for the persistence of religious belief in the modern world: believers are measurably more stupid than atheists. His tone of elevated scorn will be familiar:

The study begins with two sets of a priori assumptions. First, [intelligent] people have a brain based biological capacity for solving complex problems, and for acting rationally when confronted with fundamental questions about existence, human nature, underlying causes, or the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Second, [unintelligent] people lack this protection and are therefore unfairly ordained to live in a pre-rational world based on poorly validated evidence and little accumulated insight. They accordingly often find themselves in cognitively, emotionally, or morally challenging situations and have to use plan B, that is, to call upon easily comprehensible religious authoritative guidance and to submit more or less uncritically to culturally given stereotyped rituals. Frustration with their life may also make them seek redemption or faith in an after life.
High-IQ people are able to curb magical, supernatural thinking and tend to deal with the uncertainties of life on a rational-critical-empirical basis, and to become prosperous servants of society, whereas low-IQ people easily become trapped in religious magical thinking, in addition to achieving, earning and serving less well.

They are doing another bait and switch here. By "SN" they mean magical thinking but it creates the impression that liberal theology, philosophy and anything not "scinece" is automatically stupid. It's not hard to prove that non religious people are smarter when you define religion as "stupid" a priori. Of course they don't distinguish bewteen an ancient world religious view and a modern one. But it get's worse.

ibid:
Brown:

So I did a little digging around. I downloaded the paper, which costs, alas, $37.50 with VAT, and read it carefully through. It turns out that Nyborg is an enthusiast for scientific racism. It's not just believers who are more stupid, in his world: it's black people and women, too. In a collaboration with Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, he measured religiosity against IQ in 137 countries, and concluded that low IQ countries always had higher rates of religion. It's not religion that makes you stupid, he told a Christian paper at the time: but if you live in a very religious country, you are very likely to be stupid. And of course the correlation of religion and poverty is in global terms very clear, while the most religious continent of all is Africa.
In the paper under review, he writes,

quoting Nyborg and co.

The ultimate causal level presumes that geographically separated peoples were subjected to different evolutionary pressures over extended time-periods. Those living under the hardest of evolutionary pressures, in cold or arctic areas, were gradually and over many generations selected for enhanced g (for details of the Climate Theory, see Lynn, 2006; Rushton, 2000). They had to replace ancient pre-rational supernatural beliefs with more effective rational approaches in order to survive under the harsh conditions given. People living in warm or tropical areas enjoyed in general more relaxed selective conditions, and low g individuals were not severely punished, as their survival was not seriously compromised by uncritical reference to ancient supernatural thinking, irrational beliefs in souls, invisible worlds, Gods, forces, angels, devils, hell, or holy spirits. A contemporary belief that supernatural forces control behavior, feelings and thinking is accordingly seen as a reminiscence of pre-historic animism and magical thinking.

Brown: Oops!
(In case anyone is tempted to take this seriously, it's worth pointing out that one of the most demographically successful populations in human history were the New England puritans, many of them descendants of Vikings, who managed to combine life in a very cold climate with fervent religiosity.)
But Nyborg is entirely serious. He argues – in the spirit of Murray and Herrnstein's Bell Curve – that intelligence is IQ; IQ is biological, and biology is destiny:

(Nyborg:)
High g individuals will gravitate towards atheism or science, will discard supernatural phenomena, and will learn fast and prosper. Average g individuals will find one of several moderate liberal denominations more to their taste, will display average learning, and will accordingly assume an intermediate socio-economic standing. Low g individuals will to submit to one of the many dogmatic denominations, will be slow learners, and will attain a low socio-economic status that accord with their limited cognitive
complexity and closed mind. Variations in disbelief, denominational complexity, educability and income are accordingly expected to follow from essentially heritable g differences, and to manifest themselves as today's mainly biologically brain based religious class differences.

(Brown): By now I imagine that you are recoiling from these ideas. The belief that religion can simply be explained by stupidity suddenly looks a lot less attractive when it is presented scientifically by an intelligent man who also believes that poverty, too, can be explained by stupidity, and stupidity in its turn by race.

Of course only scinece people are intelligent. Since philosophy, literature, art don't count as real knowledge people who are do them are not smart. only number crunchers matter.

This is all very self referential because IQ is only measuring IQ not intelligence. Brown talks about the Flynn ects which shows that IQ's are getting higher. Our children will be smarter than us, we are smarter than our parents and grandparents. The problem is they are only getting higher not because people are really smarter but because the concentrated urban environment re-writes cultural literacy. It's the same problem as the bell curve. In the olden days people lived in the country and hunted. So a question "what do a dog and rabit have in common?" the old answer was "use dog to hunt rabbit." Yet this is now a wrong answer. Now we don't hunt and we are all into scinece, so the right answer is they are both mammals. Thus people in the ancient past are automatically stupid compared to us. Flynn finds that by modern standards the average student around 1900 had an IQ between 50-70. So how did they even function? A person today with an IQ of 50 would be profoundly retarted, live in an institution and not be able to tie his shoes. Yet doctors, Lawyers, and bankers ran the world with IQs that would today be 60-70.

Brown reflects:

The answer, he says, is that one of the things that IQ tests measure is "post-scientific operational thinking". This is not the same as scientific thinking. But it is thinking about the world in terms of the categories by which science understands it. For instance, if you ask, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common", the post-scientific answer, that we would now regard as evidence of intelligence, is that they are both mammals. The pre-scientific answer is that you use a dog to hunt a rabbit. That's what matters about the two animals, not what class they belong to.
It is that kind of difference in reasoning which accounts for the huge measured IQ differences between urban and rural Brazil, and, of course, the fantastically low IQs measured in African countries.
But could something similar be true of religion? In particular, could dogmatic and fundamentalist religion be more useful to the poor and wretched? Could it lift them to the stage where they could experiment with doubt, with nuance, with novelistic thinking? The history of the early Methodists suggests exactly this. Remember John Wesley's reflection on his own success:
The Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.:

Obviously then the real implication might be that some religious subcultures are still more firmly rooted in the cultural literacy of the past, but not that stupid people beleive in religious beliefs and smart people don't.

Bogus Atheist Social Sciences: Nigel Barber's theory of Religion and Uncertainty

Nigel Barber

The 'study' by Nigel Barber "uncertainty hypothesis."


I've arleady discussed the atheist propaganda instrument, the Psychology Today blog. I will be discussing study that appears on that blog soon. One of source on that page caught my interest. It's a study by someone named Nigel Barber. Of course Barber has a relationship with the Psychology today blog. He's not just an academic whose study they daraw upon as a result of research but he's actively participating in the propaganda machine. This is from the bio the blog publisher writes for him:

Hailing from Ireland, Nigel Barber received his Ph.D. in Biopsychology from Hunter College, CUNY, and taught psychology at Bemidji State University and Birmingham Southern College. A prolific cross-national researcher, Barber accounts for societal differences in sexual and reproductive behavior using an evolutionary approach. Books include Why Parents Matter, The Science of Romance, Kindness in a Cruel World, and The Myth of Culture: Why We Need a Genuine Natural Science of Societies. Interests include finance, organic gardening, and hiking.

The Study used in the psychology today blog article.This guy's study has gotten a lot of press, it's discussed on the Huffington post (unfortunately--all the good political people ahve to suckers in the spiritual world?).

The study explicates and argues for the thesis that religious belief is prompted by economic insecurity and will eventually wither away as economies grow and properer in the first world. This is an inane, presumptuous and myopic understanding of things. It is predicated upon a huge number of misconceptions about religion, ignores modern social scineces and assume the structural functionalist Bolderdahs of the century before the last one. It just dogmatically ignores all the work in the 20th century by everyone from Maslow to Huston Smith, sweeps aside all the talk about sense of the numinous and the religious a priori and just asserts that there's a straight 1x1 correlation between money and faith. This assertion is actually rooted in Fuererbach.

Abstract of the study on Sage Publications site
Barber, N. (in press). A cross-national test of the uncertainty hypothesis of religious belief. Cross-Cultural Research.

According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis). The author predicts that religious belief would decline in economically developed countries where there is greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. These predictions are tested in regression analysis of 137 countries that partialed out the effects of Communism and Islamic religion both of which affect the incidence of reported nonbelief. Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.


According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis). The author predicts that religious belief would decline in economically developed countries where there is greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. These predictions are tested in regression analyses of 137 countries that partialed out the effects of Communism and Islamic religion both of which affect the incidence of reported nonbelief. Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.

Before turning to the criticisms others make there are several things that need to be said about this abstract. First for some ridiculous reason this theory seeks to ground the basis for religion in one thing, money. It should be abundantly clear to any student of history that there are multiple connectoins between belief and the believer. To reduce all of those to one thing, such a Fuerbaching proposal should send red flags waving (pun intended). It's so "materialist" in thinking. Maslow's work in psychological spirituality should tell us by itself tht this nonsense that the reasons for religious bleief have a lot more to do with an overall understanding of one's relationship to being and to the cosmos. Maslow draws upon a large tradition of empirical psychological study.Economics is only one area of life.We have everything in life to cope with. There's uncertainty in everything,including life and death. Take a statement from the abstract:

According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis).

The first part of the statement is based upon an unspoken assumption that if this motivates religion then it's the naturalistic cause and that's all there is to it. If we assume that religious belief in mixed in with evolutionary endowment, which is no reflection on its truth content becuase if God created evolution why would God not also mix bleief in with evolution? Meaning the function to secure one in the face of turmoil and trammels of life is simply something religion is supposed to do because God made it that way. That is no more proof that it's only a naturalistic accident than the fact that things fall down rather than up. The assertion that religion declines when economic position is achieved is clearly false. That's one of the basic bogus assumptions of bogus atheist social science, its empirically not true. In the United States religion has not declined but your economic hay day has come and gone but even while climbed to the top of the industrial ladder and become the most affluent nation we did not cease to be religious as a society.

They are basing these assumptions on bad ideas and stereotypes about Europe. Especially Northern Europe is seen as the capital of atheism in the world. To hear most atheists tell it one would think that the situations are severed form the US there are only about 3% Christians in Sweden and everyone else is an atheist. This is the assumption of Barber because he and the other blogger of the psychology Today Blog are basing their thinking on the bad studies by Paul and Zuckerman. Else where I have demonstrated the bunk that masquerades as social science under those two names. I've written a bit on Zuckerman. I have contacted him by email and must admit he's a nice guy. I dislike his pseudo social science on religion in Eruope. Take Japan as a counter example, which I believed is used by Paul as an example of a nation totally secularized in which religion is a minor influence. Japan is a lot more influenced by religion than Paul or Zuckerman would want to admit.


The situation in Northern Europe is disproved by another study that debunks anther economically based theory.

There are also others who are critical of religion yet doubt the veracity of Barber's study.The Demand for Religion by Wolfgang Jagodzinski and Andrew Greely is a study that counters a theory that views religion as a response to economic demands. This time theory states that religion will grow or shrink depending upon the installment of the demand for it. In other wrods supply side economics in sociology of religion. The two authors demonstrate through their own studies that northern Europe is a lost more religious than people think.

This paper examines the conflict between the "secularization" theory of religious decline and the economic model of religion which assumes a fairly constant need for religion and attributes variation in devotion to variation in the supply of religious services. First the analysis reveals that the number of "hard core" atheists (those who firmly reject the existence of God and the possibility of life after death) in seventeen countries are a relatively small proportion of the population. Then it turns to Norway to determines that one can hardly describe that country as "unreligious." Next it discovers that there is a higher level of Catholic religious practice in the competitive environment of Northern Ireland. Finally it considers the one thoroughly secularized country – East Germany – and concludes that the "demand" for religion can be diminished considerably if a ruthless government takes control of the process of religious socialization.

One might also note not only does the Jagodzinski and Greely study disprove Barber's assertion, because it shows his assumptions about the correlation between economic security and religion belief are wrong, but also the theory they are working agaisnt also would, if true, deny Barber's hypothesis.

In the International Social Survey Program’s study of religion in 1991, two questions were asked which are pertinent to this investigation:
Please look at this card and tell me which statement closest to expressing what you believe about God:

1. I don’t believe in God
2. I don’t know whether there is a God and I don’t believe there is any way to find out.
3. I don’t believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a higher Power of some kind.
4. find myself believing in God some of the time but not at others.
5. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.
6. I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it.

And
Do You believe in life after death?

1. Yes, definitely
2. Yes, probably
3. No, probably not
4. No, definitely not

In third column of Table 1, "Hard Core" Atheists are those who agree with the first item in the first question (they are firmly convinced that God does not exist) and with the fourth item in the second question (they firmly reject the possibility of life after death. This group therefore can be assumed to experience no need for religion and to be absent from the religious market place.
In the second column, "Soft Core" Atheists include those in the third column and those who, while they reject God do not completely reject life after death (they accept the third response on that question – there is "probably not" a life after death. This latter group might be considered to be on the far fringes of the religious market place.
The "Softest Core" Atheists in the third column include those in the first two and those who can fairly be called agnostics (the second response to the God question) because they do not completely reject the possibility of the existence of God. They might be considered as hovering a little closer to the religious market place.
Note that

1. The proportion of Hard Core atheists is relatively small in all the countries except East Germany (42.7%)
2. The proportion is above 10% only in former socialist countries (12.4% in Russia, 13.9% in Slovenia, and 11.3% in Hungary) and in the Netherlands (11.4%) and in Israel (12.1%).
3. In the other eleven countries, the highest rates of Hard Core atheism are in Norway (6.7%) and Britain (6.3%). Thus if latent demand for religion is excluded only from the Hard Core atheists, there is still the possibility of a large clientele for those firms which might venture into the religious market place in such supposedly "secularized" countries as Norway and Britain.
4. There are not all that many Hard Core atheists in the countries studied, nor indeed all that many soft core atheists either.
5. The "Softest Core" Atheists are less than a third of the population in every country except East Germany. They are more than a fifth of the population only in four former Socialist countries – East German Russia, Hungary and Slovenia. With the exception than of East Germany more than two thirds of the population of the countries studied are willing to admit the existence in some fashion of God and the likelihood of life after death. Devout many of them may not be but on the two central issues they are more religious than not. They then may be considered as part of the religious market place if not always enthusiastic consumers.

Furthermore in the sample as a whole, Hard Core atheism correlates only with gender (women less likely to be atheists) and not with education or age (those favorite measures of the more naïve of the "secularization theorists.") 83% of the Hard Core Atheists say they never believed in God, 61% say they never attended church services when they were eleven or twelve years old and 9% more say they only rarely attended. The choice of Hard Core atheism as a philosophy of life was apparently made at a very young age in life and is sustained through the life course.

There are also critics who directly engage the Barber study.


criticism:



Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a member of both the Committee on Genetics and the Committee on

Do life’s uncertainties promote religion? A flawed study


problem 1

from Coyne:

Barber collected data on these issues from 137 countries. The index of religiosity was taken from Zuckerman (2007), as “the proportion of people reporting that they did not believe in God.” There is a possibility of error here since the question was not asked in the same way in every country.

Problem 2 (Ibid)

But there is a big problem with these results. As the table shows, the different indices of “security” are also correlated with each other. For example, there’s a strong negative correlation (-0.69) between the degree of agricultural labor and the percentage of people getting third-level educations. Likewise, pathogen load is negatively correlated with level of education and positively correlated with degree of agricultural labor. Income inequality is negatively correlated with taxation (a measure of “welfare stateness”). Pathogen load is negatively correlated with whether a country is/was Communist, but positively correlated with whether a state is Islamic.

These cross-correlations among the different indices of “security” mean that we cannot use each of them as an independent variable affecting religiosity. We don’t know, for example, whether the negative correlation between disbelief in God and income inequality reflects a direct influence of the latter on the former (countries with higher inequality have higher belief in God), or only that income inquality affects religiosity because that inequality is itself a sign of poor health (pathogen load has a 0.5 correlation with the Gini coefficient). What this means is that you cannot say that each of the seven variables is itself significantly associated with religiosity. They are not independent.

conclusion:

So what can we conclude? The results generally support the “uncertainty” hypothesis because each variable is correlated in the expected direction with religiosity. But what we cannot say is that each of the seven variables itself has an independent effect on belief and disbelief. That awaits a multiple-regression analysis—or other statistical tests that get rid of the problem of cross-correlation. The data for this are in fact already available to Barber.

And, of course, we all know that correlation is not causation. Even if each of these variables was independently and significantly associated with religiosity, we still don’t know in which direction (or neither) the causality runs. It’s formally possible, for instance, that more religious societies promote income inequality and poor health, but for most variables that suggestion seems less parsimonious.

We can also ad that the total adherents to hard atheism around the world amount to an extremely small group.

^ a b "Worldwide Adherents of All Religions by Six Continental Areas, Mid-2005". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9432620. Retrieved 2007-04-15.

* 2.3% Atheists: Persons professing atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion, including the militantly antireligious (opposed to all religion).
* 11.9% Nonreligious: Persons professing no religion, nonbelievers, agnostics, freethinkers, uninterested, or dereligionized secularists indifferent to all religion but not militantly so.


from Wikipedia 8/2/11

"According to another, rates of self-reported atheism are among the highest in Western nations, although also to quite varying degrees—United States (4%), Italy (7%), Spain (11%), Great Britain (17%), Germany (20%), and France (32%)."[20]

source:b "Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll". Financial Times/Harris Interactive. 2006-12-20. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1131. Retrieved 2011-04-09.

Observe Great Briton which has only 17% atheists. One would expect more like 50% if Barber's theory were true.

What Atheists say When they are Outgunned

Last week on CARM I was challenged by atheists to show "any evidence at all" that mind is not reducible to brain. I put up a huge post. It was originally a page I researched adn wrote but taken over (with my permission) by God and Science.org. Rather than discussing the matrail a certain atheists responded by trying to make me feel guilty about having too much evidence!


Originally Posted by Samscram

I don't go out on fools errands.

It is fascinating to see that your faith is apparently so shaky that the words of the bible aren't sufficient and to maintain it, you must look to the academy to find the Holy Grail as it were.

I must admit that's a new one! What does it mean? Atheist harp and harp "there's no evidence for your God." When you give them some, then it's too much. I am an intellectual. My faith si a combination of emotional trust and intellectual reasoning. My life journey has been about putting the two together and over the years I have devoted that to a high level. I have the best evdience I'm going to resort to scholarship because my life is about scholarship I AM A SCHOLAR! My faith is integrally a part of my intellectual journey and vice versa.


He goes on:

The fact that you have to cite "authority" after "authority" after "authority" without providing even a synopsis of their content proves to me if to no one else that you don't know the content and/or haven't the ability to utilize it in a rational rhetorical venue.

The fact that you have to site authority after authority, in other words, "don't confuse me with the facts." That is one of the silliest and most unfair things I've ever heard anyone say. do you realy expect me to post a whole book on this baord? You do have a responisiblty to find things out for yourself. All I can do si point in a direction. if you are too lazy to follow up that's your problem. I don't have time or space to type whole books into this text box it's totally unfair of you to deamnd thtat.

Of cousre his comment I don't know the content, what an arrogant little wind bag! He doesn't even mention a single point its I who don't know the content! BTW what rational rhetorical venue? Isn't that what the message board is supposed to be? At least before CARM it was.

you guys are constantly making the refrain "there's no proof for X" Your God, or whatever. you always say Christians can't have any evidence and can't prove anything. then when I do show that I have moutian of evidence and there's something wrong with that. now I'm not good because I have too much evidence. Before I was stupid and feeble minded because I believe stuff without evidence, now I have too much.

that's absurd its silly its transparent. you can't out evidence me. so you have to say something s you just reach for the old anti-intellectual "scholars is egg heads" bit.

that's just silly as it can be. You have to just suck it up and admit that you are out evidenced. period.

Then he pulls out the big gun (you gut "there's no evidence for your God"):

Despite the fact that you have blustered, ranted, insulted, raved, even condemned posters to hell; cited hundreds of "academic" studies, a bunch of Ph.Ds as well as your personal blarney page, [COLOR=#ff0000]you have yet to produce a single piece of empirical evidence which necessarily establishes the existence of god.

Now, if I did (which I do) have even any evidence at all wouldn't that be too much? Wouldn't he then say "you have to turn to experts to save your faith."

That's exactly right, I don't prove God, I don't try to prove God. I don't have to do that. In fact I don't want to. I've explained many times why. That would contradict my mystical theology. I've explained this over and over again. God is beyond the empirical.

You can't provide a single empirical fact that proves science is true or that there are laws of phsyics. Somethings are too basic to prove in one little empirical fact.

the rock solid foundational things can't be proved easily.

Originally Posted by Samscram

To my knowledge, Jesus nor any of his diciples had a Ph.D.

what does that have to do with anything?

Paul probably had the equivalent.

Is that the reason that you apparently need to resort to modern day academia to prove his existence?

"resort to..." what kind evidence do they expect anyway? The rule out philosophy because it's not science. Science is academic and scientists have Ph.D.'s (the dread Ph.D. something not right about them egg head Ph.D. guys). The nix philospical proof, they nix loigcal proof, they nix Ph.D.'s which includes scinece, what else would one use?


you have just undermined your whole artiest position. you can't on the one hand demand evidence then when you get it deny that it's important and try to turn it into some kind liability to have.

you have to stick to the facts. academics are the experts they decide what's true and what is not they are the experts who study the issues decide what is scientifically proved and what is not. all scientists are academics. you can't be a scientist without being an academic.

As to your complaint that I'm slandering you by ridiculing your reliance on Ph.Ds to prove the existence of god I confess that your posts gave no hint that their author was one.

I never said I was proving the existence of God. when you are going to start reading posts? you think you can waltz in here just assume all Christians are alike you don't have to read what they say. you go study my position and find out what I believer before you waste my time.

This is symptomatic of America's anti-intellectualism. When I was an athiest atheism was about thinking, it was done by intellectuals. So the modern scinece or arrogance atheist have they are smarter than Chrsitians comes from a hold over of that time when atheists were intellectuals. Now they are getting all of these anti-intellectual non academics involved in it who don't value learning and don't reverse thinking's so they don't' value degrees. That whole sense of arrogance at being smarter becomes less justified and is more and more boiled down to arrogance based upon "we are us and we don't like them."

But atheism is rational. Yes yes, the free thinkers, they are ratinoal. they hate thought, they hate degrees, they hate intellecutlas but they SOOOOO very smart!

Traces of God: Answering the Reverse Design Argument

Atheists have an arugment that seeks to reverse the design argument. It does exactly what the design argument does, which is probably reason enough to disregard it; it reasons form the apparent state of the world to the probable non existence of God. If it is illogical to reason form the wrold to God, it is equally illogical to reason from the world to not God. For this reason I swore off design arguments years ago. I have violated that oath twice, but for good reason (I'll get to those in a minute). In any case, there is a great deal wrong with this argument, and in figuring up all the many problems I see it I began to think of two things:

(1) Perhaps it would be instructive to delineate the cases under which one can argue from the state of the world to the existence of God.

(2) In pondering this question, I began to think about perhaps what might be the ultimate God argument.


The problem is that really if you think about it almost all probabilistic arguments are really arguing from the state of the world to the probable existence of God. But somehow this seem less drastic in some cases than others. I know there are those who just turn off at any kind of God argument. But for us Connoisseurs of God arguments, this should be a thorny issue. After all, what's the real difference between arguing form the contingency of the world, and arguing from the design of the world? Well, off hand the real difference is that one can be compared to something, the other can't. That's one of the major problems with this atheist argument, which was advanced at one point by Richard Carrier at one time. We do not have a designed universe to compare outs to, so we don't know what we are observing, design or random devleopment?

The argument says if we were to consider a random universe that came about by accident, you couldn't do better than our own. It really looks accidental. Life is precarious and rare, the universe is very hostile to it. It's vast, far more vast than it has to be. On the one tiny oasis we know of where life took root it blossomed into something as glorious as Richard Carrier's ego, we have no really obvious clue that God exists. If we were to consider what a puroespful logical creator would do we should expect sign posts to his existence everywhere, right? Well, maybe. maybe not. That's the problem the argument is nothing more than begging the question. It assumes we know what God would do, and after constructing a straw man God who behaves the way we want him to, we just assume we know what he would do and than access the tragic fact that it hasn't been done. So by golly, there must not be a God, because this non God doesn't' follow my advice! Of course the model for his straw God is fundamentalism.  Athens are so afraid to take on liberal theology honestly, but it's because they are all secretly fundamentalists. What I mean by hat is they are the "tails" to the fundies "heads." Like communist and anti-communists, they are both parts of the same thing.

The difference in this argument and one that actually has something to compare, a base line from which to work, should be obvious. The atheist who argues for Carrier's idea must forge his own base line by setting up a straw man (um, God) and then priviliating his assumptions about the nature of religion in such a way that he just nixes the possibly of any other kind of theology. That's not a real comparison. The fine tuning argument can compare fine tuning to lack thereof, compare target levels to the actual hitting of same. The contingency arguments (quantum and other forms of cosmology) can compare contingency to necessity. Religious experience arguments are drawn from the results of experience, they compare experience to non experience. The two instances in which I do use design arguments are those in which comparisons can be made between the nature of the world and state of existence known to lack that attribute as known non designed reality; the use of the "God Pod" as evoking innate ideas. We can compare reactions to God talk to other kinds of talk and see that our brains only react to God talk in the way that they do. Thus we can compare the innate ideas of God to reactions to other ideas. The other instance is the fine tuning arugment,which has already been explained. But the Carrier reverse design argument has nothing to compare except Richard's ego. With that as the standard for assumptions, we have no basis upon which to draw conclusions about the nature of God from the state of the universe.

This argument does have one other troubling application. It could be a "possible defeater" for proper basically. To be properly basic an idea must be logically apprehended as it is, with no possible alternative explanations, or  "defeaters." The argument is a possible defeater only if we understand it to be indicative the kind of universe God would not make. But we can't make that assumption beause we can't pretend to know all the things God would do. Once can find many alternative theological explanations that involve both Evangelical views of God and non Evangelical views. The most obvious non Evangelical view is that of process theology. The atheist can only think of God as a big man upstairs. This is the basic image they rebel against. The will of the father is their Kryptonite. They foresee a big man on a throne who decides and deliberates such a potentate wants to be served, they reason, and thus must make a universe in which he is known commonly to all. So we should expect the universe to be smaller, easier to navigate, easier to understand, filled with sign posts of God. No disease, no problems and everyone automatically given tons of faith so the world would be a paradise. If some serpent spoiled it, it should be put right immediately so that we can go on in our little heavens, where no doubt we get to listen to Richard Dawkins directing the chores of angels.

The God of process theology, on the other hand, is more like the Helena dialectic, or like some organizing principle. This is not a God deliberates and decides. this is a God who is potential in one realm, and who micro manages (literally) creation in the other; almost a law of physics, changing with creation, bringing subatomic particles into being and ushering them out of being. This is more of a stage director in the play of the universe (and in other dipolar structure stage director and producer) than a big king on a throne. Such a God would start the process of life and allow it go where it will, then embrace (to whatever extent possible) any beings that evolve sufficiently to come up to its level.

Another version would be my own idea of God as being itself (Tillich's idea--). This version of God is much like the process God, but I fell that God is too sacred a mystery to pin down to dipolar structures or to analyze all of "his" ("her," "its") doings. God is the great wholly (Holy) other. WE cannot know except through mystical union what God is doing. But such a God is the basis upon which being proceeds into concrescence and the basic reality of the Platonic forms. Such a God does not design or make plans, but the whole of creation is a non deliberating plan in the sense of being an expression of God's charter indwell; yet not necessity the result of raciocentination. Thus God starts a principle of life emerging from the nature of being, because that's what being does it spreads the beings, it "let's be" (John Mcquarrie). The evolutionary course that is followed may be assisted in an automatic sort of way, not as a plan, not as a deliberate gesture, but as the result of a nature that has to manifest itself creatively. This being doesn't' say "I will make men, and men will serve me." But men evolve out of the storm and the wastes of the abyss and they naturally come to find God because theta's he nature of beignet is there to be found in the sense of the numinous. When humanity reaches a point where it comprehends the numinous, to seeks God and finds God.

Humanity finds God in a million different places. It finds God in flowers and trees, in brooks (and in books), in grass, in each other. It finds God in storms and scary things, and in the night. It finds God in the sky and the stars in the darkness of a vast and endless expanse. It reaches out for what is there because it has been put into it to do so; not because God sat and said "I will make men and men will seek me" but because God provided for the reality of the Imago Dei to evolve and develop in whatever species reached the point where humanity has come to. God did this automatically as an aspect of self expression, as an outgrowth of consciousness. This kind of God would make a universe of the type we see around us. This type of God would also place in that universe hints so that whatever species reaches that level that God's manifestation would be waiting to show them God's solidarity with them. God would plant a thousand clues, not as a matter of deliberation like one plants Easter eggs, but as the result of being what God is--self communicating and creative. Thus we have design arguments and fine tuning arguments, and contingencies and necessities and the lot. We can find the God Pod in our heads that lights up when it hears God ideas. We can do studies and determine that our religious experiences are better for us than unbelief, because the clues are endless because the universe bears the marks of its creator.

Yet these marks are sublet for a reason. This is where the Evangelical view of God can also be a sophisticated view. The Evangelical God can also be the God of Tillich and the God of process, after all, these are all derived from the same tradition and the Evangelicals have as much right to escape anthropomorphism as anyone. The Evangelical God seeks a moral universe. This God wants believers who have internalized the values of the good. We do not internalize that which we are forced to acknowledge. Thus God knows that a search in the heart is better to internalizing values than is a rational formally logical argument, or a scientific proof. Thus we have a soteriological drama in which we can't tell if there is or is not a God just by looking at the nature of nature. That must remain neutral and must illud us because it is not given to us to have direct and absolute knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is a privilege. We must seek it through the heart, that's where it isthmian to be found. It's a privilege but faith is a gift.

Atheists can't face Scientific Facts:Exchange with Royce part 2

Part 2



Royce:

I've taken courses in formal logic and critical thinking; that's how I know what the "fallacy of appeal to consequence" is. You're committing it. 

Meta:

you are only a sophomore you can't have taken that many, you didn't pay attention apparently. Even people who are smart and study lots of logic can still argue fallaciously.

just becasue you find two aspects that are similar between an argument and a fallacy doesn't mean it's the fallacy at work. that's based upon the fallacy of argument from analogy.

Royce

Employing an argument from an analogy is not fallacious.


Meta:

yes it is. especially trying to prove B is q because A is q. that is a total fallacy.


Royce

It's only fallacious if the analogy is faulty, or if the similarity cited is not likely to provide evidence for the similarity inferred. Please learn your formal and informal fallacies. Here's a Wikipedia page to help you.

Meta:
you please learn to go beyond Cliff notes.that is not true in the first place, even the best analogy proves nothing. A being exactly like B does not prove that B will turn out like A. Especially if there is no causal link bewteen A and B.

If I show that the situation with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is exactly like the situation in Dallas in 1963 that does not prove that JFK was killed by conspiracy. or do you think it does? why didn't they just say that in front the senate hearings that chruch ran why wouldn't that be proof enough?

this is on Point (3) Disproved by positive effects

There are no comparable effects from irrational beliefs. Most irrational beliefs are the result of mental illness, mental illness is degenerative and not transfomative. NO irrational belief is tranformative. Just finding a similarity is not proof that it's the same.


you can't explain how it could be that a misfire of chemical process consistently results in dramatic life long postiive change.

Royce:

Whether a belief is epistemically rational, true, etc. has nothing todo with the positive benefits of the belief. To say otherwise is to commit the fallacy of appeal to consequences. Here's the Wikipedia definition of the fallacy:

Meta:
nononono! you are totally misapplying that. It does most certainly have to do with positive effects iff the positive effect always follow a certain thing and not another. If the positive effects rule out a negative cause then positive effects are important in arguing cause.

If a patient should have died from a certain condition, no treatment was given, he not only didn't die but improved his health, then obvious he didn't have that condition.

Royce:

"Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin for "argument to the consequences"), is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a consequence does not make it true." Please stop committing it. 

Meta:

you are misusing that. I'm not "appealing to them" I'm using them as an indicative marker. that is not the fallacy. like the analgoy above (btw that's the proper use of analogy in argument, I'm not trying to prove by use of it but illustrate the concept).


Royce:

Furthermore, you're wrong to say that, "most irrational beliefs are the result of mental illness." Please do not make up claims about topics you do not know much about. For example, Kahneman and Tversky's work on bounded rationality shows that many, if not most, people exhibit irrational reasoning in fairly everyday situations. 

Meta:

no that's not true. I specified that I was talking pathology not logical inference. you dont' know anything. you don't understand you are babbling. you find this you think it really proves your nonsense and all it really does it make for show and tell. O look at me I can articles I'm a genius. o yes!no you are not.


Royce:

And these people are not suffering from mental illness. Furthermore, there are plenty of everyday situations in which people have false or irrational beliefs that have positive consequences for them.

you haven't proved they have pathological states. so we are just talking at cross purposes. you are distorting the original argument becuase you have your little show off thing there.

For example: a husband may be driven to care for their wife due to them havign the (false) belief that their wife loves them. Someone can devote their life to charity and giving to others due to the (false) belief that an Hades and/or Thanatos will reward them in the afterlife by allowing them to see their departed love ones. Not to mention the empirical evidence that depressed people tend to have a more accurate image of themselves then less depressed people (here's the Wiki page for it; i can give you paper on it if need be). So that's a clear case in which an inaccurate belief has positive benefits: helping one avoid depression. 

Meta:

multiplying examples doesn't cut it.

[He's still just talking at cross purposes because I was talking about psychological pathology and not merely illogical inference. Religious experience is not the result merely having illogical ideas. Illogical ideas done produce the kind of emotional reaction termed "mystical experience." So we are obviously talking about something more psychological. Logically the argument he should be making should be about potential causes of mystical experience, because that's the issue, the atheist argument that they the result of naturalistic causes. He hasn't done anything to prove that just having illogical ideas causes the kind of informative effects we see with mystical experiences.]

that's argument from analogy. Poor analogy. saying this is no like my argument.

 Royce:
Arguments from analogy are not fallacious, unless the analogy is faulty, You have not shown the analogy is faulty. Furthermore, you are engaged in God-of-the-gaps reasoning, and God can be cut out of the explanation by Occam's razor


Meta:

(1) you can't evoke Occam's razor to get of God. Occam himself said you can't do it.

(2) you can't argue farm analogy and prove that some result B will result becuase the situation is so like the result in A. If we could then we could just stop having senate hearings and just appoint analogy committees.

Major point in the 7 major arguments
(4) God part of the brain is a pro God argument, it's evoked by the assumption that religious experience is the result of an adaptation.

God part of the brain cannot be expalined though mere evolutionary means because it requires innate ideas. Evolution can't give innate ideas, in fact innate ideas come to be considered impossible in the enlightenment.

Royce:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! Evolution cannot give innate ideas?! You're joking, right?! Have you read ANYTHING in evolutionary psychology?! Please stop this habit of making up claims about topics you know next-to-nothing about.


Meta:

(1) evolutionary psychology is BS. Sociobiology was bull ****.


(2) there is no proof of innate ideas. none. you are using instinct and calling it "Idea" you are reductionism leads you to think ideas are just instincts.

Web definitions
Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_ideas

Britannica

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...70/innate-idea

"innate idea, in philosophy, an idea allegedly inborn in the human mind, as contrasted with those received or compiled from experience. The doctrine that at least certain ideas (e.g., those of God, infinity, substance) must be innate, because no satisfactory empirical origin of them could be conceived, flourished in the 17th century and found in René Descartes its most prominent exponent. The theory took many forms: some held that a newborn child has an explicit awareness of such ideas; others, more commonly, maintained that innate ideas have some implicit form, either as a tendency or as a dormant capacity for their formulation, which in either case would require favourable experiential conditions for their development."

Here's your assigned reading:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/...w/fulltext.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/...1/fulltext.pdf

sorry the sophomore doe snot assign the Ph.D. you are the studnet I am the teacher. time stop pretending.

your arguments suck. you argue twisted logic and you make up your own facts. children at play do not make good philosophers.

your assignment is to listen to people who have ideas different from (ahahaahah) "yours," try to understand what they are really saying instead of twisting their words.


 part 3


that is totally! it's idiotic to argue that it's not valid [It there being the M scale.]when it is being used as the standard approach. I've quotes several experts who say Hood revolutionized the field that he's great and that his scale is great. you have no coutner answer.

[ already cited:
Katherine A. MacLean, Roland R. Griffithis, et al

"Factor Analysis of the mystical experience Questionnaire: A study of experiences occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion PDF 
http://www.heffter.org/docs/2013pdf/Mystical%20experience%20questionnaire.pdf

"Beginning with Hood (1975), the modern empirical study of mysticism has focused on char-

acterizing mystical experiences that individuals have had across their lifetime. Hood’s Mysticism

Scale ...developed according to Stace’s (1960) framework, is the most widely used quantitative mea-sure of mystical experience. The Mysticism Scale has generally been shown to be a reliable

and cross-culturally valid measure of lifetime experiences."

Michael E. Neilsen
Georgia Southern University
Feb, 2000
Psychology of Religion in USA

Ralph Hood (1998), a major figure in American psychology of religion, suggests six psychological schools of thought regarding religion. The psychoanalytical schools draw from the work of Freud, and attempt to reveal unconscious motives for religious belief.

"Ralph Hood (1998), a major figure in American psychology of religion, suggests six psychological schools of thought regarding religion. The psychoanalytical schools draw from the work of Freud, and attempt to reveal unconscious motives for religious belief. Although Freud reduced religious belief to a natural, if ultimately flawed, attempt to cope with life's stresses, contemporary psychoanalytic interpretations are not necessarily hostile to religious faith. Analytical schools find their inspiration in Jung's description of spiritual life. Most psychologists, however, consider such descriptions to be undemonstrated by scientific research, and therefore it plays a limited role in psychology. Object relations schools also draw from psychoanalysis, but focus their efforts on maternal influences on the child. Each of these three schools rely on clinical case studies and other descriptive methods based on small samples, which runs counter to the prevailing practice of psychology in America." \\

Dale Caird
originally in journal for the Scientific study of religion 1988, 27 (1) 122-126

"Research into mystical experience has been greatly facilitated over the last decade by Hood (1975). Utilizing the conceptual framework of Stace (1960) he devised a 32 item questionnaire tapping eight categories of mysticism. This questionnaire the M scale was shown by Hood to have respectable internal consistency and reasonable construct validity.]


Royce:

I do have a counter: multiple researchers pointing out the flaws and limitations of Hood's M scale. Here they are again. 

Meta:

No you don't have it. you have made up that they say that because the don't. Look would Hood Put them (Spanos and Moretti) in his chapter saying "these guys back me up" if they didn't? how could he get away with that? hU? use your brain. you never did quote their conclusion! you qutoe minor stuff form in the middle of the study you don't show their conclusion.

Hood uses them as back up how could he do that if they said he was no good. Little matter of losing credibility!He hasn't. I've quoted experts saying he's ground breaking, he's the standard, he's taken seriously. you manipulated what they say so it looks like they are against him but they are not. Page 364 of his text book:

"They directly correlated the M scale with the Tellegen and Atikinson absorption scale and with three measures of hypnosis. Overall the M scale correlated positively with all of these measures."



(1) you have misquoted Spanos. He does not say the S scale is bad. you are reading that in by using minor statements that are not part of the conclusion. their conclusion is that the M scale corrolate with two other scales and shows that it's validated and that people who have theses experinces are as stable as the average person.

Royce:

You can't show a single-place I misquoted them. 

Meta:

"leaves out a whole level.." they did not say level, they did not have a conclusion that M scale is no good. they never say that!

[numerous times previous exchanges--prior thread--when I confronted him with that he would say "they do say that."]

Royce:

They claimed that there was a whole subset of mystical experiences that Hood and Stace ignored (nonpositive and negatively affective mystical experiences), 

Meta:

NOW YOU ARE CALLING IT A "SUBSET" THAT PROVES IT'S YOUR WORDS! i YOU HAVE BEEN SAYING "LEVEL" BECAUSE i CORRECTED YOU ON IT ABOUT 10 TIMES. NOW YOU CHANGE THE PHRASE. THAT JUST PROVES YOU MAKING UP PHRASES AND CLAIMING ITS IN THE STUDY.

Royce:

that this oversight may have biased the work of Hood and Stace, and that when they examined this subset of mystical experience it was correleated with psychological disturbance. I've given you the quotes to back up this claim on this thead. Here they are again: 

Meta:

NO i MADE THAT POINT FIRST BEFORE YOU DI AS ANSWER TO YOUR NONSENSE. YOU HAVE COMPLETELY MISREPRESENTED. YOU ARE SO DISHONEST THIS PROVE YOU ARE TOTALLY DISHONEST

they didn't leave anything out. you have been habitually speaking like there's some written in stone protocol that there has to be a negative side and there is no data to confirm that. Jame's references are anecdotal. there is no data. Stace didn't include it because it wasn't in the mystics he read. Hood didn't include it because he was studying Stace.


Royce:

""A number of investigators have classified mystics with traditional psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., as hysterics, Leuba, 1929), or have labeled mystical experiences with such pejorative expressions as "infantile" or "regressed" (e.g., Maven, 1970; Prince & Savage, 1972). An alternative tradition has viewed mystical experiences as positive, optimistic, and ego-enhancing rather than as negative or psychopathological. Along these lines Hood (1974, 1977; Hood, Hall, Watson & Biderman, 1979) found no relationship between his questionnaire measure of mystical experience and measures of psychopathology, and positive correlations between mystical experience and measures of self-actualization and psychological strength. 

Meta:

those negatives are NOT from studies. they didn't any scientific studies in 1929! they are anecdotes.

Royce:

James (1902), however, acknowledged that mystical experiences were not always positive and were sometimes negative, evil and frightening. Such "diabolical mysticism" he believed was restricted to those "of enfeebled or deluded states of mind" (417). Relatedly, a number of investigators (Glock & Stark, 1965; Margolis & Elifson, 1979) have indicated that individuals who report intense religious experiences sometimes describe negative experiences, out-of-body experiences, visions, voices, disorientation and other "nonpositive" events that do not fit within the uniformly positive descriptions of mystical experience offered by Stace (1960) and others. For instance, the empirically derived taxonomy of mystical experience developed by Glock and Stark (1965) included such negative and "diabolical" experiences as the sense of being acted upon by an evil presence, being given messages by or being overtaken or possessed by Satan, and so on. The mystical experience questionnaire developed by Hood (1975) was based on the positive description of mystical experience offered by Stace (1960). Hood's (1975) questionnaire does not assess negative or diabolical aspects of mysticism and this may be one of the reasons that it fails to correlate significantly with measures of psychopathology [emphasis added].


Meta:

none of those are data. James's exampel was based upon one guy (read teh Verities. I've read it I know the example--not a study). they do't give a reason why it shouls do that.
[To be more precise the early dates such as the James and Luba were not really studies as we would do studies today. the latter dates (after the 60s) are studies but they are not damaing to mystical experience. Out body experience is not part of mystical. The conclusion that Spanos and Moretti reach says that mystical are as stable as non mystics. Sot they are talking about experiences mystics have in addition to mystical experience.]

I argued the first several threads on Spanso that you never proved this point..you have no yet. I asked over and over again for the data you still don't have it. if you had data you would use it. you don't have any kind of quote such that "x% of mysticls have negative." you have not quoted that. you don't have it becuase it doesn't exist.

(2) not much

(3) It's short term. I've arleady documented that. that's from the spiritual board that summarized Nobel and Wuthnow. they say the negatives are anxiety and it's shortterm.

you have no evidence on it at all.

Royce:

For the present study we developed two instruments to assess "nonpositive" and diabolical religious experiences. Our Diabolical Experience Scale was based on the Glock and Stark typology (1965) and assessed the extent to which people reported contact with demonic beings (e.g., "I have sometimes felt as if I were in the presence of the Devil"), experienced demonic revelations (e.g., "I believe that certain things have been revealed to me by an evil spiritual being"), and felt overwhelmed by evil forces (e.g., "I have had an experience in which an evil presence seemed to absorb and take hold of me"). 

Meta:

Spanos and the conclusion is the M scale passes! read their conclusion stop cherry picking stuff form side bars.

Royce:

Margolis and Elifson (1979) found that individuals who reported mystical experiences sometimes reported out-of-body experiences (OBE's) and visions and voices. The visions and voices were sometimes defined as demonic and sometimes as divine or holy. Consequently, we developed an Anomalous Experiences Questionnaire to assess such experiences. [...]

I disproved that. you did not answer. you are dredging up stuff I disproved.


Meta:
(1) that's not part of mystical expedience. that's why the quote say 'they also have...' doesn't say it's part of it

(2) I quote several definitions that rule it out including Stace. so that's a good reason why the M scale doesn't use it or need.

[quoting Spanos and Moretti--from the conclusion!]

"Like Hood (1975, 1979) we found that positive mysticism was unrelated to measures of psychopathology. On the other hand, diabolical experiences were related both to positive mysticism and to those measures of psychological disturbance that emphasize the reporting of somatic symptoms (i.e., neuroticism and psychosomatic symptoms)."

(1) I already said this 1979 was before the triple solution so the M scale was less developed at that time. any findings not valid now becuase it's better and it's different. their conclusion that it works is ok because if it worked then it works better now.

(2) any criticism of the M scale from that far back is invalid becuase it ignores the way the scale is done now.

that means big tricked you used to make the bogus argument that they condoning th M scale is necessarily wrong because if they were they would not find it corroborating with two other scales.


Royce:

Wrong again. The two scales were specifically designed to examine the nonpositive mystical experiences ignored by the M scale. 

Meta:

that doesn't even address what I said. I said if the negatives were significant they could not correlate it with the two absorption scales (the quote from Hood's book above). So you have not answered that.

if they thought to not measuring the negatives were significant enough they could not conclude the people were stable.

Royce:

Nonsense. The clearly said that negatively affective mystical experience (specifically: diabolical experiences) were correlated with measures of psychological disturbance.

Meta:

THAT'S NOT AN ANSWER. IT HAS NOTING TO DO WITH the issues. SCREW YOUR HEAD ON AND TRY TO LISTEN TO THE WORDS: SPANOS AND MORETTI FOUND THAT MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE PEOPLE WERE AS STABLE AS ANYONE,THAT'S PART OF THEIR FINDING. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU CHERRY PICK OTHER STATEMENTS THAT'S WHAT THEY FOUND A CONCLUSION! THEY COULD NOT CONCLUDE THAT IF HTE NEGATIVES WERE SIGNIFICANT. THEN THEY WOULDN'T BE STABLE. DO YOU EVER UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT OF NEGATIVES?

Royce

http://books.google.com/books?id=ETV...etti%3F&f=true
I read the relevant pages. Where does your your rebut a single claim I've made about Spanos and Moretti's 1988 paper?


Meta:

YOU HAVE NOT READ THE CONCLUSION (what you call "revlivant is your cherry pikcing) until you read the conclusion you have no argument. [he never quoted from the actual conclusion of the study I did--see above]

Royce:
I've asked you to read it several times why are you afraid to?

Meta:
I've asked for the number or percentage of negatives. why wont you give that? you must be afraid to you always give something else rather than that.

 part 4

in all of that hubbub he doesn't' answer these points:

(5) none of the researchers who claim to evoke mystical experience by stimulating the brain use the M scale or another valid scacle to know if they succeeded so you can't use them as evidence.

(6) that means your argument is merely ideologically driven and theoretical

(7) you can't show that an accident or an adaptation would be consistently positive i so many ways.

rather than answering them when he finished screwing up 4 he goes back to the Spanos and Moretti which was earlier set of threads. why? because he thinks he can millage off that since it's twisting a study to make it look it doesn't support Hood when it does. he also clearly has no answers for these points.

Atheists Can't Face Scientific Facts: Debate with Royce

Exchange with Royce over 7 arguments: Naturalism as cause on RE

 This is an exchange on a message board over issues relating to my use of 200 studies on religious experience and the arguments I think they support for the existence of God and the validity of religious beilef. I've addressed several times, on this blog, the nature of these studies and grossly unfair treatment atheists have given them. One such post was, "Atheists Slander Real Scholar," "M Scale Proved by My own test." "Atheist show their Lack of honor and decency." Please read those articles to understand what this is all about.

There have already been several exchanges at this point. I isolated the exchange on its own thread and asked others not to take part so it would be 1x1 bewteen Royce and I, and he bailed.



Blue Text: my past words in previous exchange, not all of my answers are in blue because the last exchange before Royce chickened out and ran away form the debate is not in blue. The blue is what I had said the previous time.

Here are the original 6 points that are the major issues:

these are the arguments I made to disprove Royce's assertion that brain chemistry was the cause of RE.

(1) you have never answered the receptor argument

(2) It's disproved by the universalism

(3) It's disproved by the positive effects

(4) the God part of the brain is more of an argument for God than against, so bringing into any sort of evolutionary encroachment raises the possibly of God at work.



(5) none of the researchers who claim to evoke mystical experience by stimulating the brain use the M scale or another valid scacle to know if they succeeded so you can't use them as evidence.

(6) that means your argument is merely ideologically driven and theoretical

(7) you can't show that an accident or an adaptation would be consistently positive i so many ways.


the current state of my answers to Royces come back.


Part 1

I am cutting out a bunch of this stupid yammering and getting to some real arguments.

there was a lot of stupid stuff in there like "you are not good you can't think" ect ect we don't need that.


first look for an answer to the receptor argument. that was (1). that's first of the seven points.


here it is as I make it:


Meta:
the naturalistic processes that involve brain chemistry are the basic process through which we think and understand. That means that God has to work in those perimeters if we have any sense of God's presence. It's not surprising to find brain chemistry involved with it. That would like arguing that because God has vibrate the air to speak audibly to Moses then it's naturalistic so God can't be speaking.
That's not much of an argument.

Royce:

First, many theists are substance dualists and thus think that their minds are ontologically distinct from their bodies. Thus, something could interact with their minds without interacting with their bodies, and so God could communicate with them without interacting with their bodies, including their brains. So your argument would not work on theistic substance dualism.

Meta:

that's irrelevant. the point is that none of the neurological arguments can escape the epistemological dilemma and prove anything about the spirit. so they can't rule out mystical experience of as being experience of God's presence just becuase it invovles brain chemistry. making a theory of perception is not at issue is does not answer the argument.

Royce:

Second, we can cut God out of the explanation via Occam's razor. Brain chemistry (along with other naturalistic factors such as upbringing) would suffice for explaining the religious experiences.

Meta:

No we can't becasue all the other things I've argued tell us there are things involved and you can't make these simplistic formulations, which is after all merely argument from sign, or correlation.

that doesn't answer the epistemological dilemma of the receptor argument.

Royce

One would not need to posit a God, or interaction with an existent God, as a cause for these experiences (it does not make the explanation on the metrics of inference to the best explanation), especially given the disparate nature of religious experiences. Looking at people's reports of these experiences, one would not thing it likely that they are experiencing the same, singular deity.

 Meta:

that's a very stupid argument and proves you have not read a single study on the subject. all the studies point to the universality of the experiences themselves. many of the studies, but Hood especially prove this. The article in the McNamara book is one major Hood source on that point.

(the experiences are all the same, what differs is the name of God i the particular tradition).

the universal nature of it is one major arguments that proves there's much more to it than just neurological data. you can't just cross it out becuase it invovles brain chemistry.

not the answer doesn't answer it. not saying that every single person has it (although it's been proposed theoretically by William James and Wuthnow) but it is universal to all cultures, times and faiths. It shouldn't be becuase religious construct are cultural. cultural constructs can't be universal to all cultures. that's a good reason to think something more is involved.

that's the universality argument I just got through referring to.

Royce:

So that's what you mean by "universalism". Well then, that's fairly trite. After all, if even one member of a culture had that experience, you'd say that the experience was present in that culture. I could say the same about hallucinations. After all, it's fairly likely that every culture that existed had at least one member who had an auditory and/or visual hallucination. So using your definition, that means auditory and/or visual hallucinations are universal and universalism applies to them. Ha!

Meta:

what a childish argument! you are certainly a sophomore that is well,you know, sophomoric! First of all the arguemnt is made by the leader researcher in the wrold in the field whose instrument is the standard procedure for study of religious experience. Its not some little deal i made up. Backup! that's the way he argues.

secondly, Steve, you have no basis for the idiotic assertion that it's only one person in a culture. it's not only proved by modern studies which of course use more than one person in a culture but also based Stace who read all the great mystics of the world that one could find in the 1950s. IT"S YOUR BURDEN OF PROOF because I have the data to prove it., from the M scale validations and other studies. so you have must do the proving that it's not true.

Royce

Also, culturally-influenced traits can be universal. For example: language-use. Do all cultures speak the same language? No. But as Chomsky pointed out, there are underlying commonalities to the grammar and languages employed across all cultures. Doesn't change the fact that language and language-use is a culturally-influence trait

.

Meta:

you don't get the idea of a construct. I'm not surprised you don't get what that is. language itself is nto a construct it's an instinct. Generative grammar is an instinct. It's not cultural. the particular language are cultural they are not passed on and they learned and they limited to culture.

it's just the way anthropologists divide up the world. anything universal is not a cultural construct anything that is limited to a given culture is a cultural construct. religions are different in different cultural just as languages are. so they are not instinct but culture.

If you want to conclude that mystical experience is given instinct with genetics that's ok with me. that is so close to the God o the Brain arguemnt it feeds into arguemnt I made form that. that's the way you want to go that's fine. I'll jump over the fence and start making that argument, great. that's a fine argument because it's an empirical based scientific argument for God.

I will present part 2 in the next couple of days. The kicker is I moved this to a new thread because this was a tangential exchange on a large thread about something else. When I moved it I asked everyone to say off so it would be 1x1, I wanted to move it to isolate it becuase he had several other posts that weren't part of the exchange they were creating confusing, too much to look at, can't focus on the issues. When I moved it and isolated it and ask that it be 1x1 he refused to continue. When he doesn't have anyone to hide behind he wont face me.