Taffy Lewis

Hobbs,

One interesting point is that if someone were intent on inventing a god they wouldn't invent a god that was as demanding as the god of western theism. This god requires constant worship and praise, a total dedication and commitment of our lives to him, and some fairly high moral requirements. For example, Jews must observe lots of rituals and rites, Christians are supposed to love their neighbors as themselves (as are Jews and Muslims), and Muslims are supposed to follow strict prayer and fasting, among many other things. It's been a constant criticism of christianity and other forms of monotheism that they are too repressive and strict. If we were intent on inventing a god, why not make one that allows us to do pretty much what we want while giving us everything we could ever dream of? Doesn't the latter seem a better candidate for a god we'd invent?

Vorkosigan

The obvious response is that anyone can have exactly the same experiences theists have when some of them experience God. And just as you can go around my house and see my peach tree, you can fulfill the conditions of perceiving God and experience him and come to see that he is real.

Um, no. The peach tree is experienced by one and all, regardless of conditions or will or desire. Further, I can manipulate the peach tree, pick its fruit, cut it down to make wood for cabinets, move it to the front of the house, etc. It does not play games, and is subject to independent tests.

Gods satisfy none of those conditions.

The existence of competing claims and incompatible accounts of God does weaken the confidence a theist can have that their experiences are veridical. However, the question is does it weaken it enough to undermine it. I don't think so. Again, we can compare theistic perception to sensory perception. Most sensory perceptions are genuine. At least we find ourselves compelled to believe they are. Yet quite a few are incompatible. Typical examples include hallucinations, illusions, and dreams. We spend about a third of our lives sleeping and sleep generates quite a few false visual and auditory sensations. Yet we don't allow this to undermine our general trust in sensory perception.

This is because (1) that belief is evolved into us and (2) The vast, vast majority of our sensory perceptions are dead on. Every day we have millions of discrete perceptions of objects, sounds, feelings, etc. Only a miniscule number of these are confusing.

Also, it is false that everyone believes in the physical world.

I didn't claim it was true, so don't understand your point....

Advaita Vendanta Hinduism and most strands of Buddhist thought teaches that the world of appearances (ie. sensory experience) is illusory. And among philosophers we have idealists who make similar claims. Yet most of us don't allow any of this to undermine our general trust in sensory experience and belief in the physical world.

Right, because, as we have found, the philosophers who argued that the physical is an illusion cannot sustain their case.

Also, it doesn't seem that memory is as reliable as sensory experience and yet we trust it in general. So theistic perception need not be as reliable as sensory experience in order for us to trust it. Sensory experience, memory, and theistic perception are epistemically parallel in many ways.

They are not at all parallel in the way you want them to be. The fact that we trust memory does not mean it is reliable (more frequently than perception, as studies show, memory is unreliable and constructed). Theistic perception is merely an internal brain state that can be triggered by many different experiences.

This point can be dealt with fairly easily. Many false sensory experiences are generated through "drugs or other stimulants" and hallucinations can be brought on by deprivation or other pathological conditions. Again, this does not cast doubt on our general trust in sensory experience. In order to avoid a double standard it should not cast doubt on theistic perception.

You've avoided the point. The point is that particular forms of perception -- the ones you label "theistic" -- can be replicated by drugs and experiences. I cannot, no matter drugs I take, make myself perceive a peach tree, eat a peach fruit, and then shit the detritus, and then use that for fertilizer in my garden and have my roses grow spectacularly. Hallucinations are generally obvious -- have you ever hallucinated? I have. And it is easy to tell that what you are seeing is not real. The point is, again, that "theistic perception" can be replicated without recourse to a deity.

Also, I see no good reason to believe that most theistic perception occurs under such pathological conditions. At least, you haven't given me any good reason to believe so.

Since I never made this claim, I don't see why I should have to defend it.

This objection is misguided because you seem to require that we see or hear a god in order for us to know that theistic perception is trustworthy. But if we could perceive God through our senses then we would have no need of a theistic perceptual faculty.

But you claim we DO perceive gods through a special faculty. So what is this faculty working on that no instrument can detect and no measurement find? Clearly, it's an internal brain state that is not connected to anything outside the mind. Where does this faculty reside? How did it evolve? What does it operate on?

From you earlier comments.
only claim that one condition for perceiving God is "honest pursuit of religious truth". A person might need to fulfill more than one of these conditions. Further, I did not claim that any of the conditions for perceiving God are sufficient for theistic perception. I only claim that certain conditions are necessary. The distinction between that which is necessary and that which is sufficient is very important. If our perceiving God also requires a free choice on the part of God to reveal himself then it will also be indeterminate whether or not God reveals himself.

The non-falsifiability of this has already been addressed.

Further, it's not clear to me how someone can find religious truth and also discover that it is a sham. This is blatantly contradictory.

Nothing contradictory about it. Many people drop into religion, believe they have something, then grow to realize it is a sham and leave. Happens every day. If people were really directly perceiving gods, why would they ever stop being religious?

The term 'inference' refers to a conscious process. No doubt many brain processes are necessary in order to have such conscious episodes. However, the important distinction is that some of our beliefs are warranted directly by experience rather than through some indirect means. The justification for this claim is that if some things are not known directly then either we have an infinite set of warranted beliefs, circular warrant, or a set of beliefs which have no warrant at all. Everything can't be known indirectly. This is the most important aspect of the perceptual/inferential distinction.

... think you see where this is going. Either the chain stops with something grounded and warranted in a direct way or we have either an infinite chain, a circular chain, or a set of beliefs with no warrant at all.

Taffy, think about it. There's no infinite regress. No "belief" is warranted by direct experience, because you don't directly experience your own brain processes and you definitely don't directly experience reality. All you get are outputs and 99% of those you are never conscious of. Everything you get is an inference somewhere in the chain of processing. The brain breaks down the data, assigns it to different parts for processing, and then re-integrates it and presents it to the consciousness, when necessary. But you don't have "direct" experience of reality in the sense you appear to mean here. There is always processing going on, the editing of reality for your benefit, between the object and what you think is the perception. Think about the peach tree. The angle of light is always changing, but the color of the tree remains the same. Why?

Again, we have the same problem. Something has to be known directly or we have an infinite set of thoughts. For example, you know aspect A of your thought through being aware of aspect B of your thought through being aware of aspect C of your thought through being aware of aspect D of your thought, etc. Every aspect of your thoughts cannot be known indirectly or our thoughts have infinite aspects. This is clearly impossible. So why not just say the propositional content of our thoughts are known directly? These are the aspects we are aware of when we make inferences.

Because, we do not know the propositional content of our thoughts directly. Did it ever occur to you that your brain might be lying to your consciousness so that you can come up with clever after-the-fact rationalizations for your behavior that are useful to you in social interactions as justificatory strategies? Your "theory" of consciousness seems to give it an unwarranted importance.

What we know directly is a translation of our thoughts, suitably edited for content. Nothing is ever perceived or inferred directly, and when your consciousness is involved in the process, it transmits problems and receives conclusions. Your are, thankfully, unconscious of your thoughts.

First of all, there has been much debate about particular areas of the brain which facilitate religious experiences including experiences of God. This has been referred to as the "god module". The research is early so we can't say anything definitive. One book dealing with a very narrow type of religious experience is Why God Won't Go Away:Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. The authors believe their research supports the notion that we are aware of some supernatural or spiritual realm.

The authors may make such claims as they please, but the fact that you can stimulate the brain with drugs and electricity, and get the same effects, tends to show that there is no experience of god, just internal brain states. The authors of that tome offer no explanation of what is being perceived, or how. The brain itself is not known as a perceptual organ, but a processing one. Conclusion: the activity is merely a processing system behaving erratically when stimulated.

Secondly, I don't know why a physical mechanism would have to be known in order for us to be warranted or justified in trusting theistic perception. Until this century we knew very little about the mechanism of sight. Does that mean people were not justified or warranted in trusting their sight until modern times? This seems to be a bit too sceptical. So we don't need such an account in order to trust theistic perception.

Bad argument. Nobody serious ever argued that light did not obey natural law. Further, everyone knew that the eyes had something to do with seeing. But now you want us to have an innate gods detector, but you can't find it, you don't know how it works, your only location for it is in an organ known to have no perceptual function, and all of its putative behavior can be accounted for without reference to the supernatural. See the problem here?

This is definately a possility. But another possibility is that people actually experience God. Now we need some reason to believe one account rather than the other. It seems to me that a reasonable principle of rationality says that "how things seem to be in experience is good reason to believe that's how things are in reality unless we have reason to believe otherwise." So in the absence of good reason to think theistic perception is illusory or delusive we should trust it.

But there ARE other reasons to think the supernatural is bogus -- like its complete nonexistence, for example. "Good reason" in this case is the last 500 years of western science. So you'd have to come up with powerful evidence to show that in fact we are perceiving something that does not appear to exist.

Vorkosigan

Hobbs

Whether or not it is an interesting point, it is beside the point. Are you unable to address the point I made? Why is it that whenever I try to point out what I see to be a problem with what theists are trying to sell me, they always respond to some other problem? It doesn't give me any confidence that they have answers to the problems I point out.

Not at all. For one thing, an invented god who gives us everything we could ever dream of could not possibly be taken seriously, since obviously none of us gets everything we could ever dream of. Ditto with a god who lets us do whatever we want: reality, whether or not there is a god behind it, doesn't let us do whatever we want. An invented god would have to be at least remotely plausible for anyone to believe in it.

Besides, I didn't say anything about inventing gods, at least certainly not in any conscious manner. We don't invent our own opinions, preferences, and prejudices, we just have them, and we typically feel them very strongly, as if they just must be right. As for high moral requirements, wouldn't that be a part of our opinions, preferences, and prejudices?: "I feel strongly that things should be this way, that people should act this way." "God," then, is the personification of our ideal of what we think a human at one's best should be.

Again, I have to ask why God always invariably agrees with his followers. Why is his ideal of a human at one's best always the same as that of his followers, even when his followers disagree? How can you tell whether or not you are the source of what you believe is coming from God, especially since for at least the large majority of believers God isn't the source? What makes you so different and special?

Keith Russell

Hobbs said:
"We don't invent our own opinions, preferences, and prejudices, we just have them, and we typically feel them very strongly, as if they just must be right."

Actually, if we're rational, we DO take control of our opinions, preferences, and try to consciously avoid prejudice.

Being rational does not mean that we arbitrarily 'just have' opinions, but that we try to ensure that our opinions arise from our best evaluation of the evidence available to us.

In this way, if new evidence comes to light, we change (sometimes even abandon) our opinions and/or conclusions to incorporate this new evidence.

Reason isn't about being 'right'; it's more about being 'as right as possible right now'.

Keith Russell.

Hobbs

Well, yea, but when I did that, I found I had to give up my theistic understanding of things and move beyond it. Taffy seems not to have reached that point yet. He sounds like I did 20 years ago.

Actually, I do think that, depending on where you are in life, what you have experienced, what you know and have learned, theism can indeed be a rational conclusion. If all you know is what parents and preachers and sunday school teachers have told you about how to understand and interpret your experiences, the god hypothesis will make a lot of sense. But when you look into other religions and beliefs and see the very wide variety of them, all believed just as strongly as my church's members believe our stuff, and you learn about what scientists have verifiably learned about the way the world works, then, if you look at it rationally, you should realize that more is needed to verify that your interpretations and explanations of your experiences are accurate.

Given the enormous variety of interpretations of experiences attained using the methods Taffy describes, I'd like to hear how that methodology can be reasonably judged to be an accurate indicator of reality.

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: Hobbs ]</p>

WJ

Taffy!

Fabulous post! James' philosophy/psychology about the religous experience is very similar, along with the value of revelation and the aposterior.

I like your first paragraph, and I like McKim's quote. I haven't read all the responses, but if they are dealing with 'metaphysical knowledge', I would at least hope they are in the tradition of Kantian transcendentalism.

I do have a quick analogy (from personal experience) to the 'open-heart/contrite heart' or otherwise recognition of human finitude concept. As a part-time musician, at one time I had considered it a full-time endeavor but had later dropped it altogether. Now some 20 years later, ironically I re-visited the whole creative experience with a different sense of newness. This newness came from older lessons associated with the importance or one-sidedness of theory, which in turn, had stifled my own awareness and subsequent progress of the art form itself. What I thought was the appropriate approach to understanding music through scales and analyzing/composing music in a mechanical-like fashion and so on, turned out to be a dead end. I never realized that putting together *listening* skills and intuition and spontaneity, creativity (like what also happens in scientific discoveries of a theory itself) were often times more important in performance and understanding.

The point is that thru that so-called *different* approach via *listening*, I gained an (rapid) increase in the level of understanding of music itself. (And actually, it has helped me in other areas both professionally and personally because I'm more aware of what's being said, as a by product of this increase in listening skills.)

I believe most of this phenomenon from (sense)experience speaks to (apparently) both James' and McKin's view that the aposterior is paramount to understanding the concepts behind, in this case, the existence of Deity. And of course, if Beings were not sentient, I would argue (though in theory I would not know how to argue) no value at all would be placed on the religious experience, nor would the speculation itself even be possible.

Again, without reading the posts, if one is back to deduction and the self-refuting issues associated with existence and the apriori, I'm not sure whether your questions will get answered. Otherwise, I finally see a thread that speaks to the 'empirical side' along with the psychological (science of the mind) impacts relative to the inference of a necessary Being or cause, thus providing for sufficent reason to believe.

Thanx for the thread.

Walrus

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: WJ ]</p>

theophilus

There is no such thing as "communal" or shared experience. You can only know what other people "report" as their experience. Since their report is merely another your perception on your part, you cannot know anything about what other people perceive or whether your own perception is real.
Thus, you cannot validate your own experience by appealing to the experience of others. You must presuppose that your perception and your interpretations are true.

Vorkosigan

Hmmm...I said anything about shared or communal experience where? I was talking about intersubjectivity.

bd-from-kg

Taffy Lewis:

A lot of what I have to say has been touched on before, but perhaps I can make some points more clearly by going into more detail, to show why this argument is fatally flawed.

The idea is, as you put it, that:

From your later comments, by “belief in the physical world” you really seem to mean belief in specific physical objects such as computers and trees. Now to evaluate this we need to understand clearly how, and in what sense, belief in such physical objects is “based on” sensory experience.

A newborn baby experiences what must be a very confusing jumble of sensations. Slowly he begins to “make sense” out of the mess. Certain sensations (or similar ones) occur again and again. Eventually he begins to form a conceptual scheme that makes sense of some of these. Certain ones seem to be associated with getting fed, being rocked, etc.; he forms a primitive conception of a thing he eventually learns to call “mama”. Others, he finds, seem to always be in his visual field if he is in a certain position and looks the right way; what’s more, to his amazement, he discovers that they respond if he thinks about them in a certain way. Later he learns to call these things hands, feet, etc. Still others occur under certain conditions, but do not seem to be associated with any visual or auditory sensations; he eventually learns to call these hunger, fatigue, pain, etc. And still other sensations occur together often enough in patterns that he learns to recognize. His mind seems to be structured in such a way that he naturally thinks of these frequently occurring patterns as representing discrete things such as chairs, tables, trees, computers, etc.

The baby is gradually forming a conceptual scheme through which he is able to “understand” many of the sensations he experiences and even to anticipate them sometimes. As he gets older this conceptual scheme will get much more complex, but its nature doesn’t change. Basically he hypothesizes the existence of various things that “cause” the sensations he experiences.

Eventually his conceptual scheme comes to include the hypotheses that some of these things, like chairs and tables, are external to himself; that others, like his hands and feet, are associated with him in a peculiar way, which he expresses by saying that they are part of his “body”. He also notices eventually that some of the other “things” seem to be much like his body, and that most of them seem to be attempting to communicate with him. In time he forms the hypothesis that they have sensations much like his, see and hear many of things that the does, etc. But some of the things he experiences, like hunger and pain, they do not seem to experience; they seem to be perceived only by him. And, of course, he eventually forms the hypothesis that while he can control his own body in some ways, he cannot control any of the others; yet they seem to act in ways that suggest intent and purpose. He hypothesizes that there are “minds” associated with these other bodies that can control them the same way that he controls his own, and that they have sensations much like his, but not at the same time, and probably not really the same in all ways. In particular, he eventually forms the hypothesis that these other minds have their own conceptual schemes, which do not agree with his in all ways.

Once he forms a conceptual scheme (which I will henceforth call his “ontology”), most of his new sensations can be incorporated into it very easily. If he perceives a new body, he assumes that another mind is associated with it; if he sees something that resembles other trees, he categorizes it as another tree, etc. And of course he assumes that causal relationships that are part of his ontology will hold for new objects if they held for similar ones.

One important distinction in his ontology will be between perceptions that seem to correspond in a predictable way to the perceptions of those around him (according to his ontology), and things that do not. For example, he learns that if he sees a traffic light at an intersection, other drivers will see the same traffic light, and that if it appears to be green in his direction, other drivers will perceive it as green in that direction too. On the other hand, he will notice that other people don’t seem to perceive hunger, pain, etc. when he does, or know the same things he does, or think the same things he does. He hypothesizes that the former perceptions correspond to “real” things external to himself, or in other words, that they are “objective” – that is, that they are caused by things that exist externally, independently of him – while the latter are “subjective” – that they are caused by him, and “exist” – i.e., are perceived – only by him. In some cases perceptions that seem very similar to ones that seem to have been caused by “real” things turn out to be subjective. For example, he might wake up right after a vivid dream thinking that the things he “saw” in the dream were real, only to find that no one else experienced them. In time he will (hopefully) learn from such experiences to distinguish between “objective” and “subjective” realities. The important thing to notice is that the criterion that distinguishes the two is whether other people perceive the thing in question. If they do, the thing is objective; if not, it’s subjective.

Another point worth noting is that, in forming an ontology, all sane people rely extensively on Occam’s Razor. That is, one always tries to find the simplest conceptual scheme that incorporates all elements of your experiences. for example, if you see Sally in Penney’s at the mall and fifteen minutes later notice her in Sears, you could accept any or several hypotheses – for example:

(1) Sally walked across the mall from Penney’s to Sears.
(2) Sally left the mall, got into her car and drove to the other side of the mall, and went into Sears.
(3) Sally sprouted wings and flew from Penney’s to Sears.
(4) Sally was transported onto the Enterprise, which had gone through a time warp, and was then transported from there to Sears.

A sane person will assume (1) unless he has information to indicate that (2) may be true. He will not accept (3) or (4) unless there is an extraordinary amount of supporting evidence, because accepting either of them would require massive, radical modifications of one’s ontology.

In accordance with Occam’s Razor, the complexity of the cause that we hypothesize for a given perception will depend on (a) what other perceptions we have found it to be associated with in the past, and (b) the complexity of the experience itself. If they are relatively simple - like those associated with an ordinary volleyball, for example - we will hypothesize a relatively simple cause; if they are complicated, like those associated with a computer, we will assign it a more complex cause. If we have never had an experience anything like this before, we will assign it a cause that involves the least possible modification of our existing ontology. Under no circumstances would a sane person hypothesize an infinitely complex cause, or one that is radically different from anything that he as ever had to hypothesize to understand any other perceptions, to explain a very simple experience.

The key points here are:

(1) We don’t “directly perceive” any “things” at all. We have sensations that (according to our brain’s cognitive processing) match patterns stored in our brains from previous experiences and interpret them according to our ontology as being caused by certain kinds of things.

(2) If, when we have certain kinds of perceptions, other people around us do not in general have corresponding ones at the same time, we classify them as subjective experiences and do not hypothesize that they are caused by something external to ourselves.

(3) The complexity of the cause that we assign for any given experience is based on its congruence with our current conceptions about what exists, and with the complexity of the experience itself.

One immediate conclusion from all this is that you are completely wrong when you say:

In fact, you do infer this from regularities and patterns in your sensations and perceptions and incorporated into your ontology. The human brain processes this sort of thing amazingly fast (it’s the main thing that it’s designed to do), so that it seems as though you “perceive” a computer at the same time that the photons from it reach your optic nerves. But in fact there is a time lag, during which a fantastic amount of information processing is being done. It would probably take a modern computer minutes, if not hours, to do the same thing – if we could figure out how to program one to do it at all.
Now let’s see what this supposed “perception of God” that you’re talking about consists of. You say:
Clearly you have noticed that many kinds of experiences that are considered by those who have them to be “perceptions of God” conflict with one another so violently that, under any sane interpretation, they must be considered subjective experiences – or, on the off chance that they aren’t, it is impossible to make any kind of guess as to which might have an objective cause, or what its nature might be. But you think that perhaps there is another kind of experience – a much simpler, more undifferentiated one, that may be widely shared – an experience of a “powerful personal presence”. However, this already goes beyond a description; it is an interpretation of a supposed experience, just as saying that one saw a computer is already an interpretation. The actual experience (in the latter case) is that a certain pattern of colors was perceived.

It’s hard to guess what actual experience might be interpreted by some people as a “powerful personal presence”, but whatever it might be, it would seem to be something relatively simple. It could almost certainly be interpreted through a simple modification of one’s existing ontology. Even if it couldn’t, it would make no sense at all to hypothesize an infinitely complex cause, such as God, to explain a simple experience (or, indeed, any experience).

Besides, no matter how many conditions you set for what constitutes an "authentic" experience of God, the fact remains that such experiences are clearly subjective. The fact that you're having one tells us nothing whatever about whether the fellow next to you is having one; in fact, unless he has been put (or put himself) into the same trancelike state, with the same expectations, as you, he almost certainly isn't. When other people don't "perceive" what you do, the automatic, universal presumption is that the cause of your experience is not external, but within you. People who insist that what they're perceiving is real even though no one else around them perceives it are routinely thrown in the booby hatch, even if - no, especially if, they offer imaginative, creative explanations for why no one else is perceiving it.

Thus the only reasonable explanation for why some seemingly sane people do interpret such experiences as "direct perceptions of God" is that such an entity is already part of their ontology, so that this interpretation does not require any major modification to it; in fact, it doesn’t require any at all. But in that case it is legitimate to ask why such an entity is part of their ontology in the first place. In any case, such an experience provides virtually no evidence for the existence of such an entity. The most that can be said is that it is consistent with such a belief. But you are making a far stronger claim than this, which cannot be sustained.

P.S.: When I have time, I'll comment on the supposed conditions for being able to perceive God described by Alston and McKim.

[ August 07, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

RogerLeeCooke

"The theist might point out that we are often held responsible for many nonreligious beliefs. For example, in college one's instructor will hold one responsible for having the correct set of beliefs dealing with most courses of study. This is because there are choices I can make that will make a difference to whether or not I hold a correct set of beliefs. Or consider an irresponsible parent. If a parent does not know where their child is most of the time, we might rightly say they ought to know and hold them responsible if they do not. So it's not necessarily true that we cannot hold people responsible for which beliefs they hold. This is because many of the beliefs we hold are dependent on certain choices we make. We can choose to put ourselves in a position in which our beliefs are caused and not chosen. But why believe theistic belief is similar to these examples?"

I understand that you are merely quoting these positions, not endorsing them, and I think you've done a good job refuting most of the theist positions. In the case of the arguments I quoted above, I would reply: (1) As a professor myself, I don't demand any belief of my students, only understanding. They must show me that they understand what has been taught to them. They can disagree with it all they like. (2) Parents are (rightly, in my opinion) held accountable for *knowing* where their child is, not for *believing* the child is in an acceptable place. The means of knowing are ordinary human means. But I take the point that some beliefs must not be acted on, under penalty of law. People who believe the economic analog of Christian Science and make out balance books in which deficits are only imaginary will certainly be punished. For that matter, Christian Scientists themselves are increasingly being punished for their idiotic beliefs when those beliefs result in harm to their children. In general, I'm in favor of this, although in most cases I don't trust the government any further than I trust Christian Science parents when it comes to looking out for children. Kids just have to live with some risks.