Taffy Lewis

So artificially bringing about experiences of God would say little about whether or not people actually experience God.

Taffy Lewis

philechat:

But we are in the same position with regard to sensory experience. I have to interpret my experiences "with a fixed set" if my beliefs about the physical world are to be true. Reality imposes these restrictions on us whether it is of a god or of a physical object.

philechat

Oh...what I meant is, if we know it's an illusion then we are more likely to let "the experience" run wild than if we think it comes from God...

I just think there is less "censorship" in the mind when you don't care about its being real or imaginary...

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: philechat ]</p>

Toto

There is a difference between reality and "god". With reality, we know that we can induce false sensations of touch or other illusions, because there are various ways of tricking the brain. But we still can locate a reality out there by taking account of all of the ways we know that sense perceptions can be fooled or distorted. We do have a good map of reality, which allows us to navigate the real world, build machines that work, send space probes to Jupiter, etc.

With "god" or the divine, humans have had no such success in reaching god, figuring out what god is beyond mental stimulation, etc. We have no reason to assume that there is anything behind the god-feelings, especially anything resembling the god of the Bible.

Pomp

Taffy Lewis,

So artificially bringing about experiences of God would say little about whether or not people actually experience God.

You are correct, in that is is certainly possible that people do experience "god's presence," or whatever you want to call it, independantly of magnetic stimulation, and that such experiements are similar in nature to artificial stimulation of neurons to duplicate more ordinary sensory perceptions. The point is that, as we skeptocs have maintained all along, it is more parsimonious to attribute such sensations ro an unexplaiend natural process than to a supernatural one. This new research simply takes that process from the realm of the unexplained to the realm of the explained, assuming that it proves to be solid research.

Taffy Lewis

Toto:

This is question-begging. It is only the case that we have had no success in reaching god if no one has in fact experienced god.

And we have no independent means of checking that our sensory experiences are putting us in touch with reality. Our only source of information about the physical world is our senses. If experience of God is our only access to God then it is in the same epistemic situation as sensory experience in that regard.

Taffy Lewis

Mad Bastard:

And solipsism is more parsimonious than realism about the physical world. That doesn't incline me to accept solipsism.

Toto

Let's just say that our physical sensations, properly interpreted, have lead to virtual mastery of the physical world. Our god sensations remain minor curiosities with no consistency or method, apparently of no use, and not correlated with any particular religious belief or model. They cannot be used to justify the Christian religion or any of its tenets.

If you were a Buddhist, you might argue that there is a consistant and repeatable technique of calling up the god sensations - meditation. And you might argue that this is evidence of a spiritual dimension to reality. Is that your argument? Or are you just trying to pick apart the materialist argument any way you can?

Taffy Lewis

Toto:

My point is that just as artificially bringing about experiences of touch do not call into question experiences of touch in general, artificially bringing about experiences of God do not call into question experiences of God in general.

And if sensory experience does not require independent verification in order to be trusted then theistic experience does not.

Toto

And my point is that sensory experience does often require independent verification in order to be trusted. If I have the sensation of touch, I can verify it by looking at what I am touching, and others can see me touching. This is how I know it is not just in my mind.

With the god experience, no independent verification is possible. If I tell you I am having a religious experience, there is nothing I or anyone else can do to verify that this is because of a god, and not some other influence on the brain.

(I did have a religious experience once. I knew that my cat was god, and that knowledge filled me with a serene peace, as if I had suddenly achieved enlightenment. But I also knew that I was in a state of sleep deprivation, and that I shouldn't trust that experience, so I just enjoyed it while it lasted. Sure enough, the next day my cat did not exert any godlike influence over me. Do you think my cat is god? How would you verify that, yes or no?)