Toto

Hi Taffy - (BTW how's the bar?)

I tend to avoid this forum because I have a lot of trouble taking the idea of the existence of god seriously enough to debate it. From your arguments, I am not sure if you are playing with the idea, or if you are serious.

For one thing, I am trying to put experience of god on a parity with other sense experiences, and this is what leads me to assume that these experiences must be artifacts of the brain. Unlike sensory experiences, there is no independent verification, no repeatable experiments that allow different people to come to a consensus on what works and what is illusion. An experience of god in the brain is not verified by other senses, and other people looking at me will not necessarily observe the effects of god in me.

Furthermore, your idea that almost all people experience god as a mild-mannered humanistic loving parent is very culturally and historically limited. If you look at comparative religion, at the variety of religious practices through history and across cultures, people not have experienced "god" so consistently or so lovingly.

You make this strange statement: "My point is that the existence of God and the existence of an impersonal unifying force do not seem mutually exclusive. Why can't they both exist? Nothing in the experiences of either seems to entail that the other doesn't exist." My point was that some people experience "god" as a personal god, others as an impersonal divine force. Unless you are a polytheist, and think there is a different but still real god for each person, these have to be inconsistent.

And you keep missing the importance of my cat. Your experience of cats is obviously deficient. Cats were regarded as gods in ancient Egypt, so there is some data that some people think cats are god. I had an experience of my cat as god, which conformed to the religious experiences I have read about other people having, so by your criteria, this is valid evidence for my cat being god, at least as valid as your "evidence" that god is all loving and would never send a soul to hell.

Taffy Lewis

Toto:

There is also no independent verification of sensory experience. In the case of tactile experience verifying visual experience you still have sensory experience checking sensory experience. This is circular.

You might claim that having more than one sense is enough to make trusting sensory experience rational. No doubt it adds to the confidence one places in any given sense. However, the question is would it be rational to trust your senses even if you had only one. I think it clearly would. If the only access that I had to the physical world was my vision, and no other sensory modality, I believe I would be rational in trusting it. Just because I would have more confidence if I had more than one sensory modality that does not mean I wouldn't be justified in trusting one if it was my sole access to the world. In order to avoid a double standard, theistic experience should be treated the same way.

As to the point about repeatability, I think we should consider the nature of the objects of experience in each case. With regard to the physical world and our senses, we know that the physical world behaves in a mechanical fashion and thus we are able to codify its behavior mathematically. However, in the case of God we are supposed to be dealing with a personal being. From my experience with personal beings such as my friends and family, I know that I cannot always predict their behavior and they often surprise me. Personal beings are not like balls rolled down inclined planes. There does not seem to be a set of necessary and sufficient causal conditions that we can bring about that would prompt them to do whatever we want. They are much more complex than that and they seem capable of novel and creative action. If this is so we should not expect to be able to predict or control God's behavior in the same way we can control mundane physical objects. In other words, God's freedom would prevent us from making him jump through hoops whenever we like.

This is true of many nonreligious experiences. Suppose I remember drinking orange juice for breakfast last Friday. Surely I am justified in believing I did in fact drink the orange juice even if I have no other grounds besides the memory. There might not be any public evidence to support that belief and thus no one could observe any effects of the orange juice such that they could confirm my belief. I don't see why we should hold theistic experience to such a standard if a belief such as this does not meet it.

My claim was that there is nothing inconsistent between a personal creator god and an impersonal unifying force. Maybe God brought about this unifying force. Or maybe it has existed with him in eternity. There is nothing in religious experience that suggests that if one of them exists then the other cannot or does not.

Further, I don't know what information can be given by religious experience that would allow one to distinguish between an experience of Osiris and an experience of the god of the hebrews. Anyway, I can't think of any religious experiential reports that would allow us to make such a distinction. But there can be no doubt that there have been experiences of a personal presence or a guiding will that is supposed to be experienced by millions of people through history.

I think this is another case of a double standard. No doubt there have been many false sensory experiences of cats. I've had them myself. Just a few weeks ago I thought I saw my neighbors small dog under my car but instead it was a stray cat. This does not cause me to distrust sensory experiences of cats in general.

Further, I do not understand which features your experiences of your cat incline you to believe it is a god. What does it do that is godlike? Further: Do you dismiss the experiences as illusory because others do not share the experience? Do the experiences conflict with other experiences you have? If it appears to you as godlike what sorts of considerations incline you to dismiss the appearances? And how would the case of God be parallel?

(By the way, the bar's great as long as the bladerunners leave me alone.)

Toto

Taffy - I still am not sure if this is a serious argument or some sort of post-modernist game.

You posit a personal god, who leaves no physical trace on the real world that scientists can measure. This personal god confines himself to creating idiosyncratic mental experiences for people, which prove nothing, change nothing, and can be duplicated by magnetic fields. The god-experience has not done anything noticeable to improve human society. Unlike most other god believers, you do not think this god will send anyone to hell, so you don't even have Pascal's wager to fall back on. So what good is this god? Is it any more than an imaginary friend?

Perhaps I did not explain my cat experience well enough. I was in a state of stress and sleep deprivation, I was doing a lot of yoga, and I was trying to survive on a vegetarian diet, all of which made me a little light headed (or open to the divine if you believe in that). One day while walking to a friend's house, I had the revelation that my cat was god. He was not there at the time - I just pictured him sitting on top of my bookcase yowling at me, and I was suddenly filled with the experience of being in the presence of the divine. I had read enough about religious experience to recognize this as a religious experience. But I was also enough of a rationalist to know that it might be that my brain was playing a trick on me. But the experience was very vivid, and I still remember it and the feeling of ecstacy I got.

If I were to use your criteria for judging the experience of god - there is historical precedent, as many other people have experienced cats as gods in ancient Egypt.

But - I did not start to worship my cat (any more than I did.) He eventually died of kidney problems and was not resurrected. So I think that I was dealing with a trick that my own brain played on me.

Kachana

Sorry if this has been addressed, I only flicked through the thread, but the experiments in question usually find that stimulating the parts of the brain produce not the sensation of God, but a feeling of a 'higher' presence that is interpreted by people acording to their own beliefs and culture. Some people feel God, others aliens, others demons, poltergeists and so on.

IF this part of the brain is responsible for our experience of the Christian God, why does what is experienced depend on the person? It would be truly impressive if people who had never heard of Christianity before had their brain stimulated in this way and described an experience of a being that was identifiable as the Christian God. As it stands, the evidence seems more consistent with the idea that stimulation of that brain area creates a psychological state that people seek to explain within their own belief system.

Of course, it could be argued that the brain part in question is not the part God stimulates for our experiences of him. This raises the question of why we are able to mimick God's experience, some more research on exactly how similar lab experiences of God and purportedly real experiences of God are would be interesting to this end.

Taffy Lewis

Toto:

If people experience God directly then they would be justified in believing God exists whether or not they can infer God's existence from physical evidence. It seems to me that inferring God's existence would be an indirect and less personal way of relating to God than directly experiencing his presence. So a loving God would prefer direct experience to scientific inference. I doubt I would have any friends if the only people I believed in were those that I inferred rather than the ones I experience directly.

First of all, the experiences aren't idiosyncratic to those that have them. Further, people can be justified in holding idiosyncratic beliefs. Whether or not they are justified seems more epistemically relevant than whether or not they are eccentric.

Secondly, as I've already pointed out, we can artificially bring about sensory experiences. That does not undermine sensory experience. So the fact that we can artificially bring about certain types of religious experience says nothing about whether or not many are veridical.

Clearly you were in a pathological state. This also occurs to sensory experiences. Under the same conditions I might experience pink elephants. That does not undermine sensory experience in general. In order to avoid a double standard, we should not dismiss religious experience in general simply because some people have such experiences under pathological conditions.

For some reason you seem to be presuming that either all religious experiences must be veridical or none of them are veridical. This is a false dichotomy. We would never treat sensory experience this way so we should not treat religious experience in this manner.

The Other Michael

Hello Taffy Lewis,

I have had lots of sensory experiences, and have been able to verify them sufficiently to be able to generalize that I can trust the vast majority of what my senses report.

I've had no religious experiences that I can verify as true, and no one has demonstrated to me that their claimed religious experiences have truly occurred and are the result of an interaction with a god-figure or other supernatural entity.

Based on that I'll claim that no religious experiences to date are true, and I'm still waiting for the first one to be proven true before trying to generalize that any other religious experiences are true.

That's why I treat my sensory experiences different from (claimed) religious experiences.

cheers,
Michael

Taffy Lewis

Kachana:

I think the best response to this is to simply point out that interpretation is a part of all experience.

Consider this. Ancient Babylonian astronomers recorded and discussed the motion of "holes in the watery firmament" and ancient Greek astronomers recorded and discussed the motion of "solid objects in the void". Holes are very different from solid objects. Their very different interpretations of what they were seeing does not mean they weren't seeing anything and it does not mean they did not see the very same thing (ie. stars).

Toto

I don't seem to be getting through. I am not saying that either all religious experience is true, or all is false. I am saying there is no way of telling the true religious experience from the false. You seem to feel that religious experience that fits your definition of the modern politically correct all loving god is true, and any other religious experience is pathological. I see no basis for this other than your prejudices. I also see no difference between your idea of god and an imaginary friend.

Pomp

Taffy Lewis,

It seems to me that inferring God's existence would be an indirect and less personal way of relating to God than directly experiencing his presence. So a loving God would prefer direct experience to scientific inference. I doubt I would have any friends if the only people I believed in were those that I inferred rather than the ones I experience directly.

This is a very strange statement you've made. Most of us, I would guess, would certainly believe in a god who we were able to experience as directly as we do our human friends. Would a personal divine appearance somewhere that I can see him/her/it count as "direct experience" or is that "inferring" his/her/its existence. I doubt that I would have many friends if the only people I believed in were those that I "directly experienced" as mysterious presences in my head and, if I did, I would rightly be judged to have a mental illness.