Metacrock's Blog

Answering Attack on my Experience Argument

2009-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

A college kid ("kidnonothing") with a blog called NO Nothing Space has delivered a series of ingenious and devistitaing blows against my blog and my personal experience arguments. This kid is so ingenious he actually makes fun of the name "metacrock" ("a crock of Meta" is the matchless creative and extremely deep title of his thing, whatever it is).No one in the history of man has ever thought to make fun of the name "meatcrock." Of cousre I choose that name because its so serious and no one would ever make fun of it. Like the name "kidnonothing" connotes a real thinker.

This is an attack on my defense of mystical experience in the fact of the chemical determinist onslaught.

I was scouring the internet for purely unrandom rubbish when I came across this gem of Christian paranoia.

Note immediately that the hate group minion uses the phrase "rubbish" but also "paranoia" of my article which is an intellectual analysis of the issues involved in mystical experience and chemical determinism. So answering atheist attacks on arguments make one paranoid?

Despite my unabashed dislike of apologetics, I often find myself indulging an argument here or there, or all the time for the sake of entertainment. Some have called me a verbal masochist, because I thoroughly enjoy the stress-inducing frustration of arguing the qualities of the non-existent. You can probably get a hint as to why I latched onto this guy's blog post, already.

So it's peranoid to write a serious peice about mystical experince and brain chemistry. right, got it.I would love to see this, ahahaahah "philosophy major's" term paper. O god!

The author is a fellow by the name of Joe Hinman, or at least that's what he calls himself. I have no reason to doubt, but I'm naturally skeptical of all things. So I'll call him Joanne for now until he can prove beyond reasonable doubt that he is in fact Joe Hinman, and not Joanne. Just kidding.

What a comedian. what is that about? O the little child has heard that making fun of names is a way to intimidate and at the ripe old age of 23 he has absolutely no no sill at pull off intimidation tactics.

This character has a lot more bile to spill under the guise being creative and clever so I'll deal with that on atheist watch. Let's try to find some kind of kernel of intelligent criticism.

His first contention is that the study authors can't show that they are actually testing "real mystical experiences". Well, Joe, neither can anyone show that there is such a thing as a mystical experience to begin with, or that these experiences are not biochemical. Relying on current neurological ignorance won't get anyone anywhere in the long run, because neurologists will eventually find out what's going on in our heads while we are experiencing these "mystical experiences". And I don't know how many people can distinguish between "real mystical experiences" and "unreal mystical experiences", as if there is some coherently meaningful division between the two that everyone magically knows.

He demonstrates the only ignorance my argument turns upon. The point is not that my argument turns upon the ignorance in the state of the art in research of mystical experience. We know how to tell if a person had a mystical experience or that, that is no problem. We use the M scale (Mysticism scale) developed by Ralph Hood, which I did talk about in my blog piece and which this "person" is totally ignorant. The M scale is the state of the art research instrument, cross culturally validated it has become the the method of choice in psychology of religion. Here is the text in Hood's text book which will demonstrate the cross cultural validation of the scale and what it means for social science research. Hood is immanent and one of the major researchers in his field. But He ant no 23 year old "philosphy" major.

Joe rests on the idea that these guys who are studying how the brain manufactures religious experiences don't know about the M-scale. Anyone who's familiar with Joe "Metacrock" Hinman will have heard of this scale ad nauseum. But on the face of it, that accusation seems rather obtuse.

Yet somehow not as obtuse as this guy's reading sills. I said that the people such as Presinger who claim that they manufacture religious experiences by inducing them with drugs like serotonin or little helmets that shock the brain (the serotonin study that LaCanuck on CARM is always harping about) those guys don't know about the M scale. If the delicate genius would actaully their studies as I have done, he would see that. Of course he's too busy writing brilliant blog stuff this this, where he demonstrates his acute reading reading comprehension. So this proves that telling this guy something ad nauseum doesn't help him understand it.

It is unlikely that people who are researching mystical experiences don't know about a nearly half-century old, popular psychology scale. It is also an ultimately irrelevant consideration. One of the reasons why I'm not particularly keen on using the m-scale to criticize neurological research is because it's essentially a psychological aptitude test. The scale isn't meant to answer neurological questions. So when researchers are trying to figure out what parts of the brain are functioning to manufacture the sensations that we normally associate with mystical experiences, the m-scale is completely useless because it can't tell us anything about how the brain is working in its neurological makeup.

This is where this guy's true genius comes to the fore. This is the kind of brilliant understanding that produced one of the most success and well engineered lighter than air ships, and filled it with Hydrogen, the Hindenberg! He thinks I'm saying Presinger has never actually herd the term "M scale." Well that's not his field just because he does neurobiology doesn't mean he knows anything about psychology of religion. But to be fair he might sleep with a copy under his pillow for all I know, but he hasn't used it in his studies. Now here's the clever bit, by half: This guy thinks I'm saying that the M scale is about neurology. I think anyone with half a brain who read my previous article understood that I said nothing about that. The M scales tells us if one has had a real mystical experience or not. It's the only cross culturally validated way to measure the depth of a mystical experience. He's right the M scale is not about neurology, that's not my argument Hindenburg!

What's the importance of them not using it? Let's be clear now, by not using it the researchers such as Pretinger cannot prove the evoked mystical experiences. This guy thinks they can just do some neurology stuff and see the mystical experience in the brain. they cannot. They have no basis form which to connect brain chemistry with mystical experience before they prove they've produced one. But they can't prove that because they don't use the M scale to measure it! Hindenburg has demonstrated poor reading comprehension skills so let's say it again. Put it in social parlance: there is no control on their measurement of what they have produced in terms of mystical experience. They can't prove they did it. Without using the M scale they have no verifiable reliable accepted measurement to prove they made a mystical experience happen. you can't just say "I feel something about God, or I thought about God while I had this helmet on" and call that a mystical experience.

Atheists have bought into the assumption that they are not human, that they are merely chemical robots, sacks of chemicals with electricity flowing through them. They can't appreciate the holistic value so reduce rather than seek to understand. So they are just willing assume that mystical experience is nothing more than chemicals in the head so it need not be proved. They are willing to accept sloppy scientific procedure when it comes to backing up their pet ideology. In The New Frontier of Religion and Science, John Hick has a whole chapter where develops this argument. The brain research guys who try to reduce religious experience to brain chemistry are fine neurologists but they sloppy social scientists. Without using a validated control they have no way to prove that they produced a mystical experience. They can brag all they want to about their findings but their findings are not controlled and are suspect. But Andrew Newberg who pioneered in research of the "God part of the brain" tell us in Why God Wont Go Away that these experiences are real. They not illusions or trick of the mind, something real is actually happening in the brain when we think about God. Buit even he doesn't use the M scale so even can't prove he's produced a mystical experience, but he also doesn't claim to have done so. His research is about what happens in the brain when people think about God, it's not about mystical experience.

But missing the point is not enough for Hindenberg. He moves on to new heights of misunderstanding:

Second, Joe argues that:

All these researchers are doing is trying to line up the presence of some tranquilizing chemical such as serotonin and some form of thought which includes religious imagery. That doesn't prove anything because they can never show that the serotonin is the actual cause of the transformation effects that occur long term over the life span of the subject many years subsequent.

The first problem I have with this statement is that there's absolutely nothing insubstantial about lining up neurochemistry with the overall manifestation of the mystical experience or any experience for that matter.

Yes there sure is something wrong with it when you have a control to show that that's what you produced in the first place. But secondly, he doesn't seem to get that I'm not talking about the initial experience or the feeling of the experience (such as sweaty palms or something) I'm talking about the long term effects, did it make you nicer, did it change your life, did you feel more love. ect. Some of the 350 studies I talk about compare M scale respondents with transactional self actualization scales to see that mystical experiences have actually increased their sense of this or that, or have achieved this or that, or have been self actualized or not. They find that those who experience mystical experience are more self actualized than those who do not have such experiences. The actualization can be linked to the mystical experience. AT that point the brain chemistry quite beside the point.

Newberg found from his research that religious or mystical experiences predictably correlate with increased frontal lobe activity and a negatively correlated parietal lobe activity.

That's not a chemical in the bran, that's a part of the brain. While I'm sure a chemical is involved that's not the issue because I'm talking about mapping the expeinces in the geography of the brain I'm talking the long term effects in life.

The frontal lobe is the part of the brain where we essentially concentrate and the parietal lobe is where we get our spatial awareness from. This basically means that people having the experience will become aware of their individuallity slipping away and they will "become one with the universe"... man. And this is a repeatable phenomenon. The question neurologists are trying to answer is what is neurochemically going on in our brains that causes these kinds of sensations to occur.

Hindenberg has done it again! He has surpassed his level of obtusity! In brilliant display of not getting the point he approaches the sublime level of the obtuse. First, Newberg states explicitly that his research is not a damper on the common theory, belief in God or the idea that mystical experience is a trace of the divine. He actually argues that his research proves it is a work of the divine. He argues for an understanding of divine that would entail "God" (of object of ultimate concern) working through brain chemistry. He establishes that there is a spirituality of the neurological centers. None of the chemical reductionists have managed to disprove the divine origins of the experience. Just because chemicals are involved is no argument against the involvement of the divine.

Newberg: Why God Wont Go Away:

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.(157-172)

Newberg again:

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

Hindenberg

The second problem I have with this statement is that Joe wants us to honestly believe that neurologists can "never show that the serotonin is the actual cause of the transformation effets that occur long term over the life span of the subject many years subsequent." Now this might very well be true (anticlimactic, no?), but it's a rather deceptive point and completely irrelevant.

Completely irrelevant! Is' the whole argument! that is the actual point,very nub, the crucial turning point of my whole argument. It's the lynch pen, the transcendental signifier of my whole heuristic. See what I mean? Is he not the Master of missing the point? This is the single most crucial turning point of the whole argument that I make, in fact all four of my mystical experience based arguments, and yet he doesn't even get it,he think it's irrelevant! If the argument turns on this point and you don't have an answer to you have not answered my argument, stupid!

It's also crucial because it's a tie breaker. If the opening of neural receptors could be an act of God or a naturalistic act either one, and there's no way to tell, then we have to seek some other difference between the two states. The real difference is people who have mystical experience go on to have life transformations and have much better lives and much deeper insights and so on. that's the crucial point that makes the difference in having it or not having it.If you can't link that to the chemical reaction then you have done nothing to set the naturalistic hypothesis above the common core hypothesis as the valid interpretation. That is so long as the transformation effects are linked to the experience, the psychosocial research, including the M scale demonstrates that link very forcefully.

All of this was in the previous article btw. Many of my readers who aren't philosophy majors got it.

No one is trying to show that any specific chemical causes a transformative affect on people's lives over long lenghts of time. Researchers are simply trying to discover what causes the experience itself.

Yes genius, that's true. That's why they are wrong! that's why people who argue that those kings of studies disprove the divine connection to the experience are dead wrong and making asses of themselves because they don't understand the arguments or the logic of he research. They also show a total lack of knowledge concerning the data. They clearly are not well read in the field, ie psychology of religion.

No one denies that self-reported religious experiences are affective. That's patently obvious. If you have an experience that makes you think you're Brahman, you're going to have a fundamentally new outlook on life. Moreover, there is an underlying question of whether the experience is or is not a religious one to begin with or just an experience that's very weird.

With that statement the maestro misses the point brilliantly again, and in so doing demonstrates himself to be totally ignorant. There is no basis in the research to demonstrate that people who have mystical experiences have suddenly just started thinking of themselves as some kind of spiritual giants. There's no evidence to connect mystical experience to heightened sense of one's own importance. There's plenty of evidence to connect it to greater humility, or a deeper sense of one's lack of importance in terms of just being part of a whole that's greater than one's self. But there's no evidence that translates into arrogance. It's atheists who don't even have any religious experiences who are abhorrently arrogant and who demonstrate an ignorance to match. Like so many lazy ignorant people who can't be bothered to read the research, Hindenburg makes assumptions about the character of mystical experiencers which are contrary to the data. But one often attacks an enemy for likeness he sees in himself.

Joe introduces a number of ad hoc contrivances afterwards to buttress the overall point, all essentially dealing with god's involvement in the process. So I won't really get into those, since, quite frankly, it's a waste of time. So instead I will stop here. Abrupt, aren't I? You'll have to forgive me as I get accustomed to writing blogs.

This reference demonstrates Hindenberg's sheer genius at not knowing important bodies of literature that are crucial to the issue. Those would be Shcleiermacher contrivances and Rodolphe Otto Contrivances. I do urge Hindenberg to look those names up on Wiki as I'm' sure he's never heard of them.

Just the Facts Mam? Is Science the only From of Knowledge?

2009-07-14T05:29:00.000-07:00

Kandinsky

One thing I've often noticed about message boards, they work in waves. What I mean is, a wave of one kind of argument will come out and that's all you hear for a time. The atheists all say the same things and point out the same things and they do it wave. Right now the wave is for the notion that sicence is the only form of Knowledge and only matters of fact are real. So in other words, if something isn't supportedd by fact hen it's "imaginary." That's the big pay off form them, God is "imaginary" so you would have to be a big fool to believe there's a God. Not one single fact proves God is He's "imaginary." The only that matters is fact. All you can believe is fact. If you believe something that is not a prove fact you are just the biggest kind of jackass the world has ever seen.

Robert T. on CARM says:

Things that are said to exist are detectable and evidenced; otherwise, existence becomes a meaningless word. What is the difference between a thing that exists and a thing that is only imaginary?

Lee Randolph on Debunking Christianity:

"Disregarding Established Knolwedge" 7/12/29

Its simple,
If your beliefs are not consitent with established human knowledge, then they probably are not justified. In that case, other people are not justified in believing what you say about them, and furthermore you have no reason to expect anyone to believe you.

So knowledge has to be established to be accepted. But then one wonders how we ever make new discoveries? They would have to start out as established, then they wouldn't be discoveries. If it is the case that we can let the barrier down long enough to find some new facts then it's not the case that only estabilshed knowledge is valid. Of course he's going to say it matters how it's established Now this is where the ideology comes in. Because he is going to say there's only one way to establish knowledge, that's his way; science. But not just any science obviously, because when I have discussed 350 empirical studies and documented why they are good studies and given a bibliography with every study listed, even then the atheists are too lazy to look up a single one. They brush whole lot of them aside without one single "fact" or one counter study, with no support at all for their ignorant dismissal. They are just cock sure that they must be crap and so there's no need to investigate. That's the true mark of "free thinking" that one is narrow minded and unwilling to investigate. They sweep aside studies with no good reason, using chinsy arguments such as "Depok Chopra is listed on the same bibliography so these studies must be bad." They are so deeply committed to scientific knowledge.

The fact is they have no commitment at all to learning or science. They mark out science as the only valid form of knowledge merely because they mistakenly think that it protects them from an angry God. Too lazy to think they seek to hide behind a wall of "facts." Hiding behind numbers they think makes them invulnerable to argument. They don't have to think, they don't have to face who they are or what they have done, that's not in the numbers so it doesn't matter. Now that the new mantra "just the facts" is going around as the latest atheist gimmick (just as God hates amputees did at one time) they have quick, easy to spout an automatic response so they don't have to think about the issues. There are no issues, it's easy as pie. Either you just shut up, hate Christians, follow what the atheist websites tell you is important and believe "the facts of science" and you don't have to sweat it. There's absolutely no data for God and so therefore its' stupid to believe all the other other ideological regurgitation from the great fool know nothing Dawkins.

It doesn't require some fancy Postmodern bs to see this for the naive position it is. The absurd mythology of the pristine holy scientific data, all knowing, inviolable, enlightened data that almost reeks of medieval devotional parlance. One almost expects to see them genuflect before a test tube. People gather data. That is to say, weak foolish and self interested human beings gather data. "Facts" are deceptive and they are not always what they seem. It is super foolish to pretend that there is this great wall of data that protects you from the angry God and proves your reductionist anti-human world view and makes you invincible and all knowing.People are biased bigoted self interested jerks. Facts can be false, they can be looked at wrong, they can be misinterpreted, they can be researched selectively, they can be foolish and unimportant. The famous journal debate in the 30s between Lundberg and Lynd, Lundberg argued sociologists don't collect data on the number bricks in a tenement and economists don't collect dates on coins in the economy. All research is selective and it is always done with an ideology in mind. All research is aimed at backing a paradigm.

Facts stack up to support a paradigm. They are the bed rock upon which a paradigm sits. But when the paradigm shifts (which happens because there are too many anomalies it no longer explains enough) then the facts that supported the old paradigm, still facts, become unimportant anomalies and no longer matter. It takes more than facts. you have to understand the big picture. You have to self aware, know the limitation of your view and your biases and you have to understand the philosophical stage upon which your data is presented. That's the only way to make sense of anything. People research collectively, they screen facts selectively.

To an ideologue the only facts that matter are those that support the ideology (paradigm). Thus all other facts are not counter evidence, they are merely anomalies to be absorbed by the paradigm and forgotten. Such is the case with atheist arguments.

Look at Mark, a guy on carm who attacked my writing, droning on and on about how fact oriented he is. I have presented a slew of facts. I have 350 studies that back up a huge array of data, representing thousands of facts. These are facts. It's a fact that people with this experience score higher on self actualization tests than those who don't. But that means nothing at all to any athist. water off a ducks back. ITs' a fact and it's well prove by what do agheists choose in stead of facts. They take un supported undocumented bs off the cuff that minimize the importance of the data and totally ignores the facts.

Has Mr. Fact man (Mark) ever presented a single fact? one study? no not to my knowledge. In all the years I've been on CARM (since 99) I have seen three atheists use studies, each one of them used just one study.People like Mark rant and rave about the importance of facts. They have no facts at all that disprove God. they make totally supported statements about the alleged lack of facts backing belief in God knowing full were there are thousands of facts supporting arguments for God and the only problem is the squabble over interpretation (of course they have a totally biased motive to down paly disregard and demean the facts presented in God arguments). Suddenly the fact are totally unimportant and philosophical concerns come the fore again and interpretation becomes all important when arguments life tuning arise. The atheist respect for the facts is totally limited to facts that support his world view only!

The scientistic or reductionist crowd has changed the meaning of the term knowledge. They have redefined the concept to the point that it no longer means anything but scinece. They have done a reductionism on the concept. Wikipeidia defines scinece as "knowledge." This is not an authoritative source, but it is a good indication of the fallout among popular view points.

Science (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") refers to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome. In this sense, science may refer to a highly skilled technique or practice.[1]

The problem here is Scientia is not science. That term had a special meaning prior to the advent of mathematical probability. I did a major paper in Graduate school on this and it was part of my dissertation research. Ian Hacking documents that scientist was authority, it was a kind of "probability" prior to Pascal's version of mathematical probability and it worked by the authoritative sighting of traditional venerated sources. In the general population the easy formulation of "science = knowledge" has come to be made so lazily and easily that this is all people know. People no longer bother to distinguish between types of knowledge. The notion that science is the only form of knowledge follows naturally out of that reductionism.

The "real" authoritative dictionary definition of "knowledge" is not limited to just scientific knowledge.

Webster's online Dictionary

Main Entry:
knowl·edge Listen to the pronunciation of knowledge
Pronunciation:
\ˈnä-lij\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English knowlege, from knowlechen to acknowledge, irregular from knowen
Date:
14th century

1obsolete : cognizance2 a (1): the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association (2): acquaintance with or understanding of a science, art, or technique b (1): the fact or condition of being aware of something (2): the range of one's information or understanding c: the circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning : cognition d: the fact or condition of having information or of being learned 3archaic : sexual intercourse4 a: the sum of what is known : the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind barchaic : a branch of learning

This definition of knowledge from the real dictionary does not limit knowledge to science, in include awareness of anything including art. Atheist limit knowledge to science in the mistaken delusional belief that science somehow disproves God and provides them with a means of buffeting the logic of God arguments they can't beat.
The irony is that even though the reductionists have foisted this er zots view upon the public scientists themselves don't buy it. Scientists working environmental fields for example have gained respect for "traditional forms of knowledge" (that means "primitive people gathering roots and herbs). Scientists working in these fields contrived ways to preserve and venerate the use of traditional knowledge while understanding it's application to modern science.

"Science, Traditional Knowledge and Sustained Development"
CSU Series on Science for Sustainable Development No. 4

In addressing the goals of sustainable development, the role of science is crucial; scientific knowledge and appropriate technologies are central to resolving the economic, social and environmental problems that make current development paths unsustainable. However, science does not constitute the only form of knowledge, and closer links need to be established between science and other forms and systems of knowledge in addressing sustainable development issues and problems at the local level such as natural resources management and biodiversity conservation.

Traditional societies, usually with strong cultural roots, have nurtured and refined systems of knowledge of their own, relating to such diverse domains as astronomy, meteorology, geology, ecology, botany, agriculture, physiology, psychology and health. Such knowledge systems represent an enormous wealth. Not only do they represent other approaches of the acquisition and construction of knowledge and harbour information often as yet unknown to science, but they are also expressions of other relationships between society and nature in general and of sustainable ways of managing natural resources in particular.

(ICSU is tied into UNESCO).

Science still relies upon reason for it's premises and for the understanding of its data. This means that science as a pristine and pure fact rather appertains which is always objective and correct is an illusion and myth. Since still requires reason and so one must understand logic and reason to understand science.

Course work.info "Some People think Science is the Supreme From of knowledge."
gooble html version

Science also relies on reason as a way of knowing. Reason is used to turn the data that the scientist has collected into a logical conclusion. Sometimes scientists draw the wrong conclusions from their research. This is called post hoc ergo propter hoc or 'false cause'. For instance: 'both today and yesterday it rained. I did not take my umbrella with me on either day; I will lake it with me tomorrow to ensure that it does not rain.' It is important to realise "the essence of scientific truth: it can never be proved experimentally that a claim is correct, but it can be proved that it's wrong".4* This is because of a characteristic of the logic that a scientist uses when interpreting his data. This interpretation is generally done through Induction, the idea that because your experiments keep confirming your hypothesis, the hypothesis is correct. Karl Popper observed that every swan he had seen was white. He concluded that all swans were white. However he had been observing swans in the northern hemisphere, and black swans exist in places such as Australia. Albert Einstein said: "A thousand experiments may prove my hypothesis right, but one experiment can prove it wrong”.5 No scientific theory is certain; it has just not been proved wrong yet. However most of us accept that it is true that day turns to night because the earth is turning on its axis. Therefore some theories are so close to certain that they are accepted as true.

The book that I'm writing, and almost finished, is a prime example of the need to go beyond this mere wall of numbers in seeking truth. There's a vast subject area atheists are as afraid to explore, that is the field of psychology and religion. This is the field that produced the 350 studies on religious experience. There is much more to it than just that. The study I posted before, about religious expedience and the "physically challenged" is a prime example. That study demonstrates the use of reason, philosophy and other areas of knowledge in the scientific method to produce a deeper understanding of human experience. They are not trying to reduce experience to a wall of numbers so they don't have to take responsibility or feel anything, they are trying to actually get at a reality about being human. That study even uses phenomenology in a way that allows the data to suggest categories rather than submerging the data in preconceived categories.

That's the whole point of phenomenology in the first place We normally pigeon hole sense data into preconceived categories. This means that most research is done to confirm biases rather than to find truths. Phenomenology is an attempt to get around that process by allowing the data to suggest the categories itself. With the phenomenological outlook the kind of data used is sense data not numbers that have already been digested and transformed into ledger sheets or distilled into biased pre ordained conclusions. This sort of thing has been going on in psychology for a long time. Some of it is wacky, some is "new age," some is very valid and it requires reason to discern which is which. The reductionist pigeon hole because they have to have that unassailable wall of numbers to hide behind. They reduce anything to the distilled numbers that can be used to support their biases.

The atheists create an even more truncated step in this process by directly filtering all "facts" through the ideological lens. Half of my God arguments are based upon empirical data. But the atheists can't handle, they can't answer God arguments so in an attempt to just make theists shut up and stop embarrassing them with stuff they can't answer they come up with the idea that God arguments are just wrong headed a priori and they are not be listened to. Thus the facts that support those arguments have to go away. They are not longer facts and they are not important facts, they are just anomalies to be absorbed into he paradigm.Atheists on the message boards have such little regard for the facts (the one's I present, well documented and totally researched thousands of empirically scientific facts gathered in hundreds of studies) they refuse to even look one of them up! that's how dedicated they are to facts.The bias and hypocrisy of researchers is the most important fact of all.

We have to think about God in terms of philosophical arguments because God transcends "thinghood" and is not given in sense data. This is far from meaning that God is not detectable. But we can't do in science, we have to use other means. There are other means. We know that scientific knowledge and method allows things to fall through the cracks away. Induction by its nature, in terms of scientific usage, only takes averages and allows things that don't fit the average to fall through he cracks. On a basic simple level, the average woman is not strong enough to beat up the average man. But there are women who can mop the floor with me because they don't fit the average, probably neither do I. The very concept that knowing about great ideas is not intelligent and doesn't require intellectual ability (which is something most of these atheists believe) merely because they don't accept philosophy and thinking, is just idiotic. They have to rule out the acquisition of knowledge concerning great ideas.

The real tyranny comes in where they attempt to rule out any epistemic or ontological alternative merely because it doesn't suit their ideology. God is at the basis of reality, God is the foundation of reality. God is not a thing in creation. So naturally God can't be studied directly through empirical means, he's not given in sense data. God has to be fall between the cracks. Then he's ruled out of established knowledge because only that which is given in sense data can be distilled into the impregnable wall of numbers. The wall of numbers (the one atheists hide behind so can't see them) is only constructed out of "facts" they deem important anyway (those that support their ideology). So at that rate they already have multiple levels of reduction where they have closed the cracks on the things that fall between them and merely pretend they were never there. The supreme arrogance of this tyranny is the worst in humanity. The reason is because they are willing to screen out the most sacred ideas, love, truth, tolerance, open mindedness, learning, thinking, art, life, emotion, morality, merely to get God arguments off their backs and to maintain this impregnable wall of numbers behind which they imagine God can't see them.

We can see them doing this screening process all the time. I hate to pick on Lee Randolph again, but he so clearly typifies this ideological goose stepping:
7/10/2009 "direct evidence of moral behavior from evolution."

My working hypothesis is that Game Theory and simple rules derived from self-interest are sufficient to generate self-organized behavior that is labeled as "Morality". Here's more evidence to back that up.

Evolution Guides Cooperative Turn-taking, Game Theory-based Computer Simulations Show, ScienceDaily.com

"We published indirect evidence for this in 2004; we have now shown it directly and found a simple explanation for it. Our findings confirm that cooperation does not always require benevolence or deliberate planning. This form of cooperation, at least, is guided by an ‘invisible hand’, as happens so often in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that just finding biological roots for behaviors is not morality. We are not getting at the origins of morality by showing forerunners in biology. All we do with that is to show, maybe, the origins of our inspirations for morality. Trying to reduce values to pragmatic tips for survive is not a valid means of demonstrating the nature of moral thinking. We could explore than invisible hand thing. There might be an organizing principle that suggests the TS argument, or it might just be an empty invisible hand that has nothing better to than fill itself with a useless exercise in number crunching. But the fact remains, morality is a form of ethics, and ethical requires ethical decision making. you can't get an ought out of an is, biological tenderizes for behavior are only "is." Before you can turn these unimportant facts into ethical decisions you have to do some thinking, that thinking has been done for the most part by philosophers. This is part of what we call "knowledge." So to understand mortally we have to expand you knowledge base to something other than science.

Facts are not knowledge. We need to understand the global nature of knowledge. Facts are not the limit on the nature of knowledge. Like Webster's says that knowledge is any understanding of anything. In an educational sense "knowledge" is the learning we derive from understanding what we study. We can't narrow the field of matters deemed worthy to study to just scientific matters. The basic human condition is what should concern us because we are human Our condition implies that all knowledge is important. We need to be global in our understanding of knowledge. The ontological and the metaphysical are above the scientific because they include the sweeping structures that tell us what is important knowledge and what is a lose collection of "facts" gathered as the analogue to a string collection. The hard science reductionists are even willing to cancel out social sciences. We need all of it, art, literature, philosophy, history, social science, every field. The reductionist ideology seeks to control minds. It seeks to shut down learning and shut down reflection upon being human.
__________________

Internalize the Values of the Good

2009-07-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments that I make and of which I am most proud (I really believe God showed it to me) is my soteriolgocial drama. That is my version of the free will Defense. Why does God allow evil, pain,and suffering? It's because we have to have free will and means we run the risk of wrong choices and wrong choices lead to evil, pain and suffering. My argument is a bit different than the conventional one because turns on the idea that we have to have the sort of world in which we live, one where we must search for truth in our hearts, because that's the only way to internalize the values of the good. Here's a run down on the argument:

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The argument would look like this:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultimate goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

So the pivotal point is this bit about internalizing the good. That's one point that atheists steadfastly reject. Why do we need to internalize values? What does it mean to internalize values and so on? Of course it means that when we internalize values we really believe them. They are our own, we taken into our psyche's and we make them ours because in internalizing we really get to know them. We have to defend them and think them through we come to really know them. What are values of the Good? Love, forgiveness, reciprocity, compassion, to name a few.

I have now found a study that links internalizing values with meaning in life. International values is a means of transforming one's life and moving into a position of growth, progress, and personal enlightenment.

Loretta Do Rozario’s hermeneutic Phenomenological study of those with disabled people indicates the value of peak experience or self transcendence, the transformative power of religious experience. The study was conducted as serious of interviews with respondents chosen for disabilities and hardships that they faced (more about the mythology in chapter four, “studies”). The study proceeded based upon two major procedures, analysis of interviews done with respondents and autobiographies the respondents wrote. The findings indicate a set of over all strategies and paradigms that people use to enable them to move forward and survive and deal with their conditions. The major results show that the states of hardship and joy can coexist in the same life at the same time but these depend upon strategies. Mystical experience is not a panacea through which all problems vanish just because one has this experience. But the study does show that the transformative power of religious experience as a whole and mystical experience in particular, is a vital and integral part of making the strategies work. The sense of spiritual unity involves transcendence of the self, thus making suffering bearable. Spiritual awareness (which is clearly an aspect of experience) fosters hope through belief in some greater aspect such as the divine or a cosmic force; religious assurance as a value of traditional beliefs; religious experience along with rituals provides order and meaning; adds to the sense of an existential journey in which the sufferer is growing and progressing, and the idea of purgatory enables one to separate oneself from suffering.

The findings of this study put the experience of having an illness or disability into an overall context of a person’s universal search for meaning and self transcending. This can be likened to Victory Frankl’s belief, based upon his experience of living in a Nazi concentration camp, that ‘suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning…and that through suffering one is given a last chance to actualize the highest value to fulfill the deepest meaning…’ People in this study concurred with this personal and contextual interpretation of illness and disability, by reaffirming that the process of meaning making was similar to that of the mythology of the hero and heroine’s journey, which depicts a universal journey from a separation of self to a return to ‘true self…’ The inner awareness of wholeness despite all the odds points to an implicit experience of life which can transcend form and matter. This experience of wholeness or consciousness extends and challenges the view of disability and illness as only a meaning making and revaluing opportunity in the lives of people. Instead, the model of wholeness and reconstitution point to the possibility of an implicit order of consciousness or wholeness in which people who have undergone some crisis or critical incident in their lives may be able to access and experience a ‘deeper reality’ or ‘flow’ in life…similar to the insights of the great religions (author points to social psychologist Csikentmihalyi).

Thus the “shared” aspect of the experience is not in terms of physical navigation the world, not shared perception of objective objects, but the “inter-subjective” similarities of navigation in life. RE is an integral aspect of the spiritual and psychological wherewithal that we all need to “make it” to bear up under the material trammels and horrific disappointments and tragedies that life brings our way. Just as the same kinds of experiences, the same emotional and para-senstory features are experienced by people the world over so the same coping ability and meaning and journey to wholeness is also experienced through RE.

This is the important bit:and that through suffering one is given a last chance to actualize the highest value to fulfill the deepest meaning…’ What that says is that through suffering, though living in the kind of world in which we live, we internalize the values of the good (higher values) and through that process develop a sense of personal fulfillment, growth and transformation.

This study has triple impact for three of my arguments:

(1) For the soteriological drama

it proves the validity of internalizing the values of the good. It shows hat living in the kind of world we have internalizing the values is the upshot. This demonstrates the justification for this sort of world. We have to have it in other to make spiritual progress. Of course atheists will argue God can just create us that way but that's not the case. We have to go through this process or it's not Us learning! That's like a little kid wishing to be an adult instantly; if the wish was granted he wouldn't have any experience of growing up and learning for himself.

(2) Religious experience arguments.

Demonstration of the life transformational nature of religious experience. That far outstrips any rival experience atheists offer.

(3) Arguments about sin in heaven.

At times they argue, will God allow sin in heaven? The theory is that if we have free will we can sin in heaven, and of course we would want to. But this disproves that nonsense because heaven is only made of people who choose to be there. since they will have experienced this internalizing values of the good the wont want to give up their progress and return to the infantile state of sin.

How We Know Things Part 2

2009-07-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

Do you see these chairs?

Followup to the other post I did on this "how we know things" topic. I posted the same blog piece you see in part 1 over at CARM. Crystal Star did not respond but Emuse took up the challenge. Emuse is an intelligent guy who I have always respected as a thinker.

Essentially he's taking issue with the Thomas Reid argument part of the thing. This first statement he makes is bout this proposition in the TR argument:

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

Quote:
Originally Posted by Emuse View Post

This assertion is extremely clumsy and ignores many important distinctions.
No it is not and you can't prove it is. you are totally wrong. I guess you never read Descartes. show me the data then. where's the epistemological data?

It is correct to say that the external world cannot be proved empirically or on the basis of rational argument. The existence of the external world must therefore be assumed because rational or empirical proof of it is impossible in principle. It is not reasonable to ask for a type of proof (ie, empirical) if the type of proof is known to be impossible.

Meta:

No it's not. Rational proof of the external world is possible in principle if and only if you are wiling to make judgments and assumptions, not if you demand epistemological proof.

the empiricist dilemma is absolute. you can't get out side your perceptions to check them and make sure they are true.

The epistemological level is above (or should I say "more primary?) than that of the empirical level. The epistemological level would demand an absolute means of accounting for the appearances we take for granted as the world around us. No amount of empirical data can ever guarantee that level of knowing because any data that would be had as part of a world illusion would also be illusory.

At this point the sphincter mind set reductionist crowd usually says something like "that's so stupid to doubt our experiences of the world, it's right there in front of you I have no reason to doubt it." But look at what they are doing. they are making an assumption. At that point they are willing to leap across the barrier, the chasm of logic, to make a leap of faith and assume their perceptions are real. Yet when I want to do this concerning my perceptions of God's presence they assert it's just an illusion caused by chemicals. So atheists are always trying to privilege their position while disadvantaging mine.

They want absolute proof in terms of God. But they are not willing to supply that kind of proof for their own view point, they expect that to be granted a prori as part of the presumptions imposed by science the gate keeper of reality. Rational proof of the external world depends upon one assuming certain thins, such as the inviolability of perception otherwise how could any proof ever break out of the circle of epistemological doubt? Unless you can get outside your own perceptions to check it you can't trust the data, but what do you perceive with if not your own perceptions? At some point you have to make a leap of faith to assume that data is accruate. You must rust sense data or you are doomed to remain in the morass.

Quote:Emuse

The same is true of history. We cannot transport ourselves into the past or bring the past into the present so that it can form a part of our ongoing experience. Therefore empirical proof of historical events is impossible in principle.

Meta:

look, you are right. But there's the problem. it doesn't help your side it helps my side. Because to the extent that you prove we can trust external reality through scientific evidence you also prove we can trust that God is real or that there is a Transcendental Signifier in the real world through the same mechanism and the same forms of assumptions that you get with science.

By "same mechanism" I mean you have to trust sense data to give an accurate portrayal of the world around you. By "mechanism" I mean both reason and the epistemic assumptions we make that enable us to take the reality of the world for granted.

still me:

(1)the scientific studies prove that RE meets the criteria.

that's the first reason.

(2) TS proves we have to assert the reality of TS in order to even speak or think. So we have to assume it is beyond the mind.

Quote:Emuse

However, in relation to the claims of Christianity, this is not the case. Empirical evidence that Jesus is risen from the dead is not, in principle, impossible.

Meta:

that's not the issue. We are talking about the existence of God. we are not talking "Christian evidences." you don't come to belief in Jesus based upon belief in the resurrection. you accept the resurrection as a consequence of belief.

Quote:Emuse

It is quite within his capacity to appear and prove himself empirically. Heck .. he could have remained on earth and left us with undeniable proof. However, it is not enough to assume that everything fits into the category of "that which cannot be proved" and try and arbitrarily lump everything into the same category.

Meta:

he proves himself to me. That's a stupid argument. how silly can you get? that's down right anti- intellectual. (no offense).

Actually I blew that response. I really wasn't on target as to what he was arguing. He's not trying to limit our capacity to aruge for the Res he's trying to limit the capacity for arguing that there's a category of unprovable. But what I should have said was that we have to assume the state of affairs we know. Given what we know about the world with the data we have available to us in status quot, resurrection is unprovable. But even if God did make himself known in the way he describes or even in another more evocative or less questionable way, there would still be room to say "this is only an illusion, or a dream." I'm sure there will be atheists if there is a white throne of judgment who stand before it and refuse to admit its real. I am betting if the there's a hell some atheist will be there several million years before they begin to get the drift.

Quote:Emuse

It runs much deeper than this. We have already seen that external reality is something that must be assumed. Once we assume external reality, we assume the existence of others. One important aspect of external reality (an important basis on which we assume it to be external) is that others around me share the same experiences as me at the same time.

Meta:

that argument turns against you with the Reid argument, because it proves RE can meet the same criteria that we use to make that assumption.

thus RE is fitting within the same assumption paradigm.

It's funny how they never heard me say that I am making the same assumption. what he said:

external reality is something that must be assumed. Once we assume external reality, we assume the existence of others.

That is really the basis of he Reid argument. They are assuming that whips up on my argument and yet that's what I'm saying myself. Somehow they never hear that, nor do they hear what I say when I continue and add that it turns in favor of my argument disproves their position it means that all we can do is make a judgment and the criteria we use to make it is met by Religoius experience! They usually wind up giving the same criteria as well.

he's also contradicted himself at this point because above he tries to narrow the margin of unprovable to the point of casting doubt upon the category, now he seems to embrace the category.

Quote:Emuse

For example, if there is a chair in the room then it will not be the case that others will experience it and I won't. It is not simply enough to say that experiences must be regular and consistent. There must also be shared or shareable in principle. If someone has regular, consistent experiences but those experiences are not shared by others around that person then a problem is likely to be assumed so your statement is woefully incomplete.

Meta:

Now you know that I have included "shared" every single time. I have proved they are shared. millions of people all over the world, maybe as many as 1 in 4 have mystical experience. All over the world they stack to be the same. they are all alike that is proved clearly and definitely by, you got it, the ever loving M scale!

Quote:Emuse

Nope. It is also the fact that the experience is shared by others around me. If I could see a chair in the room but others around me could see no chair then I would seriously doubt what was going on with my mind.

Meta:

But not all expressions are shared. you have a different level of consciousness than other people. But still assume you are real even though no one else but you knows what it's like to be you.

Of course that hits at the Cogito. The only thing we can be sure of apart from any assumptions or external reality is the cogito guarantees our own existence. But even that has been cast into doubt by subsequent philosophers (subsequnt to Descartes of course). I'm not sure my interjection of this point isn't also a screw up. I guess I was getting at the idea that some things on the most basic level can be ventured and that includes being itself and our relationship to Being.

Quote:Emuse

And that fact that it is not regular and consistent to the same degree cannot be arbitrarily skipped over as though it is unimportant. Not only that, it does not possess that quality of being shareable.

How to Think

Gerogetown University

Appeal to consequences

You can also make an argument, or more normally a counter-argument against someone else’s point of view, by appealing to consequences. These kinds of arguments normally have two different forms. You can appeal to the consequent conclusions to which someone is committed in making his argument, or you can appeal to undesirable consequences that flow from the course of action advocated by someone else. If you can show that the consequences of someone else’s position are either false or inconsistent, you have made a strong counter-argument of your own.

Here is how both kinds of argument work. Suppose you are discussing with someone when the United States should intervene militarily abroad. Suppose also that your companion is arguing that the United States had a moral obligation to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo because of the humanitarian disasters taking place there. You might make a counter-argument by appealing to consequences: If you believe that countries have moral obligations to intervene abroad, then the United States—and most other countries, based on their own moral precepts—would be in a state of near-continual war, invading this or that country based on a supposed moral obligation. That is an argument from consequences. If the consequences of your argument commit you to conclusions that you do not hold, the argument cannot be totally sound.

This quotation actually makes appearl to the consequent a positive thing one should do in an argument rather than a fallacy.

Here is one that uses appeal to the consequences as a fallacy:

It's called "the fallacy page"

Arguing that a proposition is true because belief in it has good consequences, or that it is false because belief in it has bad consequences is often an irrelevancy. For instance, a child's belief in Santa Claus may have good consequences in making the child happy and well-behaved, but these facts have nothing to do with whether there really is a Santa Claus.

That's how he's using it. Typical atheist thinking. The only thing they can think of is that I just assume because I believe in something it must have positive effects. The fact that these effects are derived from empirical data, and we are trusting empirical data at the moment because we have agreed that we are going to make epistemic judgments to accept empirical data when it can be validated, so this is not the consequences of belief, it's the consequence of an experience. The belief is an explanation of the experience!

If we accept that as a fallacy, not only would there be no debate, no policy debate, but atheists could never argue that religion is bad.

It's only a fallacy when the assumption is that the consequences comes from the belief itself, but when the data is empirical and it doesn't come from the belief but the experience, the belief follows as an explanation that's not fallacious at all.

(next quote he responds to by me:
therefore, we have as much justification for assuming religious belief based upon experience as for assuming the reality of the external world or the existence of other minds).

Quote:Emuse

I completely disagree. Your arguments so far gloss over so very important distinctions between the phenomena you are describing. Let us take other minds as an example.

Meta:

NO NO NO read the link man. you don't' read the material. this is exactly what Hood says. I just got through summarizing that chapter in my book because Hood asked me to. It met with his specifications. It's his findings. read them.

Quote:Emuse

I can see that I have a particular ontology (two arms, two legs and so on) and have direct knowledge that I possess a mind. I see other beings with the same physical ontology to myself and which engage in similar/identical behaviors. That they have have a mind such as my own is the best explanation for their perceived behavior. So the claim that there is no empirical support for the claim that other minds exist is misleading to say the least.

How Do We Know?

2009-07-04T06:36:00.000-07:00

you don't know what this is do you?
But it does exist.*

sometimes atheists ask things like "how do you know God is good?" I also feel they are not asking sincerely they think they are being cleaver but they are really walking right into it. Here is a recent example from CARM that I feel serves as well as any as a "typical" example this sort of line.this is by "Crystal Star."

Hi, I've asked this in other threads but haven't gotten an answer. I was thinking hypothetically if the a God existed, would it be possible for it to actually prove itself to us so we can believe, with our limited human minds and technology? (from its perspective) I can't think of a way for it to give us undeniable evidence since we are talking about a being that has the intelligence well beyond our own and has the ability to create the universe (what I've seen Christians usually describe it as).

She(?) thinks she is making a devastating point against belief. But in fact she's actually laying the ground work for one of my best God arguments. I agree that there is no such ting as evidence that is "undeniable." She this person construes that as a a reason not to believe it actually just points up the folly of demanding such proof. If it is impossible to have "undeniable proof' why expect it? But this is no reason to assume we can't know, and it's reason to assume we can't community with God. We don't have to have exhaustive knowledge of God to be aware of God. We can sense God's presence and experience God's power in our lives without knowing exhaustive and exactly what God is.

The biggest reason why walked into a trap is because what she says here, the dilemma that she sets up is exactly the position I need to be in to spring my argument from Epistemic judgment (aka "the Thomas Reid Argument").

Argument:

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

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

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

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

(5) Inersubjective

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

(6) Real and Lasting effects.

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

See note on the Thomas Reid project and Reid himself end page 2

*We assume reality by means of a Jugement

*we make such judgments based upon certain criteria

*Because RE fits the same criteria we are justified in making the same assumption; ie that these experiences are indicative of a reality.

VIII. The Thomas Reid Argument.

A. How do we Know the external world exists?

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

In other words the atheist can't answer that argument any better. There's no advantage there in being an atheist, but that's no reason to assume we are debilitated in finding God. We have to make an epistemic judgment anyway, so since Religious experience meets the criteria by which we do that, that is in itself reason enough to believe in God.

How do we know this is not just a very powerful being who is trying to do something evil and is tricking us into thinking its a good God? A very powerful being would be very much capable of doing that. So asking us to believe in it and worship it when its not proving this to us doesn't make any sense and is irrational for it to demand that we believe and worship it when we don't have a way of knowing this.

I originally answered this by demonstrating that God is not "a being" but being itself. That rules out a "very powerful being deriving us." Why? Because it's not a question of a powerful being but one of being itself, which cannot device unless we want to think that deceptions is the basis of all being, if that is the case then there's no standard of truth to compare it to. But I don't think she understands the argument because I don't think she, or even HRG understand what's being said when I say God is not a being but the ground of being. For those who wish to explore this concept further see my (several) pages on Doxa.

I have another couple of arguemnts as to how we can know we are not being decieved by God.

(1) Love and a life time of "knowing" God

(2) The ontological nature of the Good.

(1) Love and the life time of knowing God

We can have experience of God over a life time. In my 30+ years of being a Christian I have never know the presence, the sense of love, the numinous that I think of as "God" to be deceiving. There have been times when I thought it might be that, but it always turns out not to be. Sometimes it seems God knows best and I don't have a clue so it could be deceptions, but it doesn't work out that way. There's no reason to think it will. As Kierkegaard said "If the lover is asked 'why this one and not some other beloved?' the only real answer a lover can offer is 'there is no other.'" In other words "this is the one."

(2) The ontological nature of the good.

The ontological nature of the good is such that it can't be the derivative. Good cannot be second. Good must be the act of an eternal creator since God can't the immitation. This is so because Good proceed from the same impulse that being shears with love; the impulse to give. But the nature of evil is such that it can only be a mockery of the good. Evil is about power, evil is about tearing down. Evil is about power but the kind of power that comes from being creator its about the kind power that one takes and hangs on to ruthlessly. Because the nature of the good is such that it proceeds from the basis of being and form love. That is the character we understand to be divine based upon the experience of all mystics the world over, and upon our basic human concept of good. Thus the original, eternal, ground of being cannot be evil and thus cannot be deceptive.

think about what we are saying when we speak of deception. Deceptions means to distort the truth. That means there's a truth to disport. Therefore, if we link evil with deception, evil must be the copy as deception is a derivation from what is. Thus what is is true and what distorts and derives from it to trick and device is by itself nature a copy. Thus evil can't be the origin, it can't be the original state of things, it can only be the undermining of what already is. Thus the original creator would be good and would establish truth, and the pretender would be the deceiver.

What it comes down to is we are talking about a being that goes beyond the human minds understanding. So we can't know its full nature, thus we can't know its real place in the universe and its relation with it, thus we can't know if what its doing is right or if what someone describes about it is correct and so its not possible for us to truthfully believe or worship it.

Yes but going to the Thomas Reid argument, we can't know anything anyway. you are as much in the dark theists. Atheist have no edge there. We could be all brains in vasts. We could all be a figment of my imagination. She has no way of discerining this. She has no magic data that assures her this is not the case. She merely decides that it's not and moves on. The criteria we use to decide reality religous expeirnce fits. So therefore, religious experience is as trustworthy as that used by atheists. In fact I would say it's more so because it answers questions that atheists have to pretend don't matter or don't exist.

Further, punishing us because we don't believe would be like punishing a disabled person wheel chair because they can't run a marathon, or punishing a dog because it doesn't know rocket science.

that's just a matter of theological venue.

*just a building at the Texas State Fair grounds.

The Value of Theological Education part 2

2009-06-30T18:46:00.000-07:00

An atheist on CARM recently went into a tirad complaing about theology. He didn't even know the proper term for a theologian he called the thread "stupid things theologists say." Theologists! Anyway, Here' a sample of his rant:

I'm not going to start this with an insult, just to differentiate myself from some of my theist "friends".

I was searching for a theological article that made some sense to me such that I could try and enter into a meaningful debate with Metacrock. I searched various sources - I looked at a number of publicly available journals eg.

http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/
http://journals.cambridge.org/action...ournal?jid=SJT

And read through a number of the articles, but they are all the same. Each author simply puts forward their own views, without any reference to research or evidence to support their points.

Even accepting that the subject matter doesn't really lend itself to evidence, most of this stuff just looks like shameless invention.

I think the biggest paradox in reading this rubbish is that for authors who must (by nature) start with a premise that there is a deity, they don't appear to take any backward step in presuming to know the mind & motives of their particular deity. Wouldn't that in itself be the height of arrogance?

After this he said my writing is so bad he can't tell that I ever went to school. I confronted him with an article from my journal, Negations, the academic journal I published, peer reviewed and indexed and the whole nine yards. Then then somewhat changed his tune:

So I start reading (and I must say that for a dyslexic, the writing
is a credit to you),

But his admiration was short lived because he can't accept the fact that there are other forms of knowledge than the one he's been trained in. He's been brain washed to believe that only empirical scientific data is knowledge so he wont accept anything else. He goes on carping how stupid the article is aside from being well written because it isn't crammed full of facts:

and I cant get more than a few paragraphs into the article with hitting a point that as a fact driven person I can read past

You state "In so arguing, he anticipated much of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and C. Wright Mill's notion of the "cheerful robot," as well as the decline which now besets our society"

What "decline" is that? Why is it that theology seems to be riddled with unsupported statement where the authors don't seem to make any effort to given even that veneer of fact?

You are talking about ideas and using thought categoreis instead of number crunching we can't have that!

"The next generation grows up thinking of civilization as freeways and flush toilets, with no concept that it could be an ideal of behavior or of individual thought, and with no concept that spare time might be a source of intellectual renewal, rather than the chance to play"

Yet here am I, discussing the merits of theology...

As though that's all there is to ethics, just the fact that you are discussing this, however badly is somehow supposed to prove that the idea of civilization hasn't moved away from ethical thinking!

Admittedly I haven't finished reading the entire article, but that's partly due to the fact that I don't think it's heading toward a conclusion that would be supported with reference to facts supporting an argument.

That statement I can't help but hear as meaning "i just can't force myself to think in terms not involved in number crunching and and I'm too uncertain in the world of ideas to mess with it." I've always suspected that these reductionist types use data to hide behind because they can't deal with ideas. This guy didn't do anything to change that impression. This guy's view point represents the major thrust of atheist thinking now days. That's very ironic because way back in the early 70s as an undergraduate I began my crusade against reductionism, as an atheist. I identified poetry, art and literature with atheism. Back then you could because the major atheist are thinkers, philosophers and novelists not scientists. Although the scientific world had its share of them. Since I left the atheist world it went whole hog into the direction of one-denominational man. Even a large portion of scientists have seen through the reductionist bs but not the atheists. The atheists on CARM thought that Thomas Kuhn was a creationist!

Stanton Jones, professor of psychology at Wheaten college, observes that philosophers were the first to notice the sciences over dependence upon positivism and it's ideological entrapment for the assumptions scientists were making. This goes back to C. Wright Mills warnings about the priesthood of knowledge that sociology was turning itself into (The Sociological Imagination). Jones observes:

The traditional posativistic view of science has been eroding since the late 1950s. Although, preceded by a substantial amount of work in the philosophy and sociology of science (Laudan 84), The analysis of science promulgated by historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1970) were the first to really catch the attention of the scientific world, and especially the psychological world. Since that time awareness of positivistic, postmdoern or "historicist" trneds in the philosophy of science on the part of psychologists has increased (e.g., Bevan, 1991; Gergen, 1985; Gholson and Barker, 85; Howard, 85; Manicas and Secord, 83; O'Donohue, 1989; the trend in understanding science might be as follows.

Posativisistic philosophy of science has tuaght us that data are theory laden. A simplistic empirical foundationaliam or naive realism, the view that empirical data are unsullied and indubitable, is no longer tenable. Philosophers were the fist to clearly see this. Results of contemporary perceptual and cognaive psychology clearly support the contention that data are sorted or processed from their first entry into the human organism's first sensory equipment. For instance, expectations have a profound impact upon on the perceiving process (the famous Postman studies sited by Kuhn)and these findings have made their way into the philosophy of science literature. It is commonly noted that all seeing is "seeing as." (Stanton L. Jones, "On the Suppossed Incomensurability of Scinece and Religion" in Religion an the Clinical Practice of Psychology. ed Edward P.Shafranske American Pssycholgoical Asociation Washington DC 1996, 118."

This view that empirical data is pure truth and can't be questioned is the stack and trade of the message broad atheists. It's also the reason why I say there is no objectivity. Even the most diligent scientist still has his biases and the psychological data confirms that no one ever approaches data from the standpoint of pure unbiased devotion to truth alone. Atheists are hiding behind data. They had behind the mystique of the pure unblemished truth of science to give them the illusion of total objectivity. Their standard cry, "that's subjective" leveled against all theological argument is a joke and demonstrates total naivete. When I was a sociology major, back in the stone age (undergraduate), a professor talked about and had us read a famous article that was already a classic sociology. It was by a guy named Lundberg called "Knowledge for What?" In this article Lundberg argues that the idea of pure passionless data collection with no social agenda and no idea of one's own concerns is nothing more than the ditty bag of an idiot, like a village idiot collection strings and sticks and dead birds and shiny things that mean nothing. He was countered by a sociologist named Lynde who argued that data must be pure and they had a famous journal debate that was so legendary it was in an anthology textbook. This debate was in the 30s, so those ideas were around long before Kuhn. But that stuck with me. I still believe it now, all research has not only its biases but its ulterior motives, it's assumptions, its ideologies. As Lundberg expressed it sociologists do not count the bricks in tenement buildings just for the fun of knowing how many there are. Economists do not maintain such a purse love of truth and data for sake of pure data that they research dates on coins in the economy. All of this research has a point to it. Someone has a social agenda, all scientific research winds up in someone's political platform.

It took philosophers and historians to see it because the scientists were too rooted in the data to ever step back from it and look at what they were doing. Even though these were secular philosophers and historians such as Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994 CE) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), they point up two major contributions that theologians also make to the world of thought. Just as philosophers without providing tons of data and number crunching provided a valuable insight by dealing with the structure of ideas,so theologians as well provide that same function. What actually produced the observation was the very thing our atheist at the top of the essay complains about, "they are just making stuff up," dealing with the sweeping structure of ideas rather than hiding behind the body of data. To do this requires stepping back from the data and form the data collecting process, the very thing out atheist friend complains that theologians don't do (keep reading) which is exactly what do do. The process of dealing with frames of thought and engagement with ideas rather than numbers is essential to understand that the numbers can be a smoke screen hiding the ideas, which are the real driving force.

Knowledge must be global. Each discipline has a part to play. We need to be interdisciplinary in our outlook (which I learned from the History of ideas program in my doctoral work). Theology is too sequestered. The two spheres of academia (secular and sacred) work at keeping apart form each other. In spite of this theology has a part to play. It does this in two ways: First in terms of thought categories that can be used to critique all thought on a higher level, not just theological. Secondly, by providing the same function in terms of religious traditions.

(1) Critical methods and global function

One example of this sort of critique is what Matthew Lamb called "the praxis enlightenment." In the 80s theologians, far from reinforcing drab teachings or clinging to Orthodoxy, rooted out the hopeless pie in the sky thinking, Hegelian or otherwise in favor of "praxis" which involves political action, analysis and action and doing things in the world and having pragmatic impact. Revolutions in Latin America produced a lot ferment about what is really making a concrete difference in the lives of the poor rather than just blessing their poverty. This sort of criticism can be taken to secular thought and even science and was in Nicaragua. Science was used as justification for exploitation until the theologically minded members of the frente began to apply praxis to it. That is in terms of sociological number crunching and pollution and other uses ot data to justify what was being done to the poor.

Theology can charge the scene with ethical thinking and provide means of understanding the full global perspective of learning. It's far too limiting to pretend that knowledge is only scientific. We need to use global resources, all disciplines. We need to be multidisciplinary. Theology has a place in that scheme. There is a conversation in civilization. the conversation in the world of thought has been going on for over a thousand years. To take part one has to understand what's been said before. We don't need necessarily to infuse the discuss with more data, we need to understand the sweeping structures of thought and how they relate to us and to the world. Theology lends itself to this task by bringing the view of faith, which has been a crucial and central part of human experience for 65,000 years. Anesthetist try to reject theological view points as imaginary and stupid, but all they are really doing is resenting the established structures and trying to take over and control them through their own ideology.

Atheists can complain that they are "making stuff up" but these are empirical matters. The material analysis of the human conditions (liberation theology) is going to require numbers and empirical research. But it's not supplied by theologians, it has be collected and understood by theologians along with the analysis of the social scientist and the social critic. In the doing of liberation theology things can get dangerous. Many theologically based workers gave their lives for the poor in the struggles of Central America in the 70s-90s. This also requires an engagement with the people first hand, living with them, risking death with them, dying with them. This is no job for a pie in the sky sort of academic arm chair dreamer or a passionless positivist. But an army of theology students decended upon Latin America, inspired by theologians such as Moltmann, Miguse Bonino and Arch Bishop Romero, and Gustavo Gutierrez.

This function is not limited to liberal theology. The fact of doing theology at all, the fact that it offers a sens of transcendence from the paradigms of crunching and social engineering makes it a valuable blast to counter the reductionist robot making. Now the atheist can whine "they are just making stuff up" but they are taking part in a conversation. Western thought and letters are a conversation. They have been around for a long time, over a thousand years and a lot has been said. To continue the conversation one must be aware of what's been said and how it relates to the current scene and the future. That's why we need people to deal with the thought frame rather than to lose themselves hiding behind a body of data.

Since God is not given in sense data, talk about God is always going to be analogical. We have to approach it indirectly when te talk about God because there is no way to approach directly except in forms that are beyond talk (mystical experience). Therefore, theological talk will always be analogical, metaphorical, indirect, and it would be absurd to try and produce any kind of data directly relate to observations of God. That does not mean they are just making it up and it doesn't mean it can't relate to anything real or empirical. In making this grand set of metaphors that are interrelated we can we understand the sweeping structures of thoguht the frames of ideas and how they interrelate. Without that data is just the ditty bag of an idiot, odds and ends collected from nature that mean nothing.

None of this means they are just making things up. you can't just make things up you have to relate them to what's already been framed in the structure of the conversation. Maybe that stuff was made up but you have to tread upon it as though it matters and deal with it in such a way as to do a lot of thinking about it. There's automatic limit on just making stuff up. Since most people want their beliefs to relate to reality you would have to do a lot of relating of the made up stuff to reality. Look at the reader of this blog, Loren, who protests my poo pooing of her "thought experiments" in history. She can see the value of creativity in history when she uses it but can't the value of creativity when those of the hated target group that her ideology tells her is her enemy uses it. When she does it it's a clever thought experiment like Einstein, when theologians do it's just "mak'n stuff up." Even if all of those frame works and sweeping structures of thought prove to mere moon beams it's going to be the process of understanding the framework that exposes it as such, not merely the lack of data. All the lack of data will do is illicit attempts to find data to confirm what one already believes. That is the case with all sides and ideologies.

(2) within traditions themselves

Theology can illuminate religious traditions and enable them to understand themselves better. The primary task of theology is as the traditional understanding defines it (St. Anselm) "faith seeking understanding." This is the basis of theological method. The atheist quoted above carps because

I think the biggest paradox in reading this rubbish is that for authors who must (by nature) start with a premise that there is a deity, they don't appear to take any backward step in presuming to know the mind & motives of their particular deity.

The sheer stupidity of this illiterate fool misses the point that this is exactly what they are doing. They don't do it in the comic fashion that he's expecting because they are not fundie yokels. He doesn't recognize what they are doing because all he knows is number crunching. For him they are not stepping back and look at it form the big picture because they don't find it to be stupid. They don't find it to be stupid as he does because they know something about it, and he's too lazy to learn anything about it. The modern definition of theology is "participation in and study of a religious tradition." The point is the theologians strives to enable the tradition to understand itself. He/she seeks to enable those who wish to participate in the conversation what's been said and how it figures into a modern scene. It's not necessary that it be another exercise in number crunching we don't need tons of data to hide behind. Theologians deal with the sweeping structure of ideas rather than the fiddly bits of empirical data.

Theology can also be empirical. Just because we don't have mathematical equations proving the trajectory of an idea or empirical observations through microscopes showing God's DNA or something doesn't mean there's nothing empirical to deal with. We can't have empirical data of God but we can have empirical data of the co-determinate. Hence the 350 empirical studies that I use for my God arguments. We can have and do have a science of textual criticism. Atheists have no understanding of textual criticism. It's not part of science so it must be stupid. It can be demonstrated to work on secular literature. It has developed as a science, especially lower criticism. Higher criticism is the determination of authorship and dating of a text. The lower criticism is the determination of errors in a text and tracing their origins and reconstructing the original text. This has all been worked to a science and it empirical. Just as modern history thrives on texts, so theology in this sense is in line with modern historical methods. This is certainly not "mak'n stuff up."

Since theology is participation in and study of a religious tradition it invovles understanding what exactly the tradition says and why, and what that means in a modern context. The basic theological method at root is about filling in blanks. Philosophy is about asking interesting questions more than it is about answering them. By the same token theology has the answer at the end. It knows where its going but it wants to fill in the blank left by faith and show how we get there. Sometimes that has to mean re defining where are going because the imagined end result is no longer meaningful in a modern context. This would be the case with process theologians for example. They realize that the Greek based philosophy of the Orthodox was no longer tenable in a world in process so they redefined the end result, God is not static and unchanging but in process with creation and di polar. They didn't just say "I know I'll make up that God is di polar, why not it's mak'n stuff up." First there was a tradition going back the Greeks. There was Heraclitus. There was Hegel. Then there was Whitehead, who influenced modern science somewhat and the modern study of logic a great deal. There's a tradition, you have to work in relation to the tradition. Tradition doesn't mean in the academic sense just accept something uncritically it means a conversation. You have to know what's been said, to understand the sweeping structures, and demonstrate how can fit into that.

Modern theology has kept pace with modern thought. It's not making stuff up and it's not pie in the sky. It's practical and theoretical. It's empirical and idealist but it's not idealism. It's a valuable discipline, part ethics, part social criticism, part philosophy. You have to have a broad basis in the modern academy to do theology well in the postmodern age. That's exactly what the critics of theology lack. They don't have the exposure in the academy to understand the basics. They spend every day of their lives flapping their gums about how stupid theology is because one guy who tells them what to think (Dawkins) says it's stupid. He says that because he doesn't know anything about it. That's been demonstrated by his attempts to deal with it. He gave up and just started bad mouthing it and his groupies regurgitate what he says because they are "free thinkers" so they think think what they told to think.

The Value of a Theological Education Part 1

2009-06-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

Rose Window Cathedral Chartre

Recently I was chiding atheists on CARM for thier Dawkinsian attitude that they can flap their gums about the alleged stupidity of that which of they know nothing, namely theology. Somehow all of liberal arts came into it. I have always suspected that most of the real Dawkamentalists don't like art and literature and know nothing about it. My suspensions were confirmed. One of them said:

Because its only purpose is the perpetuation of theology? Literature in general is not a particularly useful field of study; theology is simply literature distilled down to the study of a single story.

Now I know atheists who love art and literature. In fact as an Atheist I loved art and literature, but things were different in my day. Back when I was an atheist, the 70s, no atheist would be caught dead saying that art and literature are useless. That's because the cultural dynamic of those who claimed to be atheist was totally different. With no internet you didn't have all these gen xers and gen y-ers coming around the net knowing nothing about Bertrand Russell. Atheist in my day were people who met on the college campus and most of them were given the courage to defy mom and dad and break out of the family mold of religious belief by literature and art classes, and of course Philosophy, science the whole college bit. In that day being an atheist was about being an intellectual, not about hating religious people. It was about being smart, and being modern. In those days the culture embraced art and literature as it's highest aspirations. So atheists had to at least give lip service to the arts. But that was back when there were intellectuals.

I blame Dawkins, not single handedly but as one major source who manged to kill of the basis of Western culture. We were already on our cultural death bed, we had already given up art and culture. But Dawkins has made it respectable among the rabble to flip off art and culture and embrace science as the only form of knowledge that matters. Atheists who are shunned for attaching my dyslexia often turn to attacking my theological career and my education. In this same discussion another one told me my education was "useless." In trying to get across to them that I don't regret a single dollar of tuition I spent or an hour spent studying it was one of the best times in my life and it would never see it as useless even if I never officially a penny form it, or even I get no credit at all for the degree. Of course understanding that would entail understanding the value of learning and it would entail understanding that there are more important aspects of learning than just science. But I don't really expect them to understand that. That would be like expecting someone who watches professional wrestling all the time to understand the importance of turning the other cheek. Let me just mention here, Fritz Von Erich never turned the other cheek! Now I know that the atheists I respect such as Hermit, your regular loyal opponent, or Quantum Troll on my boards, would never accept the attitudes I'm talking about. Hermit has made statements here repudiating that attitude. So I am not saying this all atheists.

In a two part essay I'm going to talk about the value of theological education. This first part is about the value of liberal arts in general. But I want to also point out that for me theology and liberal arts are intertwined. I really see theology as part of the world of letters, and all aspect of the world letters are important. Theology is in the area of philosophy, a form of philosophy but more specialized. Yet I see theology as a metaphor for the life of learning. Karl Garth (major theologian of the last century, called theology "the queen of the sciences." Of couse he's using the term "science" in the old European since, which is much like Kung Fu guys use the term kung fu. Kung fu is said to be anything that requires great diligent practice to master. So really fine chefs do the kung fu of cooking, and really good base ball pitchers do the kung fu of pitching, and so on. Science is any systematic study that involves first hand observation (in the European sense) so we can have science of cooking, science of pitching in baseball and so on. In this sense theology is a science.

Theology is zenith of letters. It requires expertise in everything. To be good at it one must understand the great sweeping movements of history in ways historians have long forsaken, in the way Hegel did. One must understand history as a philosopher and philosophy as a historian. It's a total interdisciplinary discipline. It requires a masterful apprehension of structure while maintaining a wit and imagination that is capable of compete departure form the script and lateral thinking. What I want to talk about here is the link to all of art and literature and why when I defend one of those I defend the others. It's not because theology is "making stuff up." Although creativity is important as it in science. But the impulse to know, to understand, to learn to think, to do philosophy and write poetry and create art all of those impulses are part of the urge that one feels to understand theology and to participate in the ancient tradition of theology. Theology is not creative per se, in fact it's supposed to resist creation. To be innovative in theology was an insult at one time. Yet all research and all discovery involve creativity. It's just a matter of how you channel it. Because theology involves understanding the entirety of the world in a general way, the structures of ontology, metaphysics, physics, life, society and how the interrelate it's a microcosm of all university subjects and all that requires systematic and scholarly learning.

Atheists who claim that theology is very stupid (Dawkamentalists) do so on the grounds that it's about something "imaginary" which they take God to be. That seems to mean they also disparage art and literature because they are merely imaginative too. The first one I quoted above says this: "I dislike fiction. It's generally rather contrived, and far less interesting than real life. This might well explain my position regarding theology." So his limited imagination sees literature only as just making up a bunch of stuff. But psychology tells us that creativity is crucial to psychological well being. Scientists tell us that creativity and imagination are crucial to scientific work. Joseph J. Kockelmans in his book Philosophy of Science
(Transactions Books 1999 ISBN: 978-0-7658-0602-4) Tells us that Scientists themselves ignore the importance of meaning and belief because they think they have to fit the image of passionless drones, they become wrapped up in the acquisition of data forget the importance of creativity in research. "I make no apology for insisting openly, even at the risk of irrelevance, on the necessity of proclaiming openly the imaginative element in science. When Scientists are ask about their own use of creativity and/or the arts, they usually affirm the value of it for doing science:

Science News
Rachel Ehrenberg
web edition, May 13,2009

RENO, Nev. — In a ceremony that’s referred to as “the passing of the torch,” hundreds of high school science students took part in a Q and A with a panel of Nobel laureates and distinguished scientists May 12. A more fitting title might be “the passing of the Bunsen burner or mass spectrometer.”

Student Terrence George, also an ISEF finalist, asked about the role of imagination in science, which prompted some quibbling among the panel. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, whose work led to the discovery of pulsars, said imagination is as important as the strictness of the scientific method. “We need the rigorous testing, but we also need creativity, wild ideas that are off the wall, because that’s where hypotheses come from in the first place.” Wüthrich then added a cautionary note: “Imagination can have its dangers,” he said. Scientists can get too attached to an idea they’ve imagined. “I would replace [imagination] with curiosity.”

Ibid.

Student and finalist Taylor Trew asked the panel members whether any had artistic talent and if that talent had helped in their scientific endeavors. Martin Chalfie, who shared the 2008 Nobel in chemistry for work on green fluorescent protein, said his father, a professional guitarist, gave him a classical guitar at age 12. “I still enjoy it immensely,” Chalfie said. “It is a great way to relax … and to balance everything.” Osheroff, citing his love of poetry, noted the importance of backing away from science and refreshing with the arts. He then recited from memory the cowboy poem “Reincarnation” by Wallace McRae.

The value of literature is more important than just a means inspiring scientific work. It's valuable in its own right. The things my Dawkie opponent says above are mere ignorance. One of the most valuable aspects of literature is that of the catharsis. Catharsis is a psychological mechanism which all narrative forms contain and which Freud discussed. It's the idea that you psychologically identify with the characters and with the story, you psychologically enter the story and vent your pent up rage and trauma and hurt by identification with the character. When you leave the story you are better, it has a healing quality.

Melvin W. Askew, Ph.D.

"Catharsis and Modern Tragedy"
Psychoanalytic Review,
48C:81-88 (1961). 171

The analogy between catharsis as it occurs in tragic drama and as it occurs in the psychotherapeutic situation proved to be a fruitful one; it at least demonstrated, if it did not add, another dimension to the psychological concept of catharsis. Since the analogy is such a close one, and since it proved valuable psychologically, it might be profitable to reverse the perspective in order to see, first, if the analogy cannot illuminate some of the sources of tragic effectiveness and provide some basis for a distinction between aesthetic and psychotherapeutic catharsis; second, if the somewhat deplorable critical confusion about modern tragedy—at least the confusion arising when classical tenets are applied to it—may not be clarified.The analogy is simply as follows: catharsis in classical drama occurs when the discordant actions, impulses, and thoughts of the tragic hero are composed upon the background of an orderly moral, ethical, social, and/or religious system

Matt Jarvis

Pyschodyamic Psychology:Classical Theory and Contemporary Research
Cengage learning 2004
170

Abreratcion is recall and re-experiencing of painful memories. Catharsis is the discharge of pent up emotions that result form abreaction. "People seek emotional experiences in books and film, and the Catharsis construct seems to explain the (counterintuative) everyday experience of seeking out entertainment stimuli that illicit anger, fear and sadness." Patients report Catharsis to be of great benefit. Jarvis writes about two studies, Mahon and Kemper in 1995,Clearly show that the patents attribute benefit to Catharsis. Smyth and Green (2000) show writing about problems helps. These studies both find positive results form narrative oriented catharsis in lue of other forms of therapy. Alternative explanations Jarvis delves into seem counter to the cathartic theory but might also involve narrative forms of release. The major such theory is "self regulation." Under a period of intense affect one might gain insight through the release of feelings. The difference here is not rather and than damming up feelings that need release one is bringing a period of insight while experiencing these feelings (which are not damned up but come on at the moment due to emotional stimuli). Yet the experience of the narrative form which puts the reading into the action is the stimulus for this critical period of insight.

Another major aspect of psychological healing and inspiration that is found in literature, and especially in poetry, the use of archetypes in symbols. Archetypes are psychological symbols which are universal to all human cultures. They are ways of dealing with ideas and problems below the surface. Symbols suggest insights that conscious minds can't grasp but our unconscious minds can deal with them through the hidden code of the archetype.

Jung's Theory of Archetypes

Clayton E Tucker-Ladd
Metal Health Net 2000
"Understanding parts of our
Personality."

As you read more about personality theories, you will find other notions that give you insight into your self. For instance, Jung had a creative mind and besides describing the personality types above, suggested there are several parts of our personality beyond the id, ego, and superego. He believed that humans are innately prone to act certain ways and have certain beliefs, e.g. young children and animals are seen as "cute," almost every culture has created the notion of God and an after life, all societies have heroes and heroines, spiritual-mystical powers are thought to influence the weather, crops, health, etc., and the same children's stories are heard in all parts of the world (see Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth). These universal beliefs or themes were called archetypes by Jung. Instincts and archetypes make up our "collective unconscious," which is this tendency for all of us to view the world in common (not necessarily accurate) ways.

In Jungian theory, there is a part of our personality called the persona which includes the masks we wear when relating to others--it isn't our real self. In contrast to the publicly acceptable masks (Jung looked for opposites), there is the shadow which, much like the Enneagram, is our dark and evil side--our sexual, greedy, aggressive, and power-hungry needs which are difficult to control. If a normally well controlled person suddenly had an angry outburst, the Jungian might assume it is the work of the devilish shadow. Yet, the shadow is always there; it compliments the conscious ego; a wise person will understand, accept, and consider (but not give in to) the shadow's needs.

Maslow Makes use of Jung's concept

Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Abraham H. Maslow
Appendix I. "An Example of B-Analysis."

Maslow points out that the same universal symbols emerge in all people across culture. He confirms this connection emerges with with the use of all pyschoanalytical techniques.

"Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it invovles a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? (For more on archetypes see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II) The "prematives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation which gave them an integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numenous, that is the origin of religion."

"In Appendix I and elsewhere in this essay, I have spoken of unitive perception, i.e., fusion of the B-realm with the D-realm, fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane, etc. Someone has called this "the measureless gap between the poetic perception of reality and prosaic, unreal commonsense." Anyone who cannot perceive the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic, is simply blind to an aspect of reality, as I think I have amply demonstrated elsewhere (54), and in Appendix I."

Studies backs Jungs theory as valid

Philip Penny

A brief look at whether the Collective Unconscious is a figment of Jung’s imagination, and whether it has any successful role to play in modern Psychotherapy.

Copyright© Philip Penny

This is all very well of course, but it simply serves to prove further that there is little to justify the notion that the theory of the Collective Unconscious is an invalid one. There is much to support the notion that there are Archetypes, or inherited characteristics of human nature, and true to say that models of human psychological process based on this assumption may prove invaluable in a therapy situation. The question of whether this theory is an aspect of Jung's imagination is a philosophical one and as stated previously it is beyond the scope of this literature to explore this adequately. The conclusion of the question therefore is left up to the reader as to conclude further may well simply result in stating a figment of my own imagination.

These aspects of literature will not be grasped by students in school. That's a shame because that's when they need to know about it. It takes time to develop a taste for great literature but over a life time one can come to feel this sense of healing sometimes very strongly in stories, novels, poems and film.It's very strong in film. One of the measures I use to gage the greatness of a film is how healed I feel after watching it. Do I feel like Ive really been through something enriching? It's a sens of wholeness like I'm back to normal. Students who are under the gun to turn in papers showing that they read the Old Man and the Sea or something are not going to get this. I takes time and experience of life, must have something to compare it to. As a young student you haven't lived enough. But there are plenty of student are sensitive enough to feel this, but they usually don't know hat they feel.I was that way.I didn't really put all of this together until just a few years ago, but I did feel healed as a kid reading The Iliad in biology class the as the teacher talked about spores, or reading Light in August in Math class as the teacher discussed algebra 2.

The healing aspect of film is quite strong in Bergman films. I've reviewed several of Bergman's films for this blog and I've discussed his theological times and how they crop up in his films. Bermgan's films are not theological statements but they are of theological importance. This is because they raise great questions and they document the searching of an unbeliever, and atheist (although in that intellectual atheist mode I spoke of above). These films demonstrate the human longing for union with the reality behind the archetype, and the frustration of not understanding what that is or being sure its' really there. Archetypes are at their in poetry where the play of symbols is most important. Yet film being visual can meld imagery right into its fabric. Consider the image from Bergman's winter light which I used in that review:

Björnstrand and Thulin in
Winter Light

The doubting minister who can't face his own calling (or lack thereof) is cradled in the arms of the mothering, smothering woman who wants to baby him and who wants to own him, their backs are to the light, they are hidden form natural (divine?) light and their backs are also to the crucifix with its rustic Norse interpretation of pain of the suffering savior. That cinematic image says more than a thousand essays could say, one does not need words. Of course the Dawkamentalists would say It's worthless, just contrived and made up. It's not scientific. Yet the whole point of archetypes is that these are telling us true we can't grasp or face consciously. This is something you can't get at through science. The thing that image tell us is not something science could tell us. We cant' do studies and say "39% of all believers feel this way (reference the image). Because we can't even put into words what it tell us. But the studies we can do tell us that the healing effects of such controlled moments of emotive release and the symbols that communicate to our pysche are profound and important for our lives. In addition to that, we can use it for science, because it was scientific studies that told us this. So some psycholgist saw some archetypal image or had a catharsis at the movies and thought of some research to do on those things.

We find this same healing aspects in the narrative of the Bible. The purpose of scripture is to bestow grace upon the reader. This, and not epistemology and not philsophy or science or history is the purpose of the Bible. So finds William Abraham of the Perkins School of Theology (my old prof and erstwhile coffee drinking partner) in his ground breaking work Canon and Criterion: From the Fathers to Feminism.(I can't over stress the importance of reading this book. I would put it on my top 10 must read books for theology). One of the most important ways grace is bestowed is through the catharsis. Another is through the use of Archetypes in the symbolism of the Bible. The cross is itself an archetype, as is the empty tomb. This is why religious people can tear up the use of religious symbols and why atheists can at times think they are stupid ad idiotic for doing so. The atheist has shut himself off from the psychological healing of symbols and catharsis. Those who don't get literature and hate it because they think its' useless are just cutting themselves off from real mental health.

All theological discourse contains these elements, symbolism and archetype. But there's more to it than that. Theology is not just a means of feeling good, it's not fiction. The value of literature doesn't end with psychological management. But there's a global relationship between all disciplines of learning. It all comes together in an education. This is why a theological education will never be a waste even one ceases to believe. Atheists who don't like poetry or literature or great art films cut themselves off from a source of healing, and source of inspiration, they also cut themselves off from the global understanding of knowledge by rejecting theology and refusing to learn anything about it. Theology may not make direct use of all aspects of the arts, but that hardly matters. The point is not that theology is art its that theology is part of the greatness of human culture and civilization at its form on planet earth. In my next installment I'll deal more directly with theology itself.

Those reductionists who reject as invalid and "useless" anything that doesn't produce pragmatic results in monetary terms, in hard data that can be used to produce monetary terms,or medicine, are closing themselves off from emotional healing by rejecting liberal arts and theology. Let us a say a boy is left by his father in his early life and he hates his father. As a a result he hates fatherhood. Let's say hypothetically that this is a reason he rejects God, too much talk of "the father." he can't see that consciously because it would be treading upon closed wounds to open that up and understand it. The symbolic and cathartic aspects of literature might help with healing and enable him to face that. Now let us assume knows everything about fathers. He becomes a social scientist and he dedicates his life to proving that children don't need to be raised by fathers. Say he learns every fact that can gleaned scientifically about the value of fatherhood. But he still can't face his wounds and he wont understand that this is the reason he can't accept God. Obviously we know what would become of him. He was spend his life posting on carm and saying snide things about me. The point is the unscientific "useless" "contrived" "made up stuff" might be the only thing that would allow him to deal with his pain and understanding all the scientific facts in the world do nothing to heal him.

I see modern "new" atheism as a symptom of the larger problem of one-dimensional man. We have as a culture destroyed our own civilization. We have given up all the intangible not obvious things that lie hidden beneath the surface. That's why the Dawkies are like very simple people who look the window and go "there's no God out there so there must not be one." We have given up everything that doesn't give us immediate gratification and short term profit and quantifiable results, and what have we in return, a failing economy a dying planet and soulless jerks manipulating us into buying their crap. Learning is global, in the sense that you can't limit it to just those aspects with quick return on investment. The business model usually doesn't work well for anything except business. Those who reduce knowledge to just the quantifiable merely limit out abilities to search for further knowledge. There is a depth in terms of human experience and vitality in understanding the self and the world in terms of the liberal arts. That can only be managed with a global understanding of learning where we can draw upon everything from Shakespeare to Sokal, to Derrida to Julius Schwartz. We need it all and those who close it off are killing the thing they try to enhance. The atheist of my day were under the sawy of the 60s. The 60s meant we learn about everything. As Joni Mitchell told us "life is for learning (the song "Woodstock")." That was the attitude. Back then the social cement was "the movement." Everyone under 30 knew something was happening and everyone was part of it and we just knew something great was going to come of it all. Now the only social cement these kids have is hating God and hate religion and being temperamental and going on message board to exhibit that snide bitch tone about "your invisible sky pixie." They are cut off from learning. Learning, they have told, is boring. They don't want that. So they lump every kind of learning that doesn't make money for their employers into the useless pile. But don't worry about their feelings they have philosopher Wayne Proudfoot to tell them they have no feelings. They are cut off from real learning, they are also cut off from God and from their own feelings.It's all in there, it's global. Life is an open ended journey, it's for learning.

The Phony Standard of the Jesus Myth Scam

2009-06-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've been "arguing" (really having a p-ing contest but you know) On ever loving CARM (from which I'm about to be expelled again). This time it's with Jesus myhters. They angered me because++ they were so rigid in insisting upon phony standard of historicity that even real historians would never support. It basically comes down to "unless you show a writer in the NT who literally says 'I was an eye witness to Jesus' then Jesus didn't exist." I made the arguments that I make for historicity and rather than argue the logic of the arrangements they just smugly insisted upon the little rigid silliness. So I started doing it back to them. I began demanding that they show a witness who said "I am an eye witness to Julius Cesar he really existed." I demanded that they say those very words, not even imply it that's not good enough. they demanded that our guys say those very words so why not. They went ape trying to meet that criteria.

You can see the original thread in which I grew perturbed at his game playing with this "he doesn't say he's an eye witnesses" and the rigidity of the standard.

these are coming from another thread that followed that one up.
here's how it went.

Here you go meta, so that we may continue the conversation concerning history of Jesus, though really now, the hundred post thing is slightly ridiculous. How these forums and threads are laid out, one particular thread can be turned into multiple ones in the thread.

Your choice to not read threads over a hundred posts stems from laziness, nothing more.

anyways, what is the said archaeological evidence you have of Jesus that apparently not having negates Julius Caesar.

Because you know, as I've shown you before, we have accounts written by Caesar that are undeniably from Caesar.

We have no writings FROM Jesus.

Meta:

so you are wiling to admit that by using your arguments and your logic we could rationally take Julie baby out of history as a real guy? I'm just using your criteria. We don't have anyone who says "I knew Julius Cesar, I am an eyewitness I saw him exist."

This shows us how phony and silly your demand for such evidence is. All the stuff you said in defending Cesar I showed that same kind of evidence exists in defending Jesus existence in history. But you are willing to take out one of the most firmly established characters of history just to get rid of Christianity, that is not a objective historicism by any means. it's stupid.

are a kid? are you in junior high? you reason like someone who has never been on his own.

so now he pulls out the big guns:
Jesus Myther:

Here is Caesar's funeral oration, given by Marc Antony.

http://www.megapathdsl.net/~sdutta/marcAntony.htm

Here are writings personally written by Caesar:

http://ancienthistory.about.com/libr...ext_caesar.htm

Quote:
If you had the quote you would use it. you are not quoting any because you don't have it. if you had it you would use it.
Here is a quote by Caesar just for you.

"Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true."
Julius Caesar

Can you believe this? He's quoting Shakespeare and that's supposed to prove it's historical!

He tries to prove that argument form silence is valid form of argument.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kapyong View Post
Gday,

Jesus Myther:

Why can't you get his name right, metacrock? How many times have you seen his name written, and you STILL get it wrong. Your reading skills are woeful.

Meta:
o yea that's really something to worry about your generation is way to hung up on formalities.
(Jesus Myther is not really his name--I can't remember his name I think its Kapyong--although there were three I was arguing with, but these aer his responses.).

Quote:Jesus Myther:
The evidence for Julius Caesar is vast, and DOES include contemporary and archeological

evidence :Meta:
what it doesn't include is a guy who says I am an eye witness I saw Cesar. until you have hat you have nothing because that's the standard you use of Jesus.

Quote:JM

*

writings from Caesar's own hand

Meta:
* prove they are! I have writtings form Peter's own hand.

Quote: JM
*

statues of Caesar made while he was alive

Meta:

we alread did this. the other did the same list. they don't prove it, you can't prove a statue is of a living person. We have statues of Mercury does prove he was alive?

[*
Quote:JM

coins showing his likeness changing as he aged
I have a dime with Mercury on it. does that prove he lived?

Quote:JM:

many eye-witness accounts of his actions (e.g. Cicero)

Meta:
they don't say they are eye witnesses according to your standards. they don't say "I am an eye witness I saw Cesar"

Quote:JM
*

archeological remains of his battles (e.g. Alesia)

Meta:
that only proves a battle happened. prove Cesar was in it?

Quote:JM
* his grave still known

Meta
Jesus grave is well known. I have show you four different churches (Orthodox, Ariminan, RCC, Protestant) that all say the same site is Jesus' tomb. Prove that your site is Cesar's tomb!

Quote:JM

Cicero was a historical contemporary of Caesar and wrote about him, and to him. Hard, conclusive, contemporary proof of Caesar.

Meta:
he doesn't say he was. why is it you are willing to accept this of Cesar but not of Jesus? why aren't you willing to meet the same standard you use to question Jesus' autenticity to prove Cesar?

Quote:JM

So was Sallust, Nepos, Catullus, Asinius Pollio, Virgil, Ovid - all contemporaries who wrote about Caesar during his life.

Meta:
same post the other guy made, You are just coping the same site he used. none of these guys go " I am an eye witness"

(there were three different mythers I was arguing with on this thread. One of them made the same exact post including the signature, wise cracks an all. I know the site he copied it from.

Quote:JM
For Jesus?
NONE of that.
NOTHING contemporary.

Meta
none of the guys for Cesar do

Quote:JM
It's chalk and cheese.
the other guy even had the same closing so you just cut and pasted this.

Meta:
Chalk and cheese? I don't get the reference but the other guy included it in his post too.

It finally ended up with this one by him

JM

There are numerous quotes from Cicero mentioning direct personal meetings with Caesar :

Cicero, Letters :
XV
To P. LENTTJLUS SPINTHER (IN CILICIA)
ROME (OCTOBER)

Here I was greatly influenced by two things the old friendship which you know that I and my brother Quintus have had with Caesar, and his own kindness and liberality, of which we have recently had clear and mistakable evidence both by his letters and his personal attentions.
...An additional motive was Caesar's memorable and almost superhuman kindness to myself and my brother,

Cicero mentions here :
* his FRIENDSHIP with Caesar
(* letters from Caesar to Cicero)
* Caesar's PERSONAL ATTENTION
* Caesar's kindness to him and his brother

There are many many such examples which show a direct personal meeting with Caesar :

Again, later on, there followed a very pressing request from Caesar that I should undertake his defence.

Caesar asks Cicero to defend him.

And yet I was very intimate with Caesar,

Cicero was intimate with Caesar.

all the more so now that Caesar daily receives me with more open arms, while his intimate friends distinguish me above everyone.

Caesar received Cicero with open arms.

Now omens as to the future are observed by me in what I may call a twofold method: the one I deduce from Caesar himself, the other from the nature and complexion of the political situation. Caesar's characteristics are these: a disposition naturally placable and clement--as delineated in your brilliant book of "Grievances"--and a great liking also for superior talent, such as your own. Besides this, he is relenting at the expressed wishes of a large number of your friends, which are well-grounded and inspired by affection.

Cicero observed Caesar's character.

On this head I am always struck with astonishment at Caesar's sobriety, fairness, and wisdom. He never speaks of Pompey except in the most respectful terms. "But," you will say, "in regard to him as a public man his actions have often been bitter enough."

Cicero describes how Caesar talks of Pompey.

Also--for I like to jot down things as they occur to me--that when on the request of Sestius I went to Caesar's house, and was sitting waiting till I was called in, he remarked: "Can I doubt that I am exceedingly disliked, when Marcus Cicero has to sit waiting and cannot see me at his own convenience? And yet if there is a good-natured man in the world it is he; still I feel no doubt that he heartily dislikes me."

Cicero recounts a MEETING with Caesar.

We continued to spar long after this. But in fact I do realize we can document Cesar's existence. That's not the point. The point is the rigidity of demanding the exact words "I am an eye witness." I just said to each one of these, and I cut and pasted the phrase He doesn't say he's an eye witness."

this is was going bonkers by this time. You can tell my the tone of his writting.

I ended that pos with quote NT quoets that do say point blank "I am an eye witness" alouth only one of them in those words:

"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched-this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.

1:2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us." (1 John 1:1-2)

"Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God's elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia,"(1 Pete 1:1)

I also quoted the passage in 2 Pete that says explicitly "we were eyewitnesses"

He tried to argue that 2 Pete is a forgery.He also tries to argue soemthing tot totally stupid about the first John Passage, he tries to say "that which was from the beginning" just means the good feeling they got thinking about the idea of Jesus.so they touched this good feeling with their hands, physically? the whole point of that is to say "he was solid." That was fighting the gnosticism.

We should expect Cesar to be better documented than Jesus. He was the leader, the center of the most civilized place in the world at that time, and the center of a great world empire. Jesus was a peasant in the sticks. No one in Rome cared what went on in Palestine and the center of writing and the writing of history was in Rome and done primarily for Romans. There's no problem Cesar being better documented than Jesus. Its' not mutually exclusive, not like if Cesar is proved then Jesus wasn't historical. The point is that with their phony standard of having to have an eye witness that literally says "I am an eye witness" even best documented characters in history can be made to look fictional.

The point of this whole post is that the Mythers are using sham standard when they demand the exact phrase "I was an eye witness" and we should not let them get away with it. That's a standards historians don't use, and as I've illustrated if they did about half of what's in history would vanish.

Oldest Chruch Raises Problems for Jesus Mythers

2009-06-26T09:01:00.001-07:00

file footage (ancient church in Crete)

The Oldest known Christian church Has been found Rihab, northern Jordan, near the Syrian border. The church Dates to between AD33 to AD70. That is totally remarkable as no Christian stuff has ever been found that predates mid century.

"We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from AD33 to 70," said the head of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, Abdul Qader al-Husan.

"We have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians - the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ."

A mosaic found in the church describes them as "the 70 beloved by God and Divine". Mr Husan said they were believed to have fled persecution in Jerusalem and founded churches in northern Jordan.

He cited historical sources that suggest they lived and practised religious rituals in the underground church and left it only after Christianity was embraced by Roman rulers in the fourth century.

There is no clear holder of the title of oldest Christian church: various sites claim the honour without definitive evidence.

Pottery shards found suggest that Christians lived there until late Roman times. The problems this Not only does this offer proof of an organized church in the at least the middle of the first century, but also historical evidence of a Biblical event, the sending out of the Seventy. That event involved Jesus himself. Not only is it evidence of Christianity, but indirectly of Jesus as well. Jesus mythers have begun to argue that Christians themselves did not exist in the first century. They have begun to doubt Paul's existence, although no valid scholars do that. Some have argued there is no proof of organized worship of Jesus in the first century.

Mythers will respond with the hackney argument that worship of a mythical Jesus figure goes back to the times before Christ with the Dead Sea sect. Of course this is a fantasy and their attempt to have it both ways. Earl Doherty argues that the concrete historical story of Jesus life did not exist until the early second century. IF this site is really associated with the Seventy disciples that Jesus sent out that would be concrete evidence that Jesus existed and it would wreck the Jesus myth theory.

Another article about it can be found on Directions to Orthodoxy

Inside the cave a circular area of worship with stone seats separated from living quarters were found. This circular element, called an apse, is important says Dr Al-Hassan because there is only one other example of a cave with a similar feature, which was also used for Christian worship. The stone seats are believed to have been for the use of clergy.

Al-Hassan said: "We found beautiful things. I found the cemetery of this church; we found pottery shards and lamps with the inscription 'Georgeous'". There is also a tunnel that leads to a cistern which supplied water to the dwellers. The excavation of the tunnel and the cistern may yield yet more evidence about the lives of these early Christians.

"From the tunnel to the cistern is very important. We want to clean it and make an excavation inside it. We found a very old inscription beside it and coins also, and crosses made from iron."

Other experts say they are cautious about the claim. They want to examine the artifacts and obtain solid dating evidence. The earliest confirmed examples of churches date from the third century.

The NT is Good Evidence

2009-06-21T19:12:00.001-07:00

This is primarily for Jesus mythers. I'm speaking to all atheists to some extent but mainly to Jesus mythers and I'm saying: NT is good evidence that Jesus lived as a man in history.

Atheists have written off the NT as though it doesn't exist. The reasons they have done so are childish and illogical. Nothing is more irritating than the tendency of the Jesus myth crowd to ignore the Gospels as though they aren't there, to assert that they were written in the late second century and even latter, and based upon a conglomeration of dying-rising pagan god types upon which the Jesus mythos was patterned. This is the most irksome of all becasue its so clearly and definitely disproved. Before going into that, however, I want to deal with the two major reasons why atheists in general write off the NT:

(1) Miracles

Atheists often take the tact that if miracle happen in a text then everything in the text must be totally wrong. Even if we assume the miralces embellishments, they have to have something to embellish. Do real historians write off texts because they are laden with miracles? No, they do not. One professor (from Oxford and had a big name reputation) for whom I worked as a TA when through and showed me a text from India where it was recorded that there were huge battles with millions of people and gods taking sides, thunderbolts hurled and so forth. They write this text off as useless? No they did not. The took from it the basic concepts that the kings mentioned were in power, they were real kings and real battles were fought. They De-mythologize it but they don't discord it!

Even in British history the battles of the Autheriad are considered to be real battles but they scale them down from thousands of warriors to about 50. Real historians do not rule out every aspect of a text just becasue it's embellished with miracles. That does not make the text invalid. If what we are after is evidence that Jesus lived as a man in history we don't even have to get his teachings right to know that people were talking about him as a real man at a certain point, so he probably was a real man.

I will show that the point at which Jesus' mythos was taken as concrete history is a much much earlier, at least a hundred years earlier than the Jesus myth theory would have it.

(2) Redaction

Redaction means editing. The redaction of the Gospels basically splice together previously existing documents, such as Q, M, L perhaps others. Atheists have a habit of speaking as though this destroys any validity to the Gospels, it does not. This is so for two reasons:

..........(a) Original Testimony survives

The Gospels were not produced by a single individual but by communities, that's what is meant by redaction; the redactors are people in the community producing the text to answer the community has raised. The work from the original testimony of the first members of the community, which was passed n orally and then written down at some point. Now I'm going to show this process was very short lived, becasue the original writing was no latter than mid first century. It's true the from in which we have Gospels today is from 70-90 but the documents the documents the Gospels were redacted from were much ealier and that is thought to be mid century. Both Crosson and Helmutt Koester agree on this point.

What this means is the whole community was the author, the whole community was the witness, and the whole community was the check on distortions in the text. So the redactoin would have taken place within the boundaries that the community knew were set from the beginning. This is born out by the fact of only one version of the story. But I'll get to this.

..........(b) It's still an Artifact

When Archaeologists find pottery shards in the ground they don't say "O it's broken, just toss it aside it cant' tell us anything." When they find lamps they don't say "O it's just a lamp, lamps aren't important what could a lamp tell us? Since we know the kinds of lamps used in different eras lamps are good means of dating other finds that are with the lamp. Even if a lamp is broken the shard still tells us something and it can be re constructed.

The Gospels, if we approach them as artifacts, tell us a lot even if the miracles are false and the book is heavily redacted. We can re construct the original and we can understand what people believed in a certain time. we can know through the science of Textual criticism (which is validated for all literature not just the Bible) what the original text contained and we can understand what people believed in a certain time.

John Dominic Crosson, in arguing against Jesus myther Earl Doherty says that the fact that people were writing about Jesus as a man in history as early as mid first century is very good indication that he was a man in history.

Now there are three more important arguments that demonstrate the veracity of the Gospels as artifacts:

(links to each of those can be found here)

I. Pre Mark Redaction shows Gospel story circulated in writing by mid first century.

go here for the documentation (2 or 3 pages)

This includes the empty tomb, the Passion narrative, and the story is told with Jesus as a man, flesh and blood man.

The point is even though latter readings are copied latter, they copy readings done earlier. We can tell when the reading was written by its Jewishness. Jewish reading is early a gentile reading is late, 70 being the dividing mark.

For example in the Diatesseron, even though the MS was complied in 172 AD the readings taht it is made from are very early readings and have been passed down in their own tradition. With this in mind reading in the Diatesseron are much old than readings in the canonical Gospels as we have them. This is how we know the story was circulating as early as mid century.

That means Jesus was understood as a flesh and blood man ni the 50s. That is almost a one hundred years before Doherty's time table starts assuming the concrete historical Jesus was being invented. That means the stories of Jesus are almost contemporary, they miss it by 18 years and since many of the witnesses were still alive we can think of it as contemporary. In an age where there was no such thing as up to the minute information, 18 years is not that far away.

When the Mythers say there are no contemporary records of Jesus this is because they have just completely ignored the Gosepl source which are handed down fron contemporary testimony of eye witnesses who saw him, heard him speak and were traveling with him.

II. Jews had oral culture which means they knew how to trasmitt oral tradition and protect its' validity.

They only had to preserve it orally for 18 years (from 33-50) and that with a passel of eye witnesses in the communities. How do we know the eye witnesses were in the communities? By the Resurrection narratives. They preserve in different forms the names of the women. I mean by that Matt has one set of woman, John only name one (MM) and so forth. that's probably because MM was in the John community, (the community that produced John) and Salome was in the Matthew community, and so on. We can also know from Acts and various statements in the Epistles (Paul comments on Andronicus and Junia who he says were from the begining and calls them "Apostles").

The community was the auhor

Oral tradition was not just haphazard rumor but could be carefully controled telling. The Jews had an oral culture and knew how to pass on info accurately.

III. One version of the story.

It's spun differently when told in different ways, but essentually there's only one version. Here's the argument:

1) Mythology tends to proliferate:multiple story versions are common

2) When historical facts are known to a wide audience, people tend not to deny the basic facts of an event.

a) eye witnesses keep it straight

b) People who try to invent new aspects of the event are confronted with the fact that most everyone knows better.

c) people know the story for a fact and just dont' bother to change it.

3) Story proliforations would probably influence further tellings, thus creating many more documents with different versions of the same story.

4) If a myth proliforates we would tend to find more versions of the same story, when there is only one version we can accept a degree of certainty that the story did not proliforate.

5) We do not find a proliforation of versions of the Jesus story in any sources we know of.

6) The most logical way to account for this single Jesus story is through p2, that everyone knew it was the case, there were too many eye witnesses to spread new versions.

a) It is illogical to assume that everyone just liked it so they didn't add to it.

b) There was no canonization process in place in the early period, and the single unified verison existed from the earliest trace of the story.

7)Therefore, we can assume that it is probably the case that the masses were familiar with the story of Jesus because the story reflects events known by all to be factual.

here's a list of facts that never different between one telling and another for the first three or four hundred years of the telling. These are not the only ones just a list I made off the top of my head one day:

1) Jesus lived on earth as a man from the beginning of the first century to AD 33.

2) That his mother was supposed to be a Virgin named "Mary"

3) Same principle players, Peter, Andrew, Philip, John, Mary Magdeline.

4) That Jesus was knows as a miracles worker.

5) he claimed to be the son of God and Messiah.

6) he was crucified under Pilate.

7) Around the time of the Passover.

8) at noon.

9) rose from the dead leaving an empty tomb.

10) several woman with MM discovered the empty tomb.

11) That this was in Jerusalem.

these are the kinds of things that would change from telling to telling. There are hundreds of sources in the first two centuries and they all tell it this way.

Moreover, there are 54 lost gospels, either existing theoretically or fragment or in other texts, such as unicials, some of them even go back to first century and may pre date the canonical (such as Thomas) but they all tell it as Jesus was flesh and blood.

Even the gnostics, who denied that Jesus was flesh and blood still kept the idea of Jesus as a man in history, at least to the appearance and the way he looked to other people. So even they locate the phenomenon of Jesus in history as something that appeared to be man. Those who denied Jesus fleshly nature came latter, the Gospel of Thomas speaks of Jesus a felsh and blood man but one who came from above.
__________________

Chemicals do not Disprove Religious Experince part 2

2009-06-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

I was given an argument by an atheist which echos what I hear all the time in answer to my religious experience argumetns. The studies don't' conclude "God exist" so therefore they don't prove God exits. Of course they ignore the fact that I don't claim direct proof but argue for the rationally warranted nature of religious belief. They are not apt to accept anything not even slightest ground so they always fall back on brain chemistry. The fact that brain chemistry is somehow involved is just absolute proof to them that this naturalistic and has nothing to do with God. Of course they are totally ignorance the answers I give but assume that if chemicals are within 45 feet of the answer then it's a done deal.

My answer is that they are begging the question. They start out assuring there can't e a God. So evidence could ever count in favor of God. Having assumed the impossibility of God they further fall back on what they take to an absoltue certainty of disproof becasue chemicals are somehow involve and so it must be naturalistic. But this is disproved in two ways, through Newberg who argues that God would have to use brain chemistry so that doesn't tell us anything, and Hick who shows that the researchers who claim to have evoked RE through chemicals or stimulating the brain have really failed to measure in any reliable way that they are in fact getting mystical experince out of it. Since that's the atheist argumet in its entirety that actually beats their whole argument.

The real problem is they beg the question in terms of the role of the effects of having had the experince. The effect is that this is the real debarkation of God's role in the thing since no other pathology, chemistry or experince aside from these "mystical" ones can ever produce the same kinds of outcomes. Their role is to be the ultimate tie breakers. But the atheists continue to assume that as long as they can beg the question and assert that brain chemistry explains it all they just further assert that the effects could be produced if we really tried.

Here I dialogue with a carm atheist called "Phoenix."

Phoneix: on CARM

6/16/2009

Quote:Phoenix
If we take HRG's example of the unicorn (analogous to your God), WHERE is there ANY kind of independent observation, i.e., the empirical evidence like the observable fact that it's people who have fingerprints and leave the footprints/fingerprints for you God. Religious experience exists (the edelweiss flowers) BUT what you don't have is any equivalent evidence that your God (the unicorn) exists in the same way the fingerprints and footprints do. It seems that you want us to "overlook" this fact that you haven't connected the dots (where's the observable evidence that would justify the rational warrant?) between religious experience and the existence of your God? (my post to you on this subject that you never responded to, so you can't really claim that I have abvoided your arguments, can you?)

Yes we know the figner prints are real, but I have given sound reasons why we should assume the effects are the trace of the divine:

(1) Its' the reaosn why there is relgion, the concept was a consruel of the meaing of the experinces and goes back 65,000 years. That's a lot of presumption for an assumption. It's never been disrpoved, and it's grown with humanity throughout the ages righ ton up into the scientific era.

(2) The effects, being unproduceable in any other way indicate something different, no realtted to the chemicals alone (althought hey are invovled)

(3) Its' what we should expect of the divine because it's what religion is suppossed to do, transform our lives.

thus this is ample reason to make the assumtion that if the correlations holds and it has over four decades of scietnific study, then there' s every reason to make the construel. Thus belief is warranted.

(4) Not to foget that I'm not claiming proof but warrant for belief.

He links to the following:

Also by him on CARM

How does religious experience "justify" your assumption that the "cause" is your God, Metacrock?

1. The most plausible explanation is that the attribution of this experience to some external source is really a misinterpretation of the effects of a particular kind of brain chemistry in a particular location of the brain (what we actually observe).

Of course that's begging the question. Who says it's more Plausible? To say that you would have to know in advance that God is less plausible. If you had a way of knowing that you would just answer God arguments with that rather than asking how they prove things?

This seems plausible because you are begging the question by assuming your belief as a fact, and also because you have inaccurate info about RE being evoked by brain chemistry. I've quoted John Hick several times on this and I've beaten this with Hicks comments. Of atheists, not being interested in reason never take note of that. Hick argues that the researchers who make these claims offer no means of understanding how to judge a real religious experience. They based it upon someone's dream or a person talking about God after the alleged stimulation and that's supposed to prove they evoked a religious experince.

My theory has accounted for the use brain chemistry and its role in the process of RE through the work of Newberg. I've quoted Newberg at length when when shows that God has to use brain chemistry if he wants to experience soemthing. We could not experience anything with brain chemistry becasue it is through neural transmitters that we feel anything. So the receptors are opening to God and that can been seen as a physical process. Just because it' snot amazing flat out miracle doesn't mean God is not involved. This is part of the baby way of thinking that atheist use to think about religious things.

Newberg says:

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to all spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is (Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, 157-172).

Phoenix

2. It seems to me that IF what is termed "religious experience" is really a "conduit to the divine" (so to speak), then WHY are there thousands of God(s?)-concepts STILL out there?

Religious experince is beyond words. When we speak of it we have to filter it through our cultural constructs, becasue that's our understanding. Constructs are the way we understand the world. So that's why religions are different, because people have culturally relative and culturally bound constructs. RE is primarily about presence. One senses a presence.So there's no question of total enlightenment or being told all the answers to all the mysteries.

Phoenix

* Let's assume for the sake of argument that there is a "Creator(s?)" that is the author of this Universe, then such a powerful Entity would have no trouble in using such power to override ANY cultural theistic prism and reveal the TRUTH™ about Itself (His/Her/Themselves?) to every "experiencer".

But that wont work because you are trying to cheat. I've explained this already. You are trying it both ways. You are trying to have God be a big guy in the sky and still overcome the limits of a guy in the sky. The terminology you use is indicative of this kind of thinking. You call God "an entity" and you say "a powerful entity." God is not a powerful entity, not an entity at all. The ground of being is not just another thing in creation. A big man in the sky, even if the most powerful man anywhere, is still just another thing in creation. God is much more than that. In being more he's actually limited in a sense because he is beyond thinking like a man. Moreover, he's still limited to logical necessity so one thing he can't do is allow us freewill and yet unburden us from the limitations of our infinitude. We are human we are finite we have to see things through cultural constructs that's what language is and that's what thought is. There's no other way.

Phoenix

* The fact that people interpret these experiences through what I will call the "cultural theistic prism" [the God(s?) concept prevalent in a particular culture] says to me that this is NOT due any "outside (supernatural?) influence, but to particular interpretation (an erroneous one IMO) of a specific combination of brain chemistry and culture.

These kinds of experinces are in all cultural all over the world. Even in traditions such as Vedanta where they don't feel a presence but a void and where they don't believe in a personality of God they still relate to the void in the same way that theists relate to the presence. This proves that these experiences are universal. they not just limited to people who believe in a certain idea of God. They in all cultures and all traditions that proves it's external to the traditions.

Phoenix

3. Humans are just now able to sort out what is really going on and what we actually observe is due to natural, physical causes.

that's begging the question. There's no guarantee were even beginning.

Phoenix

The bottom-line here is WHY should I think that there's anything other than brain chemistry (one that pleasurable and for that reason ultimately beneficial) going one here. This is the hypothesis that fits the facts and doesn't require the introduction of "assumptions".

Because it can't account for the effects. When nothing else produces the kind of effects, no pathology, no mental illness, no external naturalistic poison or substance or pathological state, and no other context in which brain chemistry does, there's just no reason to attribute it to such things. You are only begging the question in making that attribution because it's all you've got. Without that assertion you would have no answer at all and since your ideology will not allow you to accept any other possibility that's really you can say.

Phoenix

It seems to me that because previous studies can document that these experiences have beneficial effects that you are attempting to stretch that into a justification for "God (your liberal Christian version)-did-it" . I don't see anyone denying that these experiences exist or that they can be beneficial. What I can understand is the very legitimate objection of attempt to use this phenomenon (one with a demonstrable physical cause) into an a very obvious case of special pleading (my God-did-it!). In other words, connect the dots:

You can't explain the effects. Come now you don't actually expect a scientific study to say "the finding of our study is that God exists?" That would be totally unscientific. But the researchers in private do often believe. There's nothing wrong with making the assumption based upon the study that well we can construe that since the experince is real the content is real and the content is God so it's logical to assume this is an experince of God. You keep ignoring the fact that this is the way we reason about all things experiential. How do I know I had a car wreck? The car is dented. I have whip lash. I have a memory of a car wreck. Now why should I know conclude that the car really did wreck? It's not really proved, and it could well be that I looked around too fast and got whip lash, a wrecking crew wrecked my car while it was parked and I hallucinated the wreck. But since the effects match the content, the effects are real, the experince is an experince of something why not conclude that the content is really what was experienced?

The criteria we use to understand reality at the epistemological level is that experiences are:

regular
consistent
shared (inter-subjective--the same types of experience)

So Re matches the basic criteria we use to determine the reality of our experiences. So we have reason to trust it.

Since the skeptic can't show any other explaination for the effects, can't duplicate them with any other method, that's ample warrant for the assumptions.

Newberg again:

Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.(37)

Phoenix

Religious experience (physical evidence==>derived from a set of brain chemistry/brain location, one that can be induced by certain psychoactive drugs and in some cases by brain lesions like temporal lobe lesions) to ....(your justification)......"God-did-it" (no disrespect intended with this phrase, just my "shorthand" for your alleged mechanism).

But you can't prove they have been! I have said this so many times. Read the John Hick book. He shows that there is no valid research proving this. they just assume anything about God is a religious experience. They don't use the M scale and they don't a means of measuring religious experince. it's that simple they can't prove they evoked it.

Me from my book:

Hick complies a short list of the major arguments proposed as to the neurological causes of RE:

(1) Epileptic seizers and frontal lobe stimulation by the Presinger helmet cause religious visions.
(2) Psychotropic drugs cause various forms of Religious experience
(3) ‘Pure Consciousness,’ consciousness of the void, emptiness, sunyata is caused by consciousness continuing after cutting off the perceptual input.
(4) The sense of unity with all reality is caused by closing down the awareness of the bodily boundaries of the individual.
(5) The sense of the presence of God or other supernatural beings is caused by splitting of the self-system into two, one half seeing the other half as a distant entity.

This seems like a very impressive case, and the reductionisms make it sound as though they have really uncovered a one to one correspondence between brain and mind. Punch here, get this experience, and punch over there get this other experience. If you want the feeling of God’s presence stimulate this area, if you want the sense of undifferentiated unity stimulate this other area over there. In reality, however, such is not the case. This argument is essentially Hick’s argument, the researchers not well versed in theology or the study of mysticism, and thus they think that unusual experiences structured loosely in religious language constitutes “mystical experience.” They are missing the whole nature what RE is and what it does because they are trying to formulate this simplistic argument from sign. That’s exactly what their argument is, an argument sign. It’s not a demonstration of the naturalistic causality of RE, it’s a correlation between two events, one supposedly causing the other, but not necessarily producing authentic mystical experience. What is produced is an odd experienced loosly structured in religious language. I don’t include Newberg or D’Aquili in my broad swipe at “reductionists” but even they exhibit some of these tendencies, but to a lesser extent because they knew enough to use real mystics. The association between the physiological and RE is the crux of the whole naturalistic argument. It’s really nothing more than an argument from sign. For the average atheist message boarder or blogger the connection is very simple. It’s quite common to hear them say “if damage the brain our body stops working, so we are just nothing more than collections of brain function and extensions of brain function.” The more sophisticated argument made by scientific researchers isn’t that different from the same argument. Ramachandran links seeming mystical experiences with epileptic grand mal seizures. Of course I quote a study in chapter 3 (“Studies”) from Lukoff and Lu, which shows that mystical experience is not related to epilepsy. Indeed, it would be absurd to assume that for all the 350 studies all of these subjects are epileptic or have something wrong with them and no researcher thought to check that out. Newberg disregards the idea that RE is the result of epilepsy or exhaustion, drugs or hallucination might trigger any other aspect of brain disfuciton such as. He argues that delusional people return form such states understanding they’re incoherence but mystical visions are coherent and meaningful and mystics never back off the idea that they were shown something meaningful. Ramarchandran draws no conclusion about the existence of God. He is merely giving a descriptive analysis of findings. He backs away from saying this disproves God. He also lists a host of other conditions such as temporal lobe personality that cause mystical experience besides epilepsy. It seems pretty ridiculous, however, to assert that everyone who has such an experience is either sick or has some form of mental abortion such that they are hallucinating or having some form of brain dysfunction. After all the study finds show that mystics tend to be healthy both physically and mentally, to be successful, accomplished, not delusional. As demonstrated in chapter 3 several studies show that the behavior of mystics does not tally with that of the mentally ill.

Hick argues that these researchers are equating RE with unusual experiences structured in religious terms but they are not really dealing with the experiences mystics talk about. He says this because Persinger, for example, always goes to great lengths to report visions and feelings of supernatural beings, both God and satan and visions of Jesus and Mary all sorts of things that his helmet wearing subjects have seen or felt. But these are not necessarily what mystics talk about. Most mystics discount visions and few mystics have them. Most mystics don’t sense an evil presence, although a subject discussed by James did feel such an evil presence but its ambiguous to what that person though it was (see Chapter on Proudfoot). These examples, rather than being good examples of science disproving religious experience, are really good examples of reductionism’s ability to lose phenomena. This may sound like great scientific research because it uses high tech gadgetry and advanced knowledge of brain anatomy. In reality, as a scientific study, it basically fails social research methods 101. First, because no control group, no administration of the M scale or any other measurement of mystical experience, so that means there’s no way to actually prove that these subjects had mystical experiences. It sounds like they had strange experiences but not necessarily “mystical.” The examples that Hick quotes include visions of Jesus figures. They do include a sense of divine presence. But there is no follow up to see if their lives change or if they experienced any sort of transformative effects on a long-term basis. For that matter Newberg’s work seems to suffer in that regard too, although with him since he uses monks and nuns one can be assured there is a much greater likelihood since these are authentic religious adherents who live life styles conductive to the mystical experience and presumably spend a great deal of their time cultivating this sort of experience. Hick makes the point that Presinger and Ramachandran are neurologists studying people who go to them because they have problems. They are not studying actual religious adherents whose lives are oriented toward cultivating the mystical, as is Newberg. This could make a profound differnce. But the reductionist mentality just says hey the experience lines up with the stimulus, argument form sign; we see sign we assume causality case closed. They make no attempt to consider the context or nature of the experience.( John Hick, The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experince, Neuroscience and The Transcendent. Playgrave:Macmillion, 2006, 66)

pardon me for quoting myself from my unpublished ms but the published material there is more important since it comes from experts, Hick and Newberg. That is published and I do document it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
the Lourdes evdience is obvious and certain.
I suppose you mean like the one you are so fond of:

Society for the Little Flower (Website) FAQ (visited 6/3/01)
St. Theresse of Lisieux

http://www.littleflower.org/therese/faq.html#4 (the one is the new site for your claim, your old link doesn't work)

Quote:
Regarding St. Therese, in 1923 the Church approved of two spontaneous cures unexplained by medical treatment. Sister Louise of St. Germain was cured of the stomach ulcers she had between 1913 and 1916. The second cure involved Charles Anne, a 23 year old seminarian who was dying from advanced pulmonary tuberculosis. The night he thought he was dying, Charles prayed to Therese. Afterward, the examining doctor testified, "The destroyed and ravaged lungs had been replaced by new lungs, carrying out their normal functions and about to revive the entire organism. A slight emaciation persists, which will disappear within a few days under a regularly assimilated diet." These two miracles resulted in Therese becoming beatified.
This is your evidence?! I have emailed this society, asking just what physical evidence exists that would validate the claim in bold (destroyed and ravaged lungs had been replaced by new lungs). There's no actual evidence posted here, Metacrock. We don't even know the location or the actual date this or the other alleged miracle (maybe 1916-17 for the ulcer cure). The location and date are important because the issue would be one of documentation, i.e., for instance X-rays of the lungs "before" (the alleged miracle) and "after" (the alleged miracle). If this incident was in some isolated hamlet in 1913-1923, then X-ray devices were far and few between. If this incidence happened during WWI then there would probably have been a shortage of the photographic glass used to create the images as well:

Quote:
Physics, Techniques and Procedures--X-ray film

Historically, photographic glass plates were used as the X-ray film base. After the supply of photographic glass from Belgium was cut off by World War I, cellulose nitrate, used as a base for photographic film was adapted for use with X-ray film. A cellulose triacetate base was developed in 1924 to avoid the highly flammable nature of cellulose nitrate. Finally, a stronger, thinner, more dimensionally stable film base made of polyester was developed in 1960.

Phoenix

So what do we have here in the way of evidence? The say-so of a maybe not disinterested physician or what, Metacrock? I very much doubt that there are X-ray pics of this case in existence. IF you are going to claim this as a miracle, then one would need something other than the word of the physician because this is an extraordinary claim (no physical cause possible).

You are committing a total violation of the rules of evidence. I use a published source, authoritative that douments the existence of medical evdience and show that that diagnostic technique did exist at that time.You have more more to so of any substance so you question the physician's interest level as though that's goign to really prove soemthing. Like the xray doesn't work if the physician doesn't care enough. that's really nuts and it's totally unfair. Xrays are objective diagnostic procedure they do not depend upon the interest level of the physician to work right. I guarantee if the guys lungs grew back over night the doctor would find some interest. That is gainsaying the evidence and its' totally unfair and it tells me you are clutching at straws.

This could be a case of spontaneous remission. Here's a recent example:
Quote:
Papulonecrotic tuberculid with spontaneous remission, by Tsuyoshi MITSUISHI, Kazumi IIDA, and Seiji KAWANA
{http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118603714/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0}

ahahaha in one night!???ahahahahahahahahahahaahahaha

you really think lungs are going to grow back over night that's remission???! O get a brain man! that's stupid! learn something about it man. God almighty! Love love a duck! talk about clutching at straws!

We describe a 62-year-old Japanese woman who had skin lesions involving her extremities, chest and back that showed spontaneous remission. The skin lesions consisted of slightly atrophic scars and crusted, reddish or necrotic papules. A tuberculin test showed induration and bulla, which was regarded as strongly positivity. Histopathologically, a tuberculoid granuloma with necrosis was present in the upper dermis and the deep dermis, including the adipose tissues. Bacterial cultures were not positive from sputum, urine or stool, and the chest X-P was also normal. After skin biopsy, all the lesions disappeared within 1 month. No relapse was noted in the entire body.

Did it happen overnight? Is that the same as growing a new lung. I don't think so.
document where that's from.

Is the above a "miracle", Metacrock? Let's hope that these researchers are going to actually study this woman to find out what happened to see if they can find any way to help other suffers rather than just ASSUME that God(s?)-did-it (totally useless "explanation" with regard to helping anybody else).

do you have a reason to assume it was God? Does it not mean anything to you taht remission never mans going away without a trace it doesn't mean growing back new organs it doesn't mean over night and to call something a Miracle there as to be a reason such as the person was prayed for or something.

why don't you try to learn something about the things you are criticizing? it's the height of ignorance.

__________________

Revision:Transcendental Signifier Arument: Rational Warrant for Belief

2009-06-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

I have said we don't need God arguments, but I didn't say I'm opposed to them. In looking back over the history of the blog I notice I've put this one up several times but in a truncated form. I've never put in the full version. So here it is.

If this is clear as mud to you and you want further background on the Derridian roots of the argument see these two articles:

Derrididan background part 1

Derridian Background part 2

Definitions

(1)Transcendental Signifier (TS):

The signification mark (word) which refers to the top of metaphysical hierarchy; the organizing principle which makes sense of all sense data and groups it into a meaningful and coherent whole, through which meaning can be understood.The corollary, the thing the Transcendental Signifier signifies, is the "Transcendental Signifiered (designated as TSed)"

(2) Signifier:

The term used of written words in the linguistic theories know as "structuralism" and in the theories of French Linguist Ferdinand Saussure. A signifier is a "mark," that is writing, which designates a concept forming a word, that which points to an object as the thing that it is and no other. ie, a physical tree is the signified, the object of the signifier "t-r-e-e."

Preliminary Observations:

(1) Any rational, coherent and meaningful view of the universe must of necessity presuppose an organizing principle which makes sense of the universe and explains the hierarchy of conceptualization.

(2) Organizing principles are summed up in a single first principle which grounds any sort of metaphysical hierarchy, the Transcendental Signifier (TS)

(3) It is impossible to do without a Transcendental Signifier, all attempts to do so have ended in the re-establishment of a new TS. This is because we cannot organize the universe without a principle of organizing.

(4)TS functions Uniquely as Top of The Metaphysical Hierarchy.It's function is mutually exclusive.

Argument:

P1) TS's function is mutually exclusive, no other principle can superceed that of the TS since it alone grounds all principles and bestows meaning through organization of concepts.

P2)We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of TSed since we cannot function coherently without a TS

P3) We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of TSed since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it.

P4) The logical conclusion would be that There must be a TSed which actually creates and organizes the Universe.

P5) The signifier "God" is one version of the TS, that is to say, God functions in the divine economy exactly as the TS functions in a metaphysical hierarchy.

P6) Since "God" is a version of the TS, and since TS and God concept share a unique function which should be mutually exclusive, the logical conclusion is that: God and TS share identity.ie "God" concept is discretion of the Transcendental Signified.

P7)Since the TS should be assumed as real, and TS and God share identity, we should assume that God is the Transcendental Signified, and thus is an actual reality.

rational warrant for belief in God's existence, QED.

B. Transcendental Signifier is the ultimate metaphysical principle which makes sense of the universe.

The transcendental Signifier (TS) is the mark that gives meaning to all the marks that make sense of the world; the "zeit geist," the "urmind", the "overself", the "object of ultimate concern", the "omega point", the "Atmon", the "one," the "Logos", "reason." all the major top ideas which bestow meaning upon the world are examples of the TS. People have always advanced such notions. (The word "G-O-D" is the Transcendental Signifier, the thing those letters refer to is the "transcendental signified")

1) All people have some notion the "big idea" which makes sense of everything else.

William James, Gilford lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a Platonist writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divisiveness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."

2) All Metaphysical Constructs include a TS.

Metaphysics is not merely realms unseen, but the organization of reality under a single organizing principle (this definition comes form one reading of Heidegger). All systems and groupings of the world verge on the metaphysical. Derrida and Heidegger say that it is impossible to do without metaphysics since even language itself is metaphysical. Everything points to the Transcendental Signifier. ( see Heidegger, Parenthesis, and Introduction to Metaphysics, and Derrida, Margins of Philosophy and almost any Derrida book).

3) Science has TS

William James--Gilford lectures:

"'Science' in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion. Where this is so, the scientist treats the 'Laws of Nature' as objective facts to be revered. ..."

Science is very Metaphysical. It assumes that the whole of relaity and be organized and studied under one central principle, that of naturalism.

"For essential reasons the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writting, is in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by a an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the closure." [Derrida, The End of the Book and the Begining of Writting, trans. Gayatri Spivak 1967 in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan Latimer, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovonovitch, 1989, p.166]

MetaListon Scinece and religion
http://www.meta-list.org/ml/ml_frameset.asp
Stephen Hawking's

"In his best-selling book "A Brief History of Time", physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that when physicists find the theory he and his colleagues are looking for - a so-called "theory of everything" - then they will have seen into "the mind of God". Hawking is by no means the only scientist who has associated God with the laws of physics. Nobel laureate Leon Lederman, for example, has made a link between God and a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson. Lederman has suggested that when physicists find this particle in their accelerators it will be like looking into the face of God. But what kind of God are these physicists talking about?"

"Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests that in fact this is not much of a God at all. Weinberg notes that traditionally the word "God" has meant "an interested personality". But that is not what Hawking and Lederman mean. Their "god", he says, is really just "an abstract principle of order and harmony", a set of mathematical equations. Weinberg questions then why they use the word "god" at all. He makes the rather profound point that "if language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature." The question of just what is "God" has taxed theologians for thousands of years; what Weinberg reminds us is to be wary of glib definitions."

C. Attempts to Deconstruct TS lead to abyss of Meaninglessness, and back to TS.

1) Derridian Deconstruction.

The French Post-structuralist Jaque Derrida seeks to explicate the end of Metaphysics which is the final project of Western philosophy. His technique of deconstruction aims at undermining any logos or first principle that would give rationality to the universe by unseating the privileges of reason which under gird all such projects. Even logic itself is undermined.

Derrida:

"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the principle of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"

Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.

Derrida's argument amounts to saying, "logic does not endorse itself." The point of the quotation above seems to be that logic is in a dilemma. If one tries to prove logic by its own terms, one is merely arguing in circle. But, if one does not do this, there is no foundation upon which one can base logic, because logic is the foundation.

[Quotes from Derrida from "The University in the Eyes of It's Pupils" Diactricits]

2) Into the abyss and back out to TS.

Many critics of Deconstruction have noted that if we take this principle seriously we would wind up unable to speak or think, even language requires an organizing principle which orders the world of our thought and speech (of course the basic thrust of Postmodern thought understands us to be trapped in, as Jameson said, "the prison house of language" unable to get at the real things of the world and their understanding because all we can really ever think through is language). But in opening this abyss Derrida creates a safe bridge over it as well, although that is not his intention. He uses the principle of difference (which he spells as "differance" to indicate that meaning is both differing and differing) but difference becomes the organizing principle of a Derridian universe. IT not only explains how meaning is derived from signifiers, not only does it tear down the meaning of all hierarchies, but it actually builds new ones because it becomes the foundation of value in valuing difference.

"The constant danger of deconstruction is that it falls into the same kinds of hierarchies that it tries to expose. Derrida himself is quite aware of this danger--and his response--which is really a rhetorical response...is to multiply the names under which deconstruction traffics..." [--Con Davis,Culture and Critique 178-179]

D. unavoidable nature of TS indicates God is a priori.

Either way, heather we try building a reductionist notion of the universe or heather we tear down the hierarchies of reason that implies a TS, we can never escape the TS. This inescapable nature of the transcendental signifier points to the a priori nature of the God concept. That reality is ordered by a single principle which gives meaning and rationality to all other principles is inescapable, but humanities multifarious attempts to understand that principle, and the frightening conclusion that the principle leads to a creator God is the logic inference. All of the many signs which have been used to understand this uber-sign imply an intelligent ordering rationality which makes sense of the universe, and therefore, logically must have created it in the first place.

1) Transcendental Signifier is unavoidable.

As has been pointed out above, there is no possibility of holding a rational view of the universe without an organizing principle, a "thing at the top." This indicates the ultimate necessity of a TS. In other words, the fact that we cannot get away from the TS indicates that there must really be one.

2) God is the ultimate Transcendental Signifier.

"Without God, who has been the ultimate Transcendent Signified, there is no central perspective, no objective truth of things, no real thing beyond language." [Nacy Murphy and James McClendon jr." Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies." Modern Theology, 5:3 April 1989, 211]

E. God is the ultimate unifying principle.

1) Coincidence of Opposites.

Nicholas of Cuza's concept that God's infinity is a universal set subsuming all finite sets of opposites. (See Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology)

"The universe of Nicholas of Cusa is an expression or a development, though of course necessarily imperfect and inadequate, of God--imperfect and inadequate because it displays in the realm of multiplicity what in God is present in an indisputable and intimate unity (complication) a unity which embraces not only the different but even the opposite, qualities or determinations of being. In its turn every single thing in the universe represents it--the Universe-- and thus also God in its own particular manner; each in a manner different from that of all others, by contracting the wealth of the universe in accordance with its own unique individuality."[--Alexandre Koyre' From Closed World to The Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 1957, 8-9.]

Cuza's vision of a universe taken up metaphysically in God in an undifferentiated unity is grounded in the paradoxical nature of geometry. One example Cuza gives is of the dichotomy between straightness and curvilinear. But if one was dealing with an infinite circle, from every point along the circle it would appear that the circle was a straight line. Or another example; large and small are opposites in a finite perspective, but in dealing with the infinitely large circle and the infinitely small one the center loses its special qualities, both are at the same time both nowhere and everywhere, and thus equally meaningful and meaningless.This may not seem like a particularly Christian notion of God, but Paul Tillich remarks that Martin Luther embraced it," one of the most profound conceptions of God ever developed." Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought.

2) God as Being itself.

As being itself God is Metaphysically above the level of existing things in the universe and constitutes all the potentiality and all actuality. This the nature of God is to order and to bring to concreteness potentialities. The signifier 'G-o-d' universally signifies and therefore takes up into itself all concepts and principles of rationality.

3) All people seek TS, therefore, this reflects innate sense of God.

Not only do we seek it, we cannot avoid it. The alternative is a meaningless universe, and more than that, a universe without coherence to reality. Of course we have the rules of logic, and we have science to tell us facts, but those move toward the TS becasue they are both predicated upon organizing reality under a logos, a rationale.

F. Objections.

1) Deconstruction and Postmodernism.

The climate of opinion today is that all metaphysical structures are merely constructed hierarchies of meaning and we can simply deconstruct them by reverse the terms, bringing out the contradictory elements in a text, or unbracketed that which is silenced by the text. But the move of Derrida to the metaphysical level form the linguistic level is totally unwarranted.The deconstruction of metaphysical hierarchies is nothing more than arbitrary. Moreover, Derrida simply makes his own TS through the concept of "difference" (he even spells it with an "a" to show that it is more than mere "difference" but induces differing and differing meaning. Yet this principle comes to define the universe, to set all values, to play the ultimate arbitration; in effect it has become its own TS.

2) We merely impose meaning upon a randum and cold universe.

We imposes meaning upon the universe as part of the brains innate pattern making ability, which is an evolutionary deposit allowing us to determine what to eat in the world and to recognize danger, remember where the good mushrooms are ect.and as cultural deposit owing to our need for security in a cold universe. Answer: While this is going to be the commonplace assumption in the current climate of opinion, and while it is no doubt true in general, even the "objective" "proven" "advocate of human knowlege" science must be nothing more than the imposition of a pattern of meaning upon nature to make us feel better in a cold universe. Of course the skeptic will break down the dichotomy between metaphysical meaning and "objective fact" about the workings of the universe. But science no less than religion transforms itself into metaphysical organization in dictating its materialist assumptions about ultimate reality. While it is true that we imposes patterns and read in meaning this in no way proves that there is nothing "out there" and the fact that it seems to be a natural inclination of humanity to find it implies that there is an innate sense of it laid upon our being as a divine program, to find the mark that gives meaning to all other marks.

3) This is an attempt to squre the circle.

Answer: This criticism has been made of the use of Nicholas of Cuza. Note, Cuza's argument does not mean that the square and the circle change shapes, it is not saying that sureness is really roundness. It is saying that in infinity all distinctions between binary opposition become meaningless. The shapes are the same, but from the view point of a finite observer in infinity the distinctions are meaningless.

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light.

2009-06-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

Gunnar Björnstrand

I have reviewed several Bergman films on this blog, starting with my review of his death two years ago ("Greatness has Left the Planet: Ingmar Bergman Dies"). Since getting Netflix last Summer I've been watching what I consider to be the greatest films from the the greatest age of art films. From the late 40s, beginning with Italian Neo-Realism, which followed the lead of Viscanti, to the mid 50s in French "new Cinema" and on to the end of the 60s film make reach it's peak in terms of artistic direction. A host of great filmmakers cranked out sublime creations, the greatest among them was Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. Bergman has a special sensitivity to religion. He was an atheist, he did not pull punches about his feelings of angst at the lack of a God (in his world view) but he was not one of these message board Dawkies. He approaches it with a sensitivity that preserves the dignity and intelligence of the believer.

My favorite example of that sensitivity is from my second favorite film, "Wild Strawberries," and there is a scene I love in that film where two young men are competing for the effectiveness of a young lady. Their contest takes the place of an intellectual debate which grows more angry in every scene. Finally they break into a fist fight and both have black eyes. They are angrily corralled by their companions and put in the back seat with the girl between them. She casually turns to the young seminarian and says "so, does God exist?" Bergman shows sensitivity in a scene where all the travels are together at a table the old doctor quotes poetry about religious belief, the atheist doesn't get it the seminary guy does. So even though he's an atheist he still acknowledges that Belief has its reasons and those reasons appeal to the heart, that doesn't make them stupid. Bergman's father the Chaplin to the Queen of Sweden, but privately he was abusive to the young Ingmar as he grew up. Bergman thus had a sympathy for the religious life but also a revultion and an acute awareness of the personal struggles that go on in the psyche of believers and seeking unbelievers.

Björnstrand and Thulin in
Winter Light

"Winter Light" is the second in Bergman's Trilogy: "Through the Glass Darkly," "Winter Light," and "The Silence." I have reviewed Thought he Glass Darkly on this bog, and also another Bergman film "The virgin Spring." One of his greats. The review of his death included a review of his greatest work, "The Seventh Seal." That is my favorite film of all time bar none. I am almost having a mystical experince just thinking about that film.

Winter light is like setting out for a wonderful vacation in a great setting such as the south of France, and suddenly finding yourself in a dentist chair for four hours screaming in pain. It has all the slow agonizing tedious built up to nothing of a root canal. Well, one might ask, "what's so great about that, it sounds like a crap movie." The first time you watch it is. But it grows on you. If you think about it latter you come to realize you did see a fine film. I wouldn't not put it in the ranks of the Seventh Seal, or the the Seven Samurai for that matter, but it is a great film. That intense tedium that goes nowhere is intentional. Bergman wants you to feel that. That's the Katharsis. He also wants the film to look dismal, soul crunching, cold, barren, stark, bleak and it does. The setting is a small Island off the coast of Sweden. It has modern convinces but everything is shabby and gritty and the people are isolated and the region is a backwater.It's the kind of place that one begins a practice in (say in medicine) because there's no where to go from there but up.

The first scene is in a church as the Sunday service begins. In fact, the whole film takes place on that Sunday between the noon service and the evening service which is only bout three and half hours. The building is interesting, the service is dismal. The building is old and crumbling with vaulted sealing and very Norse looking statues of Chrsit on the cross. There are only seven people in the whole church and they are spread out around the sanctuary. The only people who sit together are one couple, the others all lonely individuals who have no one to sit with even in spite of their being a small enough group to have an intimate service. The service is anything but intimate. It's mechanical, and legalistic, formal and by the book. The people in the service, with the exceptions of an old woman and a a hunchback who seem moved by it all.

The opening of the film and the slow unfolding of conflict imply a real slap in the face to Christian belief. The minister, by played by Bergman's best friend Gunnar Björnstrand, mutters under his breath "what a ridiculous image" as he gases at the cross.Everything is old and falling apart, ony two out of seven parishioners who bother to show up really get anything out of it, the rest is all perfunctory because it's expected. The minister (Thomas) stays to talk to the one couple who sat together. The man is a fisherman played by Max Von Sydow (the Father in Virgin Spring, also the exorcist himself in that fim). The fisherman's problem is that he's depressed, to the point of suicide, because he's fretting about the bomb. This is a very periodized anxiety of that era. In that day it would have spoken to the audience. But the minister is totally inept at dealing with the man's problems. He gets him to agree to come back latter and talk to him in private session without his wife. The couple leaves and the minister's girl friend (Marta--Ingrid Thulin) comes in. She is clinging and mothering and hovering and suffocating. She gets him to read a letter which he reads before the return of the fisherman. The content of the letter is a sketch of all the problems in their relationship. The intensity builds as the text of the letter is acted by Thulin. The scene is a masterpiece as Bergman does not allow the camera to stray from a close up of her face as she speaks the text which the minister is reading. This is violation of all the rules of film making. The close up grows in intensity as the problems of the couple are revealed. The viewer wants to move on but can't. The intensity of the letter is drilled into the face of the audience.

Thomas is sick, he has fever but he's pushing himself. In real life Bergman got the doctor to prescribe ineffective medicine for Björnstrand's bronchitis so he would really appear sick. While we might give Thomas some points for sticking to his duty we have to subtract Thomas again because his councilmen technique was total inept. He did not talk about the man's problems at all. Instead he told the fisherman about his own problems. He confessed his lack of belief and all but said things are pretty hopeless. He talked about is ideas of God but not in a way that shed theological light but in an intensely private way that could only be described as self indulgent.The man leaves clearly more distraught than when he came. Surprise, he goes right out and shoots himself.

There is a great scene, the only real outdoor scene where Thomas goes to issue last rights and help with the body. The Fisherman has shot himself in front of a stream which is moving very swiftly. There are mountains aruond, but none of it is beautiful. Of cousre it's black and white but even so nature can be beautiful in black and white, the great open outdoor forested scenes of Virgin Spring are wonderfully Beautiful, this is not. The stream looks cold and bleak and like one might drawn. The mountains look gritty, everything looks gritty, snowy stark and bleak. This is of course, the way Bergman wants it to look. The American Title is "Winter Light" so named because the quality of light in the film is muted. this is the light of the winter in Sweden, dark, somber not happy sunshine but cloudy and stark. The scene focuses on a body being put in a body bag. Thomas doesn't seem shaken as much as bored. He's so self absorbed even this guy's doesn't make him re think what he's doing.It's clear he has no calling. He's just a guy doing a job. He could be a plumber. One can't help but wonder if this wasn't Bergman's feeling about his father's ministry.

The arch of conflict come after this scene where Thomas and Marta have a showdown int he school where Marta teaches and lives in the back. Thomas basically lets her have it. He doesn't like her. he tells her so. He is humiliated her, she's clinging and so forth. She has a habit of calling "poor little Thomas" and hanging to his back. But it's clear if we read between the lines that her main sin is she is not his dead wife. He was really in love with his wife, he says, he will never get over her. He speaks of her "mockery of my dead wife." Marta looks helpless and breaks off her sobbing to say "I didn't know her." To me that means he does see a similarity between the two, but resents it. Marta does have some qualities that his wife had, but she's not the right woman.

Before the evening service Marta sits in the pew and talks to one of the seven, now six members of the church, a little hunchback guy who plays the organ. The hunchback, payed by Johan Allan Edwall, tells her that Thomas and his wife had the same problems that she and Thomas have. Thomas has exaggerated his love for her becasue she's gone and though guilt built her into a saint while she was actually clinging and smothering. He also observes that Thomas talk of searching, is there a God and so forth is just a way of keeping at bay the realizations about his own character flaws. His search for certainty is a false search because he's using God as a scape goat and search for certainty of himself not God. The real Swedish title of the film is a word meaning "the communicants." That has a double meaning because it applies to the parishioners of the church doing communion but also to the communication between the characters: in both cases it's an ironic title because their doing of communion is hollow and without feeling and their communication is non existent. The only real communicating done in the film is he little hunchback's analysis of Thomas and his revelation to Marta that Thomas and his wife also had the same kind of relationship. The Hunchback is also the only real religious character in the movie. He's the only one (other than perhaps the old woman who is only in it for one fleeting close up at the beginning) for whom faith is really a way of life and really moving.

The film ends with the beginning of the evening service. There are only three people there for the service, the hunchback, the minister and the former girlfriend. But Thomas goes on anyway. He begins "Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God almighty..." as though those meaning anything to him. Another formalistic service by wrote, never mind that the audience is only one person (the other guy plays the music). As long as one person is there the service must go on. We can take this in two ways, either "the show must go on" a dig at Christianity becasue they are so pathetic that even with just three people they still can't depart from the script. Or we can see it as hope because even if only one person receives it the word of God is not lost.

The devastating critique of Christianity and its' position in Swedish culture in this film are obvious. What can be seen if one looks closer are the points of Bergman's sensitivity to religious belief. The only really "together" character was the only religious character who sums it all up in a knowing way and does only actual communicating in the film. The hopeful aspect of the end, even though a bleak winter kind of hope, that even if only one person hears God is still there, the word is not spoken in vein. Of course Bergman didn't believe God was there, but what he actually did believe is unclear, what is clear is that he actually did have a sense of admiration and sympathy for the true believer and the true seeker.

This film reminds me of the life of great theologian Carl Barth. Barth came out of seminary typical nineteenth century liberal. The triumphalism of post millennial was shattered by WWI and he had nothing to say to an audience. He was put in charge of a parish where only three old women came tot he service. But he didn't go by wrote, he formed an intimate little service and discussed what to do about it. He learned from these women what they needed to hear why they believed, why the modern church had nothing to day to people. From there he launched his revolution in neo-Orthodoxy whic brought people back to the churches.

Winter light is a great film, even though I wont put it on a level with Bergman's greatest, ironic since he wanted it to be part of the great Trilogy, like all great films it leads one to think about great ideas.

Will Atheists Never Learn the Concept of The Super Natural?

2009-06-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

I am really sick of atheists repeating the same garbage over and over again. No matter how many times I try to correct them they just keep doing it. Here's a recent example.

Ingsve on carm

It is you that don't understand the word. You keep saying that your precious REs are supernatural which is completely false since we can easily detect them which means they are natural. If you however claim that a god makes the REs happen then that god is supernatural and that you have no proof of.

In a nut shell what's wrong with this view is that it doesn't speak to the original concept of the sueranatural. This is the degraded concept that Calvin brought about wtih the Reformer's. The idea that the supernatural can't be the religous experience because we can deterct them (althouigh what excactly he thinks we can detecti s a big quetion) is just totally missing the boat. Supernature is not a magic substance not made out of matter that can't be dterected and does amgic things. It's not a realm or a place or another dimension. It's basically just this:

God's power to elivate human antuer to a higher level. th'ts it. Ontolgoically it serves as ground and end of nature, because it's actually God's power. This is playing off of the eastern Orhtodox concept of "God's energies" God's power in teh world. So there' s a bit more to it than just matter or energy. But, that it can be detetected is not a problem becuase the Sueprnatural is in the nature. God's power to elivate is used in nature. Its' used in us. It can show up as the God part of the brain (so called) or in terms of reilgious experinece, but it is in nature. We detect it's effects that is not a disproof.

Here's a thing I wrote no Doxa summarizing the nature of the orignal concept.

Supernature: God's transforming Power in our lives and over the natural works of nature.

Nature:life from life

Natural:The sphere of influence necessary for support of physical life, the "natural world."

Supernatural:pertaining to the workings of Supernature either in the human heart or in the natural world.

Supernatural effects:Miracles; the alternation of nature in attraction toward its end in Suerpanture.

Ground and end:Ontological structure of the relation between Supernature and the natural. Foundation and telos toward which nature moves.

The problem in all these discussions about the supernatural is that we are dealing with a degraded concept. The notion of "Supernatural" is a misgnomer to begin with, because modern people construe the idea as another place, an actual location that you can go to. It's the unseen invisible world that is filled with ghosnts and magic and so forth. It's in the realm where God can heaven are, we supposse. But what they dont' realize is that this is the watered down, dilapidated concept. It's not even understood well by Christians because it was destroyed in the reformation.

The term "supernatural" comes from the term "supernauturalator" or "Supernature." Dyonisus the Areogopite (around 500ad) began talking of God as the supernaturalator, meaning that God's higher nature was the telos toward which our "lower" natures were drawn. St.Augustine has spoken of Divine nature as "Supernature" or the higher form of nature, but that is speaking of nature in you, like human nature and divine nature.

In the beginning the issue was not a place, "the realm of the supernatural" but the issue was the nature inside a man. Human nature, vs. divine nature. The Supernatural was divine nature that drew the human up to to itself and vivified it with the power (dunimos) to live a holy life. This is the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said "when I am weak I am strong." Or "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The weak human nature which can't resist sin is transformed by the power of the Godly nature, through the spirit and becames strong enought to reisist sin, to be self sacrificing, to die for others ect ect.

This was the "supernatural" prior to the reformation. It was tied in with the sacraments and the mass. That's partly why the Protestants would rebel against it. Austine (late 300s early 400s) spoke of Christians not hating rocks and trees, in answer to the assertion that Christians didn't like nature. But the extension of the natural world as "nature" didn't come until latter. The idea of "the natural" was at first based upon the idea of human nature, of biological life, life form life, that's what the Latin natura is about.

Prior to the reformation Christian theologians did not see the supernatural as a separate reality, an invisible realm, or a place where God dwells that we can't see. After the reformation reality was bifurcated. Now there came to be two realms, and they juxtaposed to each other. The realm of Supernature, is correlated to that of Grace, and is holy and sacred, but the early realm is "natural" and bad it's myered in sin and naural urges.

But all of that represents a degraded form of thinking after going throught he mill of the Protestant Catholic split. The basic split is characterized by rationalism vs feideism. The Catholics are rationalists, because they believe God is motivated by divine propose and wisdom, the Protestants were fiedeists, meaning that faith alone apart form reason because God is motived by will and sheer acceptation, the desire to prove sovereignty above all else.

The rationalistic view offered a single harmony, a harmonious reality, governed by God's reasoned nature and orchestrated in a multifarious ways. This single reality continued a two sided nature, or a mutli-facets, but it was one harmonious reality in which human nature was regenerated through divine nature. But the Protestant view left Christian theology with two waring reality, that which is removed from our empirical knowledge and that in which we live.

The true Christian view of the Sueprnatural doesn't see the two realms as juxtaposed but as one reality in which the natural moves toward its' ground and end in divien nature. It is this tendency to move toward the ground and end, that produces miracles. A miracle is merely nature bending toward the higher aspect of Supernature.

but with the Protestant division between divine sovereignty, acceptation and will motivating the universe, we mistake univocity and equivvocity for nature and supernature. We think nature and supernature are not alike they are at war, so difference marks the relationship of the two. But to make the Suepernatural more avaible they stress some aspect of nature and put it over against the rest of nature and pretend that makes it sueprnatuarl, this is univocity, it's the same. So will and acceptation, soverigty, God has to prove that he is in charge, these are all aspects of univocity.

It's the natural extension of this biphercation that sets up two realms and sees nature as "everything that exits." or "all of mateiral reality" that sets up the atheist idea that supernatural is unnecessary and doesn't exist.

Historical Overview: SN and Rise of Science

The medieval Christian doctrine of the supernatural has long been misconstrued as a dualistic denigration of nature, opposed to scientific thinking. The concept of supernature, however, is not a dualism in the sense of dinigrading nature or of pitting against each other the "alien" relams of spirit and matter. The Christian ontology of the supernatural bound together the realm of nature and the realm of Grace, immanent and transcendent, in a unity of creative wisdom and purpose, which gave theological significance to the natural world. While the doctrine of supernature was at times understood in a dualistic fashion, ultimately, the unity it offered played a positive role in the development of scientific thinking, because it made nature meaningful to the medieval mind. Its dissolution came, not because supernatural thinking opposed scientific thinking, but because culture came to value nature in a different manner, and the old valuation no longer served the purpose of scientific thinking. An understanding of the notion of supernature is essential to an understanding of the attitudes in Western culture toward nature, and to an understanding of the cultural transition to science as an epistemic authority.

The ontology of supernature assumes that the natural participates in the supernatural in an ordered relation of means and immediate ends, with reference to their ultimate ends. The supernatural is the ground and end of the natural; the realm of nature and the realm of Grace are bound up in a harmonious relation. The Ptolemaic system explained the physical lay-out of the universe, supernature explained its theological relation to God. The great chain of being separated the ranking of creatures in relation to creator. The supernatural ontology is, therefore, sperate from but related to cosmologies. This ontology stands behind most forms of pre-reformation theology, and it implies an exaltation of nature, rather than denigration. This talk of two realms seems to imply a dualism, yet, it is not a metaphysical dualism, not a dualism of opposition, but as Fairweather points out, "the essential structure of the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead the unwary into dualism, and then to resolve ... an exclusive emphasis on one or the other severed elements of a complete Christianity...such a dissolution is inevitable once we lose our awareness of that ordered relation of the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent, which the Gospel assumes." Yet, it is this "two-sidedness" which leads unwary historians of into dualism.

In his famous 1967 article, "The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Lynn White argued that the Christian belief of the Imago Dei created "a dualism of man and nature;" "man shares in God's transcendence of nature." This notion replaced pagan animism, it removed the "sacred" from the natural world, and with it, inhibitions against exploiting nature. Moreover, by the 12th century, nature became a source of revelation through natural theology. In the Latin West, where action prevailed over contemplation, natural theology ceased to be the decoding of natural symbols of the divine and became instead an attempt to understand God through decerning the operation of creation. Western technology flourished, surpassing even that of Islamic culture (although they still led in theoretical pursuits). Thus, White argues, medieval theology did allow science to grow, but at the ultimate expense of the environment.

The insights of feminist scholarship, however, suggest an even more subtle argument for the denigration of nature. Feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruther, argued that there is an identification between the female and nature, the male and transcendence. Women have been disvalued historically through the association between female sexuality and the "baseness" of nature. Londa Schiebinger, calls attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian cosmology placed women in a subordinate position. Gender was more fundamental than biological sex, and it was a cosmological principle, "...Men and women were carefully placed in the great chain of being--their positions were defined relative to plants, animals, and God." The subordination of women was predicated upon their position in nature. "Male" and "Female represented dualistic cosmological principles penetrating all of nature, principles of which sexual organs were only one aspect. One might suspect that the place of women on the great chain of being is indicative of the true status of nature itself in Christian ontology; an overt denigration of women indicates a covert denigration of nature.

read the following paper i wrote for Grade school on Science and the Sueprnatural. Only 12 pages.

Suernatural and the Rise of Science in The Middle Ages.

My Own Peronsal View

Since I believe that this physical reality is a thought in the mind of God, I understand reality as one unified whole; God's "mind" is the framework that generates and holds together all reality. Thus, Supernature is God's nature, will, and imagination. Reailty is all one thing, and that one thing is created and sustained by God (that one thing is thought). Thus "nature" is just a subset of "supernature" as a product and creation of God's thought; a sub reutine, a subset of laws that funciton in harmony with the larger frame. But the two are mixed in toegether. The Supernatural is found in the natural. Supernature is not a realm where magical beings live, but is the vivifying aspect of reality. The epitome of "the natural" is human nature, and human nature strives toward it's end in vivification through Supenature.

The "Supernatural" is the "ground and end" of the natural.

meaning: Supernature is the basic framework holding reality which generates this reality, and human nature seeks its teolos in unification with Supernature (ie God). We have a foundation for relaity and a telos toward which the natural bends. Any supernatural effects (miracles) are the result of that telos.

Revisting Fine Tunning.

2009-06-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is based upon an article by Andre Linde, although the first couple of quotes are by others. Linde is a major pysicist who is an atheist. But he admits the fine turning argument is a problem that science cannot at pesent deal with. At least at the time of the article which was a few years ago, he did say this. This is evidence I used in my previous post on the fine tuning arugment, and it was never addressed by Hemit or Loren.

1) Coincidence of the Universal Constants

Bradley again:

"One of the remarkable discoveries of the past 30 years has been the recognition that small changes in any of the universal constants produce surprisingly dramatic changes in the universe, rendering it unsuitable for life, not just as we know it, but for life of any conceivable type. In excess of 100 examples have been documented in the technical literature and summarized in such books as the Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986)".

"Slight variations in physical laws such as gravity or electromagnetism would make life impossible . . . the necessity to produce life lies at the center of the universe's whole machinery and design," stated John Wheeler, Princeton University professor of physics (Reader's Digest, Sept., 1986). "University of Virginia astronomers R.T. Rood and J.S. Trefil conclude their book Are We Alone? ..by estimating the probability of life existing anywhere in the universe to be one in a billion, and thus conclude the existence of life on planet earth, far from being inevitable, is the result of a remarkable set of coincidences."

"If I were a religious man," Trefil wrote in the concluding chapter, "I would say that everything we have learned about life in the past twenty years shows that we are unique, and therefore, special in God's sight." Instead he concludes that life on planet earth is a remarkable accident, unlikely to have been replicated anywhere else in the universe, which his book powerfully argues."

2) Initial Conditions

Bradley:

"Initial condition problems are found in many places in our scenario of the origin of the universe, its development into a suitable home for us, and the origin of life. These initial condition problems have, in fact, grown much worse with the recognition that many critical processes in the origins scenario are nonlinear, and therefore, require particularly precise initial conditions. Trefil and Rood's book cited above mentions some of these problems in detail. I will also discuss, briefly, initial conditions problems having to do with the origin of the universe and the origin of life. In summarizing this section, it is clear that there does appear to be something unique and special about our home in the universe and our existence in it."

Adrei Linde,Scientific American. Oct 97

http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398linde.html
[explaining problems with the BB for which the new inflationary model is propossed. The first problem listed above--that the universe pops into exitence out of nothing]

a) something from nothing

b) Flatness of Universe

"A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius on the order of the Planck length, or 10^-33 centimeter. We see however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10^28 centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more than 60 orders of magnitude."

c) Size of Universe--Plank Density

"A similar discrepancy between theory and observations concerns the size of the universe. Cosmological examinations show that our part of the universe contains at least IO^88 elementary particles. But why is the universe so big? If one takes a universe of a typical initial size given by the Planck length and a typical initial density equal to the Planck density, then, using the standard big bang theory, one can calculate how many elementary particles such a universe might encompass. The answer is rather unexpected: the entire universe should only be large enough to accommodate just one elementary particle or at most 10 of them. it would be unable to house even a single reader of Scientiftc American, who consists of about 10^29 elementary particles. Obviously something is wrong with this theory."

d) Timing of expansion

"The fourth problem deals with the timing of the expansion. In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. But how could all the different parts of the universe synchromize the beginning of their expansion? Who gave the command?

e)Distribution of matter in the universe

"Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter in the universe. on the very large scale, matter has spread out with remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part in 10,000..... One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the 'cosmological principle," which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous. This assumption. however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates important deviations from homogeneity, namely. stars, galaxies and other agglomerations of matter. Tence, we must explain why the universe is so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism that produces galaxies."

f) The "Uniqueness Problem"

"Finally, there is what I call the uniqueness problem. AIbert Einstein captured its essence when he said: "What really interests ine is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Indeed, slight changes in the physical constants of nature could have made the universe unfold in a completeIy, different manner. ..... In some theories, compactilication can occur in billions of different ways. A few years ago it would have seemed rather meaningless to ask why space-time has four dimensions, why the gravitational constant is so small or why the proton is almost 2,000 times heavier than the electron. New developments in elementary particle physics make answering these questions crucial to understanding the construction of our world."

Now Linde is confident that the new inflationary theires will explain all of this, and indeed states that their purpose is to revolve the ambiguity with which cosmologists are forced to cope. The Scalar field is suppossed to explain all of this; but these inflationary models are still on the drawing board. Moreover, he never says where scalar fields come from, what makes them, and indeed never illustrates how they solve the initial problem of where it all came form in the first palce. Finally, it seems that scalar fields would be a design feature that should troulbe Linde as much as the initial problems, since he compares them the circuit breaker of a house which keeps the uiverse from heating up too fast before it can expand. Moreover, they might be argitrary necessiteis (see argument I).

Studies on Religous Expernice

2009-06-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

A major philospher and friend of Brut Russell, Loren, makes these comments on the comment section in response to "Meaning and Truth."

Shouting "It's not a hallucination! It's not a hallucination! It's not a hallucination!" is a very bad argument, as is your waving away the serious epistemological problem that Bertrand Russell, Mark Vuletic, and I have tried to consider.

And becoming happy by believing something in no way indicates its truth. You could become very happy by believing that none of your miseries are any of your fault, blaming many of them on various conspiracies, but would your happiness indicate your faultlessness?

This is a hackney tactic of trying to hide the phenomena by re describing in ways the obscure what's important about it. I say RE results in "life transformation" she purposely reduces this to "getting happy" becasue the atheist can't face the facts or the truth that hundreds of studies demonstrate the superior nature of religious life.
What I'm talking about is mystical experience, not getting happy. You can get happy when you have a bowl of soup and good sandwich. I'm talking about something that totally changes your live, removes your fear of death, increases your socio us consciousness, makes you into a totally giving person, can cure you of heroin and other drugs (14%) gives your life meaning so that you feel its totally worthwhile to live. I know many atheists wallow in despair you know I'm right. not all of them, course not. But many do. studies prove that religous people have less mental illness, less depression, better sense of self actualization.

she wants to reduce this "getting happy" because it's the only thing she can say. She does not have one single counter study. not one single study shows different.

Religious experience indicative of good mental health

The “new atheists” put forth the notion that all of religion itself is a form of mental illness. This is the impression many love to cultivate. There is no basis for it in the data whatsoever. The effects are varied but over the entire range of research they spell out a healthy well-adjusted whole person. The qualities mentioned in the research over and over again include: less dogmatic, less authoritarian, more socially conscious, are about people, happy, healthy, successful, self aware, self assured, find life meaningful, enjoy their work, strong ego, strong sense of self, more self actualized. All the studies mentioned to this point back this up. Mathes, Maslow, Wuthnow, Greely, Luckoff and Lue, Noble, Hood and all others mentioned. I will include a list at the end of this chapter, and a select bibliography in the indices cataloguing the studies that find mystical experience to have long-term positive effects. These are the characteristics of self-actualization.
Religious People are More Self Actualized

This is the finding of a vast body of work. Some studies show that “Peakers” (those who experience “mystical experiences” what I’m calling “RE” in this essay) are more self actualized than those who do not have these experiences. But there are also studies that show that any inkling of religious experience carried some degree of the same advantages. Four hundred studies show that participation (as well as the nominal experiences) produces many benefits, among them less depression and better mental health.

Dr. Michael Nielson, Ph.D.

"What makes someone psychologically healthy? This was the question that guided Maslow's work. He saw too much emphasis in psychology on negative behavior and thought, and wanted to supplant it with a psychology of mental health. To this end, he developed a hierarchy of needs, ranging from lower level physiological needs, through love and belonging, to self- actualization. Self-actualized people are those who have reached their potential for self-development. Maslow claimed that mystics are more likely to be self-actualized than are other people. Mystics also are more likely to have had "peak experiences," experiences in which the person feels a sense of ecstasy and oneness with the universe. Although his hierarchy of needs sounds appealing, researchers have had difficulty finding support for his theory."

We turn once again to Jayne Gackenback

In terms of psychological correlates, well-being and happiness has been associated with mystical experiences,(Mathes, Zevon, Roter, Joerger, 1982; Hay & Morisy, 1978; Greeley, 1975; Alexander, Boyer, & Alexander, 1987) as well as self-actualization (Hood, 1977; Alexander, 1992). Regarding the latter, the developer of self-actualization believed that even one spontaneous peak or transcendental experience could promote self-actualization. Correlational research has supported this relationship. In a recent statistical meta-analysis of causal designs with Transcendental Meditation (TM) controlling for length of treatment and strength of study design, it was found that: TM enhances self-actualization on standard inventories significantly more than recent clinically devised relaxation/meditation procedures not explicitly directed toward transcendence [mystical experience] (p. 1; Alexander, 1992)
Believers: less depression, mental illness, Divorce rate, ect.

The study by Gartner and Allen indicates that religious belief is associated with good mental health, less depression and so on:

"The Reviews identified 10 areas of clinical status in which research has demonstrated benefits of religious commitment: (1) Depression, (2) Suicide, (3) Delinquency, (4) Mortality, (5) Alcohol use (6) Drug use, (7) Well-being, (8) Divorce and marital satisfaction, (9) Physical Health Status, and (10) Mental health outcome studies...The authors underscored the need for additional longitudinal studies featuring health outcomes. Although there were few, such studies tended to show mental health benefit. Similarly, in the case of the few longevity or mortality outcome studies, the benefit was in favor of those who attended church...at least 70% of the time, increased religious commitment was associated with improved coping and protection from problems."

This was based upon a review of social science studies. These were regular projects by social scientists published in the scholarly literature. All the researchers did was to read the literature and report the finds of these studies. In the past psychiatry has tended to assume what Freud assumed, that religion is pathology. This is no longer the case. The basic assumption in the mental health field today is that religion is positive, healthy, and a sign of functionality.
Long-Term Positive Effects of Mystical Experience

Research Summary

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Also called Transcendent Experiences, Ego-Transcendence, Intense Religious Experience, Peak Experiences, Mystical Experiences, Cosmic Consciousness. Sources:

Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.
Lukoff, David & Francis G. Lu (1988). ``Transpersonal psychology research review: Topic: Mystical experiences.'' Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20 (2), 161-184.

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Furthermore, Greeley found no evidence to support the orthodox belief that frequent mystic experiences or psychic experiences stem from deprivation or psychopathology. His ''mystics'' were generally better educated, more successful economically, and less racist, and they were rated substantially happier on measures of psychological well-being. (Charles T. Tart, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm, p. 19.)

Long-Term Positive Effects

Wuthnow:
*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

Short-Term Effects (usually people who did not previously know of these experiences)

*Experience temporarily disorienting, alarming, disruptive
*Likely changes in self and the world,
*space and time, emotional attitudes, cognitive styles, personalities, doubt sanity and reluctance to communicate, feel ordinary language is inadequate

*Some individuals report psychic capacities and visionary experience destabilizing relationships with family and friends Withdrawal, isolation, confusion, insecurity, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, panic, restlessness, grandiose religious delusions

Links to Maslow's Needs, Mental Health, and Peak Experiences When introducing entheogens to people, I find it's helpful to link them to other ideas people are familiar with. Here are three useful quotations. 1) Maslow - Beyond Self Actualization is Self Transcendence ``I should say that I consider Humanistic, Third Force Psychology to be transitional, a preparation for a still `higher' Fourth Psychology, transhuman, centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interest, going beyond humanness, identity, selfactualization and the like.''

Abraham Maslow (1968). Toward a Psychology of Being, Second edition, -- pages iii-iv.

Studies dealing with mystical experience (Peak experience or “RE”) itself also find that this kind of experience is also a major factor in well-being. Greely in 74, Hay and Morisy (1978) “people who reported having intense religious experiences were significantly more likely to report a high level of psychological well being than those who did not experience transcendence. Greely’s ‘mystics’ were also more likely to be optimistic than were his “non mystics” and less likely to be authoritarian or racist.” “Transcendent experience may well lead toward a permanent transformation of the psyche in the direction of wholeness and health, Maslow (1970) Owens (1972) Wapnick (1972).

2) States of consciousness and mystical experiences
The ego has problems:
the ego is a problem.

``Within the Western model we recognize and define psychosis as a suboptimal state of consciousness that views reality in a distorted way and does not recognize that distortion. It is therefore important to note that from the mystical perspective our usual state fits all the criteria of psychosis, being suboptimal, having a distorted view of reality, yet not recognizing that distortion. Indeed from the ultimate mystical perspective, psychosis can be defined as being trapped in, or attached to, any one state of consciousness, each of which by itself is necessarily limited and only relatively real.'' -- page 665

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

3) Therapeutic effects of peak experiences
``It is assumed that if, as is often said, one traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it. Psychedelic therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow's idea of the peak experience. The drug taker feels somehow allied to or merged with a higher power; he becomes convinced the self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing, release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.'' -- page 132

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integration. Unpublished paper by Jayne Gackenback, (1992)
http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

"These states of being also result in behavioral and health changes. Ludwig (1985) found that 14% of people claiming spontaneous remission from alcoholism was due to mystical experiences while Richards (1978) found with cancer patients treated in a hallucinogenic drug-assisted therapy who reported mystical experiences improved significantly more on a measure of self-actualization than those who also had the drug but did not have a mystical experience. In terms of the Vedic Psychology group they report a wide range of positive behavioral results from the practice of meditation and as outlined above go to great pains to show that it is the transcendence aspect of that practice that is primarily responsible for the changes. Thus improved performance in many areas of society have been reported including education and business as well as personal health states (reviewed and summarized in Alexander et al., 1990). Specifically, the Vedic Psychology group found that mystical experiences were associated with "refined sensory threshold and enhanced mind-body coordination (p. 115; Alexander et al., 1987)."

Studies have shown that religious satisfaction was the most powerful predictor of general happiness and acceptance of life. Prayer was also an important contributing factor. “As a result of their study the authors concluded that it would be important to look at a combination of religious items, including prayer, relationship with God, and other measures of religious experience to begin to adequately clarify the associations of religious commitment with general well-being."

Studies on religious participation

Psychiatrists assume religious experience Normative.

Dr. Jorge W.F. Amaro, Ph.D., Head psychology dept. Sao Paulo says that the unbeliever is the Sick Soul:

"A non spiritualized person is a sick person, even if she doesn't show any symptom described by traditional medicine. The supernatural and the sacredness result from an elaboration on the function of omnipotence by the mind and can be found both in atheist and religious people. It is an existential function in humankind and the uses each one makes of it will be the measure for one's understanding…." "Nowadays there are many who do not agree with the notion that religious behavior a priori implies a neurotic state to be decoded and eliminated by analysis (exorcism). That reductionism based on the first works by Freud is currently under review. The psychotherapist should be limited to observing the uses their clients make of the representations of the image of God in their subjective world, that is, the uses of the function of omnipotence. Among the several authors that subscribe to this position are Odilon de Mello Franco (12).... W. R. Bion (2), one of the most notable contemporary psychoanalysts,"

This relationship is so strong it led to the creation of a whole discipline in psychology; transactional psychology. The Transactional school is based upon the work of Abraham Maslow, who was the first modern researcher (since William James at the turn of the ninetieth into the twentieth century) to subject the outcomes of religious experience to modern social sciences research methods (late 60s to early 80s). Professor Neilson again:

"One outgrowth of Maslow's work is what has become known as Transpersonal Psychology, in which the focus is on the spiritual well-being of individuals, and values are advocated steadfastly. Transpersonal psychologists seek to blend Eastern religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) or Western (Christian, Jewish or Moslem) mysticism with a form of modern psychology. Frequently, the transpersonal psychologist rejects psychology's adoption of various scientific methods used in the natural sciences."

"The influence of the transpersonal movement remains small, but there is evidence that it is growing. I suspect that most psychologists would agree with Maslow that much of psychology -- including the psychology of religion -- needs an improved theoretical foundation."

There is a vast array of studies on other areas besides RE, studies that demonstrate the validity and advantage of participation in a religious tradition, or religious belief. This is not best evidence for the arguments because its not so much the trace of the divine as it effects and affects human life, but is a demonstration of the advantages of a belief. Nevertheless, because there is a link between belief, participation, and experience, especially if Maslow et al are right that we all experience God to some degree, we can assume that participation is a response to some degree of experience. So these studies are important for the religious a priori argument, and they serve as secondary back up for the co-determinate and Thomas Reid arguments.

Religion is positive factor in physical health.

Many studies confirm that religion is a powerful force in physical health. This is important because it seems that we are constructed as organisms to be religious. Religion seems good for us on many levels. I resist the urge to make a design argument, tempting though it is. Yet, the point is that religious experience is as trust worth as other forms of experience, in a general sense. One indication of that trustworthy nature is its healthy effect upon our bodies. Much has been said in the popular mainstream press, such as this Knight Ridder news release of 1998.

"Some suspect that the benefits of faith and churchgoing largely boil down to having social support � a factor that, by itself, has been shown to improve health. But the health effects of religion can't wholly be explained by social support. If, for example, you compare people who aren't religious with people who gather regularly for more secular reasons, the religious group is healthier. In Israel, studies comparing religious with secular kibbutzim showed the religious communes were healthier."Is this all a social effect you could get from going to the bridge club? It doesn't seem that way," said Koenig, who directs Duke's Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health.Another popular explanation for the link between religion and health is sin avoidance."

"The religious might be healthier because they are less likely to smoke, drink and engage in risky sex and more likely to wear seat belts. But when studies control for those factors, say by comparing religious nonsmokers with nonreligious nonsmokers, the religious factors still stand out. Compare smokers who are religious with those who are not and the churchgoing smokers have blood pressure as low as nonsmokers. "If you're a smoker, make sure you get your butt in church," said Larson, who conducted the smoking study."

Neilson:
Even when we control for smoking religious belief still comes out ahead.
The most important factor in well-being

Argyle and Hill were studying religious experience. Researchers, who have a large database, deal with a lot of people, tend to use simple one-factor measures to measure happiness. Those with small samples, few people, tend to use multiple measurements. The findings indicate that those who are involved in religion report greater levels of happiness than do those who are not. Neilson sites a study of over 16,000 people in Europe, 85% of weekly churchgoers were “very satisfied” with life, only 77% among those who never went to church. This does not even measure belief among non-churchgoers. Neilson sites studies by Argyle and Hills, Inglehart (1990, just mentioned) and he also sites his own study.

Atheists cannot make this go away by pretending it's just a matter of "getting happy." they can't pretend the facts aren't as they are. the research is there, it's proven. We can argue about the conclusions to be drawn, but to deny the facts is merely sticking your head in the sand. shame shame shame on you "free thinkers!" you can't face the facts.

The Fine Tuning Argument as Sing of Divine Purpose

2009-05-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

I was arguing with Hermit and Loren, our two intrepid regular atheists on my blogs. They both feel, apparently, that there is no way to justify a sense of divine purpose. I appeal to the fine tuning argument for such as sense, this elicited a challenge from Loren to debate her on fine turning.

The problem is even though I use the fine tuning argument on my God argument list (that's just to help me get 42 God arguments so I can have the answer to God, the Universe, and everything, which as we all know is the number 42--well I have to do something with my nights), I still have a problem with using it. The problem is that I argue as a standard approach that God is beyond empirical proof. Yet this is an argument ostensibly proving God and yet it's empirical. I over come this difficulty by using it, not as proof for the existence of God, but as an indication of divine purpose being detectable in creation.

This is not the only indication of divine purpose. One could certainly argue that the basic nature of all religions indicates a purpose, that special revelation such as the Bible explicitly states a purpose (although God's ultimate plans and reasons remain a mystery) and one could point to the nature of religious experince for evidence of a purpose. Let's not forget that ever loving Transcendental signifier argument. That TS argument is chock full of purpose. I don't want to get into an argument about the Bible, for the simple reason that this will derail the whole discussion. I am expecting those two loyal opponents to discuss this at length. But I think we can bracket the Bible as just understood as a source for believers to point to for things like this and argue about it latter. I will sketch out the other three sources and then indicate why the fine tuning argument is an indication of purpose.

Now in these first three I'm assuming other arguments for God. Fine tuning is used a God argument, don't let that confuse you. I'm not saying these are arguments for the existence of God. I'm saying having assumed there is some kind of God, this is how we know that God has an overall purpose concerning humanity.

(1)The nature of religion itself

The purpose of religion is to identify the nature of the human problematic, and to resolve the problematic by means of mediation of ultimate transformative experinces. This being the case, the basic reason for religion as a whole is to transform the live of the individual in such a way as to enable self actualization and to surmount the existential angst inherent in the human problematic. Since this seems to be the goal of all world religion, regardless of how differently it is construed, we can postulate that if there is some form of reality behind world religions then this must be a motive or a purpose.

(2) special relation

I have already stipulated that I want to bracket this discussion. But the Bible tells us (Ecclesiastees) that the whole duty of man is to fear God and keep his commandments. Thus we can logically infer that since we have a duty the duty giver must have purpose in giving it. In fact the whole sense of duty and devotion that all religious believers feel might also weigh in the discussion.

(3) Nature of RE (overlapps with no 1)

One of the major affects of RE is that it gives us a sense that we understand there is an ultimate purpose. This is one of the major peace making aspects of such experinces. It's universal, people all over the world have these experinces and they almost always get this sense that they now see there is an ultimate purpose and its' good. Part of that experince is a deep abiding sense of a presence of love. That is enough to tell us that love is the basic motivation of purpose.

This is an indication, not an overall argument for the existence of God. The purpose indicated would be the propagation of life.The major evidence that I use for fine tuning comes from an atheist, the atheist physicist who invented one of the primary models for inflationary universe: Andre Linde.

(4) Fine tuning.

fine tuning, in so much as the universe is totally unlikely, demonstrates that a purpose had to be behind the fine turning since it would require purposive action to fine tune. Since the universe is unlikely the odds are overwhelmingly against it we should assume the game is fixed. If it's fixed it's fixed for a reason. That doesn't mean God has to sit down and design it like a giant building contractor in the sky. But he would have to put in motion some kind of principle that would allow for the unlike protection of life where it could develop. Fine tuning indicates that there is some sort of systematic bias introduced into the process that causes it turn out to protect life.

Adrei Linde,Scientific American. Oct 97

http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398linde.html (this url may not be good any more it was a long time ago).

[explaining problems with the BB for which the new inflationary model is propossed. The first problem listed above--that the universe pops into exitence out of nothing]

a) something from nothing

b) Flatness of Universe

"A second trouble spot is the flatness of space. General relativity suggests that space may be very curved, with a typical radius on the order of the Planck length, or 10^-33 centimeter. We see however, that our universe is just about flat on a scale of 10^28 centimeters, the radius of the observable part of the universe. This result of our observation differs from theoretical expectations by more than 60 orders of magnitude."

c) Size of Universe--Plank Density

"A similar discrepancy between theory and observations concerns the size of the universe. Cosmological examinations show that our part of the universe contains at least IO^88 elementary particles. But why is the universe so big? If one takes a universe of a typical initial size given by the Planck length and a typical initial density equal to the Planck density, then, using the standard big bang theory, one can calculate how many elementary particles such a universe might encompass. The answer is rather unexpected: the entire universe should only be large enough to accommodate just one elementary particle or at most 10 of them. it would be unable to house even a single reader of Scientiftc American, who consists of about 10^29 elementary particles. Obviously something is wrong with this theory."

d) Timing of expansion

"The fourth problem deals with the timing of the expansion. In its standard form, the big bang theory assumes that all parts of the universe began expanding simultaneously. But how could all the different parts of the universe synchromize the beginning of their expansion? Who gave the command?

e)Distribution of matter in the universe

"Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter in the universe. on the very large scale, matter has spread out with remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part in 10,000..... One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the 'cosmological principle," which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous. This assumption. however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates important deviations from homogeneity, namely. stars, galaxies and other agglomerations of matter. Tence, we must explain why the universe is so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism that produces galaxies."

f) The "Uniqueness Problem"

"Finally, there is what I call the uniqueness problem. AIbert Einstein captured its essence when he said: "What really interests ine is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Indeed, slight changes in the physical constants of nature could have made the universe unfold in a completeIy, different manner. ..... In some theories, compactilication can occur in billions of different ways. A few years ago it would have seemed rather meaningless to ask why space-time has four dimensions, why the gravitational constant is so small or why the proton is almost 2,000 times heavier than the electron. New developments in elementary particle physics make answering these questions crucial to understanding the construction of our world."

Now Linde is confident that the new inflationary theories will explain all of this, and indeed states that their purpose is to revolve the ambiguity with which cosmologists are forced to cope. The Scalar field is suppossed to explain all of this; but these inflationary models are still on the drawing board. Moreover, he never says where scalar fields come from, what makes them, and indeed never illustrates how they solve the initial problem of where it all came form in the first place. Finally, it seems that scalar fields would be a design feature that should trouble Linde as much as the initial problems, since he compares them the circuit breaker of a house which keeps the universe from heating up too fast before it can expand. Moreover, they might be arbitrary necessities (see argument I).

Loren has already issued her own argument against fine tuning:

Blogger Loren said...

Here is my broader point about alleged fine tuning. It's that the Earth's appearance of being fine tuned does NOT translate in the Universe as a whole being fine tuned. The Universe makes lots of different kinds of environments, and with that productivity, it's only a matter of time before the Universe produces at least one that can allow us to exist.

I think we can see that she doesn't grasp the dimensions of the argument. You can see from the evdience of Linde above the entire structure of the universe overall in its' earliest formation out of the BB is fine tuned. I don't eve mention earth.

It's like how if you play poker long enough, you'll eventually get dealt a high hand. It's very improbable, but if you play long enough, you get dealt LOTS of hands, and it's only a matter of time before you get a high one.

The fine tuning argument is not analogous to getting a "high hand." there are so many 0's in the odds given that it's like getting a thousand royal flushes in a row. In a real poker game those kind of odds would result in a lynching for marking the deck long before we got to even one hundred royal flushes in a row.

My answer:

"No offense but I don't think you understand the argument. It says its' extremely improbable that we would hit the target levels. There are so many of them and if we missed one by just a small bit there would be no life possible in the galaxy or universe. So that means the game is rigged, and that implies purpose."The argument erroneously assumes that "life as we know it" is the only possible outcome. If the universe were different than it's still possible that some other form of life would arise.

Hermit says:

Even life on Earth is pretty diverse; it arises everywhere from superheated volcanic ocean vents to the subfreezing desert of Antarctica.

The idea that the entire universe is somehow "fine-tuned"just for us puny humans is just absurd. This is another consequence of this anthropomorphizing habit; it ignores the vast and almost limitless variety of possibilities in the natural universe to make it all about us. It isn't.

That is merely argument from incredulity. 'O I can't believe it." that's not an argument. It doesn't do anything to the logic or the empriical data.

Blogger Loren said...

Very well. Thanx for inviting me. :)

I'm not especially interested in the question of cosmic purpose, since that seems to me to be a poorly-defined hypothesis. How would one tell one purpose from another, or from no purpose at all? For all we know, our Universe's purpose is to make lots of black holes.

See you got some things to say. We can understand protecting life. We can get that much. I'm not trying to say that I understand God's ultimate purposes. God is beyond understanding. But it seems pretty clear that we are given a series of breaks in this life in all kinds of things, one crucial one is the formation of life in the universe.

It may be plentiful or we may be all there is but it seems clear that a cold and hostile universe has been tweak, the purpose suggested is so that we will be here. That means we have a purpose. That is one of the major motivations for a religious life is understanding this,and seeking what that purpose is.

I'm more interested in the question of how fine-tuned the Universe is for allowing us to emerge and survive. I think that a few things may qualify as fine tuning, but for the most part, I think that the Universe is less fine-tuned than some fine-tuning advocates seem to think.

There are thousands of target levels. They are all over the place from early staler formation, even before from the basic crystallization of elements and formation of gravitation to stars to planets to life. Every step of the way we have a thousands totally unlikely events.

I will finally suggest that God's ultimate purpose is love. This is consistent with all four of the indications I give. God's basic motivation is love and all we have to do to understand everything important that we need to know is to love.

God is not A being

2009-05-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

This is in response to the previous post, where I discuss mystical experience and its effects upon those who experince it.Hermit makes the comment:

A Hermit said...

Thing is these effects aren't just confined to "thinking about God" but are present in all kinds of transcendent experience. I have real problem with the generalization of all such experiences as traces of something called "God". It seems to me that these kinds of experience (and I believe I've had them myself) are the result of our being able, however briefly, to drop the filters that usually keep us focused on our everyday existence perceive our actual position in the universe; to sense the infinite, or near infinite, nature of the universe in which we live. But that is not same as "God".
8:46 AM

It's a bit veg as to which experinces he's talking about. Does he mean the initial experince that makes one consider "I have had a mystical experince?" Or does he mean the long term effects of having had a mystical experince? I am doubting the latter the trace of God and not the former. It's problematic as to whether or not to include the former as part of the "trace." Certainly when I first used the term "trace" I was thinking of Derrida and Derridian usage, and in that regard surely the immediate sensations would be part of the trace at least. The content is God oriented and that ties the experince to a sense that is an experience of God. But the real aspect that stands out as not naturalistic is the long term effects. There are ways to answer the physiology and chemical arguments concerning the immediate sensations, but in the long run they are not where the real proof lies. The real proof is in the long term effects, because none of them proposed alternatives (serotonin, other brain chemicals, mushrooms and the lot) can be demonstrated to produce the long term effects, that is apart from the context of RE. Now the Good Friday follow up makes it clear that there is a relationship between mushrooms and long term effects, but not apart from the context of RE. Those who did the mushrooms and had the long term effects were already mystics. That means it supports the theory of opening the receptors to God.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I have to use that to into the context of the comments I am concerned with. That's the context of the discussion and in that context there arose a mini discussion about the distinction between a view of God that is not based upon anthropomorphism vs. just observation of the natural world.If you don't have a view of God as "personal" but as a principle or impersonal force, how do you know the difference between the world as it is naturally without God and God?

Hermit said:

they are actually talking about two different sets of experiences. The mystical doesn't come from just thinking about God at all. I have real problem with the generalization of all such experiences as traces of something called "God". It seems to me that these kinds of experience (and I believe I've had them myself) are the result of our being able, however briefly, to drop the filters that usually keep us focused on our everyday existence perceive our actual position in the universe; to sense the infinite, or near infinite, nature of the universe in which we live. But that is not same as "God".

In response I said:

Yes, it is exactly the same as God. you know my view includes much more than the idea of the big man in the sky or the big kign on the throne right?

those qualities are inherently what I mean when I say the word "God." that's what I'm talking about: eternal, necessary, ground of being.

read my TS argument again. you actually believe in God by my terms.

By "those qualities" I am referring to the sense of pervasive presence in RE, the sesne of eternal being, the basic realization of necessary eternal being.AS Hemrit put it:

to sense the infinite, or near infinite, nature of the universe in which we live.

He follows up by saying "that's not god." It's my contention that it is. Especially true of sensation of the infinite. That is the basis of understanding God as being itself. you sense some spacial quality in being that transcends the mundane, that's the sense of the numinous, that's the basic religious experince. What is going on there is my contention about the eternal and the infinite evoking the basis of religious experince, that means there is somewhere in that experince the trace of a valid object of religious concern. Tillich calls God "the object of ultimate concern." That's what is revealed in the sense of the numinous, and that's exactly what Hermit is describing. He is actually as much as stating that he believes in God, if by God one understands Tillich's concept that I defend. Of course Hermit can't have that and repudiates it. Now to be clear, I am saying that since the religious instinct is evoked (sense of the numinous) in the infinite then this gives us a valid object of religious devotion; ie God. This leads to further discussion that Hermit doesn't want to call it God. That strikes me as merely semantic becasue it fits my concept of God. That is to say, this talk of transcending the fetters of the mundane and sensing the infinite, as well the association of mystical experince with qualities that make up the sense of the numinous evokes my concept of God. Thus how can I refrain from thinking of it as God? Well Hermit doesn't accept the same concept. We are talking things we both apparently sense, he just wants to label it differently than I and to approach it and respond to it differently. So even though that may be a huge chasm, that "difference" in our approaches, but it's still a unified sense that we are not that far apart. Thus, I told Hermit "you actually believe in God by my terms." I think that may have been an exaggeration, but he is nearing the prospect. In response he said:

"No, I believe in a natural, impersonal universe. I believe that's completely awe inspiring, and calling it "God" it's the first step in an anthropomorphizing process which, for me, actually diminishes it."

right there is where I said:

that's just semantics. How can the term "God" be anthropomorphic when it can applied to the Hegelian dialectic or the Platonic forms or a billion "incidents" of process?

That last bit is a reference to the deep dark secret of process theology,that God is really defined as "a society of occasions."

you have merely limited your view of God as a matter of semantics.
9:16 PM

J.L. Hinman said...

I think that such experiences of oneness are pure hallucination.

and your bigoted opinion is empirically disproved. do you hear me? science has disproved that. 350 studies show it is not hallucination. you see? it's disproved. science disproves it.However, I think that such hallucinations can permanently rewire some parts of our brains, thus producing "transformative effects".

that's a contradiction in terms if that's ture that proves God is doing it because is no otehr example in anyting anywhere where that happens. transformative effects do not resul form metnal deterioration. Hallucinaiton is usualy caused by pathology.

pathology can't produce good psotive long term effects. It does not. it never does. no other case. There are lots of aspects of our psyches that are falling to the onslaughts of brain research, and it will be interesting to see how that turns out.

the brain research guys don't study religious experince. that was the whole point of my post.

why don't atheists ever read? What A Hermit was experiencing seems rather close to Plotinus's One, which is beyond all description -- and which lacks personality and is eternally fixed. That entity "creates" timelessly; the Universe is emanations from it.

"personality" is a blind alley. no verse in the Bilbe says God has "personality." that is beside the point.

God = Planto's one! All aseity is assiety. It also seems like Richard Carrier's "Vulcan mind meld with God", a doozy of a mystical experience, in http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/carrier.html

Carrier is a pretencious idiot. that doesn't make the studies go away. you are just flying in the face of scientific evidence.

Athiests love science until it disproves their hate, then they ignore it.

Loren:

Metacrock, you ought to try to look past your pet theological beliefs and stop reading them into others' beliefs. I try to do that myself; I recognize that Democritus's atoms are far from quantum-field-theory particles.

That is certainly an unfair and not well thought out statement. I am clearly moving beyond the limitations of a purely Christian view point and including all religions and all traditions, but that is not enough! It wont be enough until I totally throw all belief. Clearly that is just ideology talking. One who is more conversant with the conversation of Western thought, especially theology, would see this.

A Hermit said...

"that' jut semantics. How can the term "God" be anthropomorphic when it can applie to the Hegelian dialectic or the Plantoinc forms or a billion "incidents" of process?

you have merely limited your view of God as a matter of semantics."Aren't you the one who says you have a "personal relationship" with a God who takes an active and interventionist interest in your affairs? Do you not identify this God with the person of Jesus Christ?

Hermit and/or Loren:

Explain to me how you aren't anthropomorphizing when you do that.

It should be obvious that it's not anthropomorphic, unless you don't know what the words means.I am constantly saying "not a guy in the sky." I say "not A being." God is not a being. I say God is not possessed of personality. How is any of that anthropomorphic? you think the slightest trace of consciousness and will is anthropomorphic but I have constantly said that we can't recogizne God's conscoiusness as such becuase it would be such a higher form.

I think it's absurdly absurd for you to charge that linking Plato's one with the Christian God and Brahman and all the other God concepts in the world is anthropomorphizing or imposing the Christian God on everyone. That's just stupid. Sorry to be blunt bu that's one of the dumber moves I've seen. I think that shows how neither of you ever really think about what I say. I find that typical of atheism.

Anyone who has followed my blog as long as Hermit has should know that my view is that of Paul Tillich God is not a being but being itself. Not a bit anthropomorphic. God is the basis of reality and the aspect of being that grounds reality. "He" is an aspect of being, the ground of being, the basis of it. We only say "He" as an convention in the first place. That's the very opposite of your criticisms. Jesus is a different deal. Jesus is the incorporation of God into the form of a man, not the coming to earth of a man-like God or his he God in a man suit. He's the unique transmogrification of God into the nature of human being.

Brain Chemistry is no Aswer to Religious Experience

2009-05-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

The media is replete with articles such as the one by NPR which tries to say that RE is the result of Brian chemistry.

the point of the article is to destroy faith in religion by reducing religious experinces to brain chemistry. They link up the sensations and the activities of the brain when one is thinking about God. That is exactly the evdience I sue when I talk about the structure in the brain that gives us the idea of God. That general argument holds no terror for one who believes in religious experince. It doesn't disprove RE and it doesn't provide an alternative that reduces to naturalistic origins either. Here's why:

(1) they can't prove they are studying real mystical experience.

Most of the researchers who do the God part of the brain studies, who try to match up parts of the brain with religious experience, this goes for the guy with the helmet, Ramerchandrin, Newberg and all of them, none or them are able to show that their subjective are having real mystical experiences.

The one way to do that scientifically, those guys don't even know about. The way is the "M scale." You have me speak fo this before. It was invented Ralph Hood, it measures the extent to which one has had 'peak' experience or mystical experience. The researcher in that article do not use the M scale at all. That means they are just assuming that any thought about God is as good as any other thought, that' is not the case.

Since they aren't measuring religious experiences they can't claim that religious experience reduces to brain chemistry. These reductionists are pulling a bait and switch. They switching real religious experince for any thoughts about God, or strange experinces in which something about God is mentioned. This came out in John Hick's book about New Frontier of Religion and Science.

(2) Lining up chemical with God imagery proves nothing.

All these researchers are doing is trying to line up the presence of some tranquilizing chemical such as serotonin and some form of thought which includes religious imagery. That doesn't prove anything becasue they can never show that the serotonin is the actual cause of the transformation effets that occur long term over the life span of the subject many years subsequent.

(a) is the chemical present becasue the tranquil effect of God's presence causes the release?

(b) did God release the chemical to calm them down?

(c) Does the presence of the chemical even have anything to do with the transformation effects?

None of those have been answered.

(3) Opening receptors to the divine.

We are sentient flesh and blood beings. If God created us, he created us that way. If we are the product of evolution only, evolution has made that way. That's the way we are. We think by having our thoughts transmitted by neural receptors in teh brain, those are chemicals. Just like having ears. We hear by picking up vibrations on the ear drum.

God could not speak audibly to us without using your ears. By the same token, if God wants to give us thoughts and sensations, he has to paly with the chemicals. The fact that a trigger mechanism can open the receptors so that we are more included to these experiences than otherwise is no more a disprove of God being involved in the process than Moses having ears to hear God speak disproves God's voice.

Reductionists will make much of the fact that several studies in which psilocybin mushrooms were used produced a valid mystical experience. That is ture in several studies, the major two being Good Friday by Pahnke, (early 60s) the follow up in the 80s (forget who did that) and a recent one by Grifiths (Johns Hopkins).

I actually discussed the latter study with Hood, the inventor of the M scale. he's impressed with the study but doesn't find it challenging his work or his conclusions at all. Far from seeing it as any kind of disproof of God he takes the study as a whole as proof of all of his ideas about God about religious experince. Most researchers in that field do. None of them actually try to use that kind of study as disproof most of them use it as proof of the validity of religious experince, mushrooms and all. But this is a very different set of researchers and a different kind of research from the Ramerchandrin God finder helmet and God part of the brain.

The Good Friday study and its follow up is even less of an argument for reductionism and more proof for the open receptor theory that the pro mystical core faction argue (the idea that God is doing it). The reason is becasue the follow up shows that the mystical experinces induced by the mushrooms produced profound changes in teh subjects that radically transformed their lives and stuck with them through out life. Many of them said that was the most crucial moment in their lives.

Now it is true that the meditation group, the control group that did not take mushrooms only did mediation did not have those profound changes. But the thing is almost all the mushroom takers were mystical anyway before they tried the mushrooms. They were chosen from among a group of seminarians. Most of them had had religious experinces in their childhoods and were headed for the ministry. They were mystics long before they were mushroom takers. Most of them had already had these experiences. So the what this is proves is not tha the very same experiences with the very same outcome can be induced by naturalistic means, but that the triggers (including drugs) open the receptors which are partly opened anyway and experiences already being had become greater.

This is obvious because otherwise they would have to have the same experince as the control group since the argument is that those experinces can be induced naturally. But the fact they were already having them disrupts that argument because this was not something induced upon people who had no relationship with the divine.

(4) Doesn't explain outcomes

The outcome for most is that they find their lives transformed by mystical experiences. This has been demonstrated over and over with 350 studies over a four decade period. Those transformation effects have not duplicated by any other means. The immediate sensation of the religious experince may be had by inducing some drug, but the long term positive effects have not been so duplicated. The point is not the immediate sensation but the effects long term.

There is no other example of such effects being induced by anything. The only example that comes close is the Good Friday follow up, but since that experimental group were mystics anyway, there is no control that would separate the two effects; making the open receptor idea much more plausible.

Most atheist seem to think the point is that God is doing this by magic. Andrew Newberg in Why God Wont Go Away rights about the realization of a neural dimension to the spiritual, without fear of reduction to the naturalistic. Its' not magic and it doesn't have to be. God can work through naturalistic means. The one difference that we can look at and say "this is God" rather just "this is serotonin" is the long term effects and their relation to promotion of a way of life that works.

Atheists also seem to think that reductionism is beating up on the Spirit if it doesn't find some mysterious element or source of energy or some kind of energy that can't be explained. None of that, not a strange energy, or magic, or an element we don't know is necessary. We do not have to find something in the process of the experience that can't be accounted for in the natural, because it is a natural process. The thing that stands out and makes it different and tags it as the trace of God is the divine in the content of the experince, and the long term effects which can't be produced by anything else.
__________________

How do You kow Which Parts of the Bible Are Inspried?

2009-05-18T20:25:00.001-07:00

On the other thread by me Magus asks me:

Quote:
Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any? Do you believe that the bible is only a reflection of the way that the people who wrote it or do you believe god wanted it to turn out the way it did? If you believe some parts come from god and other do not, how do you determine which is which?
He didn't like my answers so I'll try again.

Quote:
Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any?

Not a matter of Parts. You can't dissect a narrative line by line and ask "what parts of this narrative are the result of the writer's genius and what parts are just banal filler?" You can criticize different aspects of course, but you can't say 'this sentence is genius and this sentence is not a product of genius." The whole narrative works together to create a solid word. Narratives communicate in many subtle says. you can't limit the number of insights one can deduce from a work of art.

Fundametnalists look at the Bible in a certain way and atheists look at it in reaction the fundamentalist way. The basic assumption is made by both that the text of the Bible is, from the "In the Beginning" of Genesis to the "even so come quickly Lord Jesus" of Revelation as words transmitted from God to the mind of the authors. As though Moses sits down, takes pen in hand and a lights shines on him and a voice in his head says (in a booming echo like way) "write write write, this is is...."In in in The the ther beginning ing beginning beginning...." I don't think it works that way. I am willing to understand that when the prophets say "this is what the Lord says" they may be repeating word for word the exact verbiage God gave them to say, although not necessarily. But for most of the Bible I doubt that it works that way. I think people were just using the ideas that came to them as a result of their religious experinces, and as a result they used those concepts and feelings in the different ways that it occurred to them to use such material. They put their ideas of God into the stories and those who had real experinces really captured the nature of God's grace, and those who did not genuinely experince God failed to capture such things.

The real problem is the model. The model of the fundies says that God is writing a memo. The Bible is the word form "the Big man upstairs" and just like an executive writing a memo. Moses is taking dictation. But that model assumes directly handed down verbiage, it's even called "verbal plenary" meaning "all the verbiage is inspired." That's the model I use. I go by a model that views the Bible as a collection of writings which are based upon human encounters with the divine. People experience God in different ways, usually beyond words; to speak about that they must call up from the deep recesses of their spirits (minds) that intangible part that produces art and literature, and they formulate into words their experinces. That means they have to load the experince into cultural constructs.

A cultural construct is an idea that is suggested by culture, by association with other people in society and the symbols and analogies and metaphors that tacitly speak to us at a level we understand but can't necessarily articulate. In the ancient world life was cheap, people were used to thinking in terms of either wiping out the other guy or being wiped out. The ancient Hebrews magnified their culture, but a romanticized view of themselves and their struggles into narrative form and used that framework to express the wordless sense of the numinous that they experienced through contact with God. The tendency to want to wipe out other people, to destroy totally every trace of their existence and lives, is part of the cultural constructs which act as a lens to give words to the writer's deep and hidden senses of God communicated through wordless sensations on the mystical level. So they build into the narrative a bunch of stuff about wiping these guys and those guys but what we need to understand is the major point being made.

For example, in the bit about the Amalekites, I'm pretty sure the bit about the infants is added in latter. I think we see real evdience in the text that it's been tweaked. But the real point is not wipe out the Amalekites nor is it that it's ok for us to wipe our enemies, the real point is obey God. Saul didn't obey God and the incident was a down fall for him. Now it doesn't matter that the incident is this failure to wipe out the infants it could have been anything. They wrote it like that. The real point is do whatever God tells you to do. But that God is not going to tell us to wipe out our enemies and destroy their kids is pretty obvious to most of us. We can defend that description well enough to say "God did not command this." We can even put it up to religious experince. My experinces of God tell me God doesn't want this. But why did the author of that part of the Bible (presumably Samuel) think that God did tell him that? Because he's filtering the experince through his cultural constructs.

Now you might ask "but then how can we learn moral truths? Our moral understanding is not static. Our understanding evolves over time. The ancient Hebrews could not understand this was wrong because it was common place in their day. We understand the wrong of it because culture evolves. Jesus understood it was wrong. Jesus did not say "wipe out the Amalekties" he said "turn the other cheek." He even corrected the understanding of the OT generations when he said "you have heard it said an eye a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you turn the other cheek." With the Bible we do not proof text. We don't determine what to do by one verse. We use the preponderance of the evidence, meaning everything we can understand about the Bible. We don't stop there, we study and understand what others have said about it. We use the words of the saints and the great theolgoians as precedents and bench marks to help us interpret. Samuel was not speaking with authority for all time in telling that story. He was merely telling a story he heard soem someone and putting down on paper some tradition (probably the real author was writing from Babylon in the exile--that's the most heavily redacted part of the Bible). He was putting into the work his understanding of God from his experinces as well what he had been taught. But the end result is a narrative and like all narratives it only works to accomplish its task when we try to understand it as a narrative and not force it into molds where it doesn't fit such as memo from the boss, military communique, or auto owner's manual.

It doesn't make sense to say "this is inspired and this isn't." That would be like saying "which feet of Elliot's The Wasteland are inspired and which aren't. You can't segment things in that way. We need to understand the bible as literature. It's major function is to bestow grace upon the reader. you read it to be healed to find spiritual edification and to understand God's laws. There are those who think it should be read like an instruction Manuel for a car. They seem to think it's going to tell us ever move to make in the same way that the owner's Manuel tells us how to change the oil. Since the Bible is a collection of different works written over a long period of time it doesn't make sense to try and fit the whole collection into one model and understand it all in the same way.

We don't have to understand exactly the role of inspiration nor do we need to look for the inspired parts as opposed to the banal parts. What we need to do is understand the over all preponderance of teaching and weigh that in light of what God shows us in our own lives. When we do this grace is bestowed, we are healed, we are drawn closer to God but we do not have to relate to it as if we are reading the instructions to change the oil in the car.

Magnus, if you think this is still inadequate, tell me why. I want you to have questions. I am sure you will and I'm ready to answer them.

The Religous A Priori

2009-05-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

(1) Scientific reductionism loses phenomena by re-defining the nature of sense data and qualia.

(2)There are other ways of Knowing than scientific induction

(3) Religious truth is apprehended phenomenologically, thus religion is not a scientific issue and cannot be subjected to a materialist critque

(4) Religion is not derived from other disciplines or endeavors but is a approach to understanding in its own right

Therefore, religious belief is justified on its own terms and not according to the dictates or other disciplines

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In my dealings with atheist in debate and dialogue I find that they are often very committed to an empiricist view point. Over and over again I hear the refrain "you can't show one single unequivocal demonstration of scientific data that proves a God exists." This is not a criticism. It's perfectly understandable; science has become the umpire of reality. It is to scientific demonstration that we appear for a large swath of questions concerning the nature of reality. The problem is that the reliance upon empiricism has led to forgetfulness about the basis of other types of questions. We have forgotten that essentially science is metaphysics, as such it is just one of many approach that can be derived from analytical reasoning, empiricism, rationalism, phenomenology and other approaches.

Problem with Empiricism

Is empirical evidence the best or only true form of knowledge? This is an apologetics question because it bears upon the arguments for the existence of God.

Is lack of empirical evidence, if there is a lack, a draw back for God arguments?
I deny that there is a lack, but it has to be put in the proper context. That will come in future threads, for this one I will bracket that answer and just assume there no really good empirical evidence (even though I think there is).

I will ague that empiricism is not true source of knowledge by itself and logic is more important.

True empirical evidence in a philosophical sense means exact first hand observation. In science it doesn't really mean that, it implies a more truncated process. Consider this, we drop two balls of different size from a tower. Do they fall the same rate or the bigger one falls faster? They are supposed to fall at the same rate, right? To say we have empirical proof, in the literal sense of the term we would have to observe every single time two balls are dropped for as long as the tower exists. We would have to sit for thousands of years and observe millions of drops and then we couldn't say it was truly empirical because we might have missed one.

That's impractical for science so we cheat with inductive reasoning. We make assumptions of probability. We say we observed this 40,000 times, that's a tight correlation, so we will assume there is a regularity in the universe that causes it to work this way every time. We make a statistical correlation. Like the surgeon general saying that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies were really right, they read their Hume, there was no observation fo cause and effect, because we never observe cause and effect. But the correlation was so tight we assume cause and effect.

The ultimate example is Hume's billiard balls. Hume says we do not see the cause of the ball being made to move, we only really see one ball stop and the other start. But this happens every time we watch, so we assume that the tight correlation gives us causality.

The naturalistic metaphysician assumes that all of nature works this way. A tight correlation is as good as a cause. So when we observe only naturalistic causes we can assume there is nothing beyond naturalism. The problem is many phenomena can fall between the cracks. One might go one's whole life never seeing a miraculous event, but that doesn't mean someone else doesn't observe such things. All the atheist can say is "I have never seen this" but I can say "I have." Yet the atheist lives in a construct that is made up of his assumptions about naturalistic c/e and excluding anyting that challenges it. That is just like Kuhns paradigm shift. The challenges are absorbed into the paradigm untl there are so many the paradigm has to shit. This may never happen in naturalism.

So this constructed view of the world that is made out of assumption and probabilities misses a lot of experience that people do have that contradicts the paradigm of naturalism. The thing is, to make that construct they must use logic. After all what they are doing in making the correlation is merely inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning has to play off of deductive reasoning to even make sense.

Ultimately then, "empiricism" as construed by naturalist (inductive probabilistic assumptions building constructs to form a world view) is inadequate because it is merely a construct and rules out a priori much that contradicts.

The A priori

God is not given directly in sense data, God transcends the threshold of human understanding, and thus is not given amenable to empirical proof. As I have commented in previous essays (blogspots) religion is not a scientific question. There are other methodologies that must be used to understand religion, since the topic is essentially inter-subjective (and science thrives upon objective data). We can study religious behavior through empirical means and we can compare all sorts of statistical realizations through comparisons of differing religious experiences, behaviors, and options. But we cannot produce a trace of God in the universe through "objective" scientific means. Here I use the term "trace" in the Derision sense, the "track," "footprint" the thing to follow to put us on the scent. As I have stated in previous essays, what we must do is find the "co-determinate," the thing that is left by God like footprints in the snow. The trace of God can be found in God's affects upon the human heart, and that shows up objectively, or inter-subjectively in changed behavior, changed attitudes, life transformations. This is the basis of the mystical argument that I use, and in a sense it also have a bearing upon my religious instruct argument. But here I wish to present anther view of the trace of God. This could be seen as a co-determinate perhaps, more importantly, it frees religion from the structures of having to measure up to a scientific standard of proof: the religious a prori.

Definition of the a priori.

"This notion [Religious a priori] is used by philosophers of religion to express the view that the sense of the Divine is due to a special form of awareness which exists along side the cognitive, moral, and aesthetic forms of awareness and is not explicable by reference to them. The concept of religion as concerned with the awareness of and response to the divine is accordingly a simple notion which cannot be defined by reference other than itself." --David Pailin "Religious a pariori" Westminster Dictionary of Chrisian Theology (498)

The religious a priroi deals with the spacial nature of religion as non-derivative of any other discipline, and especially it's special religious faculty of understanding which transcends ordinary means of understanding. Since the enlightenment atheist have sought to explain away religion by placing it in relative and discardable terms. The major tactic for accomplishing this strategy was use of the sociological theory of structural functionalism. By this assumption religion was chalked up to some relative and passing social function, such as promoting loyalty to the tribe, or teaching morality for the sake of social cohesion. This way religion was explained naturalisticaly and it was also set in relative terms because these functions in society, while still viable (since religion is still around) could always pass away. But this viewpoint assumes that religion is derivative of some other discipline; it's primitive failed science, concocted to explain what thunder is for example. Religion is an emotional solace to get people through hard times and make sense of death and destruction (it's a ll sin, fallen world et). But the a priori does away with all that. The a priori says religion is its own thing, it is not failed primitive sincere, nor is it merely a crutch for surviving or making sense of the world (although it can be that) it is also its own discipline; the major impetus for religion is the sense of the numinous, not the need for explanations of the natural world. Anthropologists are coming more and more to discord that nineteenth century approach anyway.

Thomas A Indianopolus
prof of Religion at of Miami U. of Ohio

Cross currents

"It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. [Huston] Smith seems to regard human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as "innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word, religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies, and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of transcendence held by a participant..."

The Skeptic might argue "if religion as this unique form of consciousness that sets it apart form other forms of understanding, why does it have to be taught?" Obviously religious belief is taught through culture, and there is a good reason for that, because religion is a cultural construct. But that does not diminish the reality of God. Culture teaches religion but God is known to people in the heart. This comes through a variety of ways; through direct experience, through miraculous signs, through intuitive sense, or through a sense of the numinous. The Westminster's Dictionary of Christian Theology ..defines Numinous as "the sense of awe in attracting and repelling people to the Holy." Of course the background assumption I make is, as I have said many times, that God is apprehended by us mystically--beyond word, thought, or image--we must encode that understanding by filtering it through our cultural constructs, which creates religious differences, and religious problems.

The Culturally constructed nature of religion does not negate the a priori. "Even though the forms by Which religion is expressed are culturally conditioned, religion itself is sui generis .. essentially irreducible to and undeceivable from the non-religious." (Paladin). Nor can the a priori be reduced to some other form of endeavor. It cannot be summed up by the use of ethics or any other field, it cannot be reduced to explanation of the world or to other fields, or physiological counter causality. To propose such scientific analysis, except in terms of measuring or documenting effects upon behavior, would yield fruitless results. Such results might be taken as proof of no validity, but this would be a mistake. No scientific control can ever be established, because any study would only be studying the culturally constructed bits (by definition since language and social sciences are cultural constructs as well) so all the social sciences will wind up doing is merely reifying the phenomena and reducing the experience. In other words, This idea can never be studied in a social sciences sense, all that the social sciences can do is redefine the phenomena until they are no longer discussing the actual experiences of the religious believer, but merely the ideology of the social scientist (see my essay on Thomas S. Kuhn.

The attempt of skeptics to apply counter causality, that is, to show that the a priori phenomena is the result of naturalistic forces and not miraculous or divine, not only misses the boat in its assumptions about the nature of the argument, but it also loses the phenomena by reduction to some other phenomena. It misses the boat because it assumes that the reason for the phenomena is the claim of miraculous origin, “I feel the presence of God because God is miraculously giving me this sense of his presence.” While some may say that, it need not be the believers argument. The real argument is simply that the co-determinate are signs of the trace of God in the universe, not because we cant understand them being produced naturalistically, but because they evoke the sense of numinous and draw us to God. The numinous implies something beyond the natural, but it need not be “a miracle.” The sense of the numinous is actually a natural thing, it is part of our apprehension of the world, but it points to the sublime, which in turn points to transcendence. In other words, the attribution of counter causality does not, in and of itself, destroy the argument, while it is the life transformation through the experience that is truly the argument, not the phenomena itself. Its the affects upon the believer of the sense of Gods presence and not the sense of Gods presence that truly indicates the trance of God.

Moreover, the attempts to reduce the causality to something less than the miraculous also lose the phenomena in reification.William James, The Verieties of Religious Experience (The Gilford Lectures):

"Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined."

This does not mean that the mere claim of religious experience of God consciousness is proof in and of itself, but it means that it must be taken on its own terms. It clearly answers the question about why God doesn't reveal himself to everyone; He has, or rather, He has made it clear to everyone that he exists, and He has provided everyone with a means of knowing Him. He doesn't get any more explicit because faith is a major requirement for belief. Faith is not an arbitrary requirement, but the rational and logical result of a world made up of moral choices. God reveals himself, but on his own terms. We must seek God on those terms, in the human heart and the basic sense of the numinous and in the nature of religious encounter. There are many aspects and versions of this sense, it is not standardized and can be describes in many ways:

Forms of the A priori.

Schleiermacher's "Feeling of Utter Dependence.

Frederick Schleiermacher, (1768-1834) in On Religion: Speeches to it's Cultured Disposers, and The Christian Faith, sets forth the view that religion is not reducible to knowledge or ethical systems. It is primarily a phenomenological apprehension of God consciousness through means of religious affections. Affections is a term not used much anymore, and it is easily confused with mere emotion. Sometimes Schleiermacher is understood as saying that "I become emotional when I pay and thus there must be an object of my emotional feelings." Though he does vintner close to this position in one form of the argument, this is not exactly what he's saying.

Schleiermacher is saying that there is a special intuitive sense that everyone can grasp of this whole, this unity, being bound up with a higher reality, being dependent upon a higher unity. In other words, the "feeling" can be understood as an intuitive sense of "radical contingency" (int he sense of the above ontological arugments).He goes on to say that the feeling is based upon the ontological principle as its theoretical background, but doesn't' depend on the argument because it proceeds the argument as the pre-given pre-theorectical pre-cognative realization of what Anslem sat down and thought about and turned into a rational argument: why has the fools said in his heart 'there is no God?' Why a fool? Because in the heart we know God. To deny this is to deny the most basic realization about reality.

Rudolph Otto's Sense of the Holy (1868-1937)

The sense of power in the numinous which people find when confronted by the sacred. The special sense of presence or of Holiness which is intuitive and observed in all religious experience around the world.

Paul Tillich's Object of Ultimate Concern.

We are going to die. We cannot avoid this. This is our ultimate concern and sooner or latter we have to confront it. When we do we realize a sense of transformation that gives us a special realization existentially that life is more than material.

see also My article on Toilet's notion of God as the Ground of Being.

Tillich's concept made into God argument.

As Robert R. Williams puts it:

There is a "co-determinate to the Feeling of Utter dependence.

"It is the original pre-theoretical consciousness...Schleiermacher believes that theoretical cognition is founded upon pre-theoretical intersubjective cognition and its life world. The latter cannot be dismissed as non-cognative for if the life world praxis is non-cognative and invalid so is theoretical cognition..S...contends that belief in God is pre-theoretical, it is not the result of proofs and demonstration, but is conditioned soley by the modification of feeling of utter dependence. Belief in God is not acquired through intellectual acts of which the traditional proofs are examples, but rather from the thing itself, the object of religious experience..If as S...says God is given to feeling in an original way this means that the feeling of utter dependence is in some sense an apparition of divine being and reality. This is not meant as an appeal to revelation but rather as a naturalistic eidetic"] or a priori. The feeling of utter dependence is structured by a corrolation with its whence." , Schleiermacher the Theologian, p 4.

The believer is justified in assuming that his/her experinces are experiences of a reality, that is to say, that God is real.

Freedom from the Need to prove.

Schleiermacher came up with his notion of the feeling when wrestling with Kantian Dualism. Kant had said that the world is divided into two aspects of relaity the numenous and the pheneomenal. The numenous is not experienced through sense data, and sense God is not experineced through sense data, God belongs only to the numenous. The problem is that this robbs us of an object of theological discourse. We can't talk about God because we can't experience God in sense data. Schleiermacher found a way to run an 'end round' and get around the sense data. Experience of God is given directly in the "feeling" apart form sense data.

This frees us form the need to prove the existence of God to others, because we know that God exists in a deep way that cannot be estreated by mere cultural constructs or reductionist data or deified phenomena. This restores the object of theological discourse. Once having regained its object, theological discourse can proceed to make the logical deduction that there must be a CO-determinate to the feeling, and that CO-determinate is God. In that sense Schleiermacher is saying "if I have affections about God must exist as an object of my affections"--not merely because anything there must be an object of all affections, but because of the logic of the co-determinate--there is a sense of radical contengency, there must be an object upon which we are radically contingent.

Discussing Soteriological Darama With My Friend Hermit

2009-05-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

My soteriological dara theory is about why God allows pain and suffering and evil. Please read the whole theory here, as this will enable understanding of this discussion. My friend and constant sparing partner Hermit brings up some issues that I think should be explained or dealt with in some way. It's an interesting discussion. Just to get started, let me post the basic assumptions I make in presenting the theory:

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized

the argument looks like this:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultiamte goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

The most important point that drives the whole theory is the idea of internalizing the values of the good. It this that makes it necessary to live life as a long search and that is why God allows free choices even though they often mean evil choices. Internalizing requires a search.

This brings us to Hermit's first point:

He's quoting me first

"(1) Meta:

It doesn't do us any good to be spoon fed ideas. We have to learn for ourselves the meaning of the good or it wont mean anything to us, our hearts wont be in it.

Hermit:

"There's a big difference between "spoon feeding" and teaching...(trust me, I'm married to a teacher...I hear about it all the time...). But teaching doesn't involve hiding evidence, concealing knowledge or making it more difficult than not to find the answers...an honest search for the truth should reveal that truth if it's really there, and any teacher will help that search, but not by hiding in the shadows and allowing injuries to occur.

I didn't say anything about hiding evdience. I said the evidence s clear and easy to find, but you to search. It's not that its hidden, God's presence is hidden to some exent, but it can be found. The evidence is there but you have to want to see it. That makes all the difference: skepticism thrives on wanting to doubt.

Moerover, one does not have to teach what is obvious. If an answer is obvious it need not be taught. to teach is to assume something needs to be expalined and that means its something we can't understand without help.

"(2) Meta:

suffering is not an teaching agency, just suffering in and of itself doesn't teach much. it's the necessity of the kind of world in which one must search out the answers because they are not obvious that makes suffering necessary as a consequence."

Hermit:

I completely disagree; the only necessary consequence of not searching for answers is continued ignorance. Pain, suffering, fear and anguish are not necessary.

That's really twisting the premise of what I said. First of all to assume that something needs to be taught means its not obvious and you can't see it without explaination. So all the knowledge you accept as such is "hidden" in the sense in which you use that word here. Secondly, I said suffering in and of itself does not teach much. Do you disagree? You beileve that suffering does teach much? then you shouldn't mind it. Case closed. No problem of pain.

read this here:

Now you want to assert that suffering isn't necessary, what do you have to replace it? It is necessary to the extent that God must allow free will if wants moral universe, because moral choices require freedom or the yare not moral. Thus the moral unvierse must be a free will universe. That means have to be free to actualy make the wrong choice, when that happens suffering happens. Thus suffering is necessary to a moral univerese.

Hermit:

What you are proposing is akin to leaving a small child alone in a room full of sharp knives and pots of boiling liquids so they will learn, from the "necessary consequences" of their cuts and burns that sharp knives and boiling water are dangerous. The child will certainly internalize that lesson, but there are better ways to teach it.

Are you a child Hermit? You are not a man? you can't make decisions? This is why God gives us a moral sesne, and a moral law on the heart. This is why we have society and society has rules. But your strange desire to put life out on the streets on the same par has a child's nursery and to assme if like is not totally peachy then there can't be a loving God and to totally resist any and all possible answers is nothing short of impossing a double standard. You want to be free to question, you want to be to disbelieve, but then you don't want that free when using it wrongly means consqeunces.

You are just cheating the issues by insertion of a false premise. The premise that there can no pain of any kind whatsoever or else God is either no good or not there, why should we accept that premise? It is a logical option that God has his reasons, why is it not logical to assume that?

What calculus do you use to decide what is fair and what is not? How can you, a mere mortal pretend to tally the balance sheet and decide that creation isn't worth it, when you can't even understand the issues at steak (nor can any of us)?You do not have an infinite knowledge of all things. So how can you possilbly tally everything up? I mean you do not even know if other worlds exist. How you determine that it's not worth it to create and allow the pain and suffering on the assumption that it will all be redeemed?

"(3) Meta:

if everytime anyone did anything hurtful god worked a miracle to stop it no one would ever have to search for the truth and would never internalize the good.

Hermit:

"I think it's insulting and demeaning to humanity to presume that we are incapable of learning to be good without the possibility of apparently gratuitous pain and suffering.

That is a contrdiction to point one. In point one I said suffereing in and of itself does not teach much. But you disagreed with that. Now you take my theory to mean that we need suffering to learn to the good. But you are not taking into account why that is. You speak as though you think, that I think that is' the suffering itself that teaches. I denied that explicitly. What is necessary to do the teaching is the search, not the suffering. The suffering is a side effect that just comes with the territory. Moreover, you define it as "gratuitous" and I never defined it as such. It's a side effect of free choices, but it is not gtratuitous (for its own sake) it's the necessary result of being free in a real world.

Does that meant that I trivialize pain. No. Of coure not. We are still obligated as a part of our duty to humanity to aid in the cesation of suffering as much as we can.

Hermit:

What moral improvement do we get from the rape and murder of a child, for example?

Again, that question assumes that the suffering itself is the teacher. I already said it's not. Its' a consquence of having freedom to make wrong choices. Wrong choices need not hurt people, assuming we can make the right wrong choices. But the freedom to make them is essential.

Hermit:

Most of us instinctively recoil with horror at such cruelty, we don't need to have it actually happen to understand that it's a bad thing..

That's why society has laws. But you keep assuming that I've the suffereing itself is the teacher. How many times must I remind you? The suffernig is the necessary consquence of freedom. If all people would chose not to hurt others we could have a perfect world. But they are not going to choose that, and if they don't have the freedom to choose then they are not capable of learning to make moral choices.

Hermit:

.

in fact I would intervene to prevent such a thing from happening if I could, even at the risk of my own life. Why would a genuinely loving God do less?

Because the freedom to choose is intrinsic to love. Don't you know you can't force someone to love? It's not love if it's just some automatic instinct, or if its forced. God wants us to love in the heart. He wants us to seek him and discover the values of the good and make choices out of love, and all of that requires that we have the freedom to choose. Thus, having the freedom to choose, we must be allowed to choose wrongly or we don't really have it.

If your world view is right why is humanity not a paradise? why have not all people chose rightly? You say we can love without God, we don't morality in terms of rules, (IF I understood you correctly) we don't belief in God. All we have to do is love. We can all just act in love and everything is fine. They don't we?

I says it's because we have sin nature. We have to do this search thing to find the answer to that, or in my off seminarian MacFarland* speak: we have to discover a way to mediate ultimate transformative experince in answer to the human problematic. We have free will, but we don't understand how to apply to until we come to acquire the values of the good. Then we can choose the good, and that means choosing others over self. We can do that when we are bogged down in sin nature. We must be freed from sin nature by God's power of transformation (supernature). All of this requires free will because if we are not free we can't love or make moral choices.

We both believe we are free to choose. But I believe there's more to it, it's not just so intuative that need only do some natural spontaneous act of kindness, we have to go through the mill to gain the perspective necessary to discord selfishness.

*Neil MacFarland, Perkins professor who taught my religion in Global perspective class, that's where I got that phraseology.

Cuasality in Miracle Hunting

2009-05-02T06:19:00.001-07:00

In the discussions of miracles several atheists have made some big misconceptions.

(1) mistaken assumptions about my knowledge of correlation and cause.

some assume that since they are clever enough to know the very basic information, the difference in correlation and causality, that I must not know that because I'm a Christian and Christians are stupid, and they are so very clever to know some basic fact that all high school kids should get, correlation is not causality.

But what they don't get is that just i argue inductively that correlation is indicative of a cause if certain conditions obtain, that doesn't mean I don't know the difference.

Quote:
(2) What these very clever atheist don't get is that correlation is indicative of cause.
part of the problem is that certain people don't seem know what indicative means. Be that as it may, there is an epistemological gap in our knowledge it a problem at the most fundamental philosophical level. We can only establish causality in one way, buy making very correlations and eliminating alternate causes. This is the only way there is, and that's what Hume really proved with the billiard balls.

science can't prove causes. We can only prove correlations. When I assume causes on miracles, it's the only way we ever establish cause. Hans says "only if we eliminate the alternate causes." Yes, that's true, but it also leads to recursion of the original problem. Because if we can't observe causality and it must be inferred from correlation, then you can't say "I have eliminated an alternate cause by showing causality and eliminating it." That's just a repeat of the same problem. The alternate causes are only possibilities, they are not proven either. What is boils down to is in the final analysis a really tight correlation is the only way to determine cause. Although it is important to eliminate the alternative possible causes, essential in fact. What this means is I am right to assume causes from correlations, given that I can eliminate alternatives, and I usually can.

All of this means that medical evidence showing the disease went away, when examined by scientific medicos is good evidence for miracles. It's not absolute, there is no absolute. There will always be a gap in our epistemology. We will always have to make epistemic judgment.

(2) Don't need to show hit rate

The argument is made we must show the percentage of those healed vs not healed.

That's ridiculous. The reason is because we do not know the reason when someone is not healed. We cannot assume "O not bein healed means there's no ;god, because some are healed." Knowing the hit rate is important in many cases. such as prophesy, "so and so is a true prophet he predicted x," but how many predictions did the make that did not come true?

Knowing the hist rate is not true in terms of empirical evidence of healing because:

......(a) We don't know if the not healing is the result of no god, or God just didn't want to heal. Because a will is on the other end of the prayer we cannot treat it like a natural process and expect it to behave like a drug in a field trial.

......(b) Miracles are supposed to be impossible. they violate natural law. that's the whole theory of naturalism in a nut shell; nothing happens apart form natural law.

Thus if one miracle happens that proves miracles and all it takes is one. proving that x% are not healed doesn't prove anything. miracles are supposed to be impossible and can't happen, if one of them happens, or we can assume it happened, then that proves they do happen. We don't know the rate because God is not a drug. Divine healing is a matter of God's will.

(3) God's action in healing is not indicative of God's feelings about those healed or not healed.

This is the whole fallacy of the God hates amputees thing. You might as well say God hates breakfast because not once in my Christian walk has God ever made me scrambled eggs in the morning.

St. Augustine proved that there is no correlation between worldly prosperity or success and God's love. Rome was sacked by the vandals and everyone was saying "this disproves Christianity." but Augie said "no it doesn't, divine favor is not based worldly success. Stuff happens to Christians too, God causes it rain on the just and unjust."

(4) No double blind

Lourdes evidence does not need to be double blind First of all these are not "studies." They are not set up as a longitudinal study to see if healing works. These are real people and their journey to Lourdes is part of their journey in life in a search to be healed, they are not white lab mice plotting world conquest.

Secondly, double blind is used as a means of control so we know data is not contaminated by the subjects knowledge of the test. People suffering from an incurable disease cannot cure themselves. So it doesn't matter if they know. If the data shows the condition went away immediately and it can be documented that all traces are gone, the of course can assume healing, provided there is no counter cause such as he took a wonder drug before he left for Lourdes; they do certainly screen for that.

Of course there are still epistemological problems. There will always be such problems. That's why you can't prove you exist. But just as the answer to that problem is "Make epistemic judgment based upon regularity and inconsistency of data," so it goes with miracles, proving smoking causes cancer or anything else.

Thomas Reid got it right, we are justified in assuming empirical evidence provided it's strong evidence.

One more problem. When I say "correlation" this invites the question "how can you find a correlation if you don't know the hit rate? A correlation implies X and Y are seen together a lot, not just in one instance. But we can't go around giving people cancer and praying for them over and over to see if they ar always healed. We have to let multiple cases stand for correlation. But since we can't say why healing didn't take place we have to use empirical means to assert on a case by case basis.

Our Cities Vanish: Poetry by Ray Hinman

2009-04-26T18:21:00.001-07:00

Our Cities Vanish by Ray Hinman (My Brother's Poetry)

At last the long awaited volume of my brother's poetry is published.

Our cities vanish, about 80 Poems by my brother, Ray Hinman. I believe that my brother has great literary talent and his poems have always been a big hit in all the coffee houses and petry festivals and art festivals where he has read them. One of them once made a professor cry in a graduate class (this is was a tough professor and a real literary scholar). They are not necessarily religious. His experinces traveling in Mexico fuel the major brunt of the collection. The reader can feel the sand between her toes, taste the exotic Mexican liquors and feel the feel the sun beating beating down. Ray is unafraid to use lanague to evoke images and archetypes that open up the world of the mundane to the sesne of archaine and mythological.

His literary journey began with the influence of Geoethe, took a long detour through Wallace Stevens and Ford Modox Ford, and winds up with Latin American Poets.

For a preview of what the poetry is like see the website I put up. The book contains about three for four times as man and they quality is just as good.

Artifacts: Poetry by Ray Hinman

An Opportunity to Discuss Theodicy by Clearifying Something

2009-04-25T07:15:00.000-07:00

God's major plan for easing suffering in this life

I made a statement in my answer to Loren which has been misconstrued by some readers. Here's what Hermit said:

quoting me:"There are pre conditions before God dos stuff, or so it seems. The bible as much as says it. and faith is one of the major pre conditions."

His response:This is one of the cruelest elements of theism, in my opinion; this idea that people are allowed to suffer because of their spiritual inadequacy. Have you any idea how many people pray faithfully for relief and continue to suffer in spite of their faith? And you want them to think it's their fault for not believing "right"?

Sorry Joe, but this is the kind of thing that really turned me against the whole idea of faith.

I agree. I hate when theists try to answer the theodicy problem and do so with ideas that make the surrerer's guilty for something. That's nothing more than what the dumb guys in Job say. I always thought the "freinds" of Job (in the 60s we used to say "with freinds like that I don't need enemies") who said "you sinned" were the dumb ones. I agree with Hermit and I did not say that. His mistakes is where he says this:this idea that people are allowed to suffer because of their spiritual inadequacy. I never said that.

I said you have to be in the zone, I did not say you are not in the zone because something is wrong with you. I see that as a matter of timing not the sufferer's lack of virtue or any other problem with the person doing the suffering.

I think the allowance of evil and suffering is explained adequately by my version of the free will defense know as "Soteriolgoical Drama." I'm sure no one is going to my website to look that up. Certainly Hermit, Mike and Loren are not doing so. So here it is for their convenience and edification. (BTW "soeteriological" Means "the study of salvation" I call it that not because I think one is saved for suffering or because sufferers don't have it but becasue the nature of salvation is a drama played out in the form of a search. Not a drama for entertainment, but a true life drama.

The Free Will Defense is offered by Christian apologists as an answer to any sort of atheist argument such as the problem of pain or the problem of evil. The argument runs something like: God values free will because "he" ("she"?) doesn't want robots. The problem with this approach is that it often stops short in analysis as to why free will would be a higher value than anything else. This leaves the atheist in a position of arguing any number of pains and evil deeds and then crying that God had to know these things would happen, thus God must be cruel for creating anything at all knowing the total absolute pain (which usually includes hell in most atheist arguments) would result from creation.

The apologists answers usually fail to satisfy the atheist, because in their minds noting can outweigh the actual inflicting of pain. Something atheists evoke omnipotence and play it off against the value of free will, making the assumption that an "all powerful God" could do anything, thus God should be able to cancel any sort of moral debt, make sin beyond our natures, create a pain free universe, and surely if God were all loving, God would have done so.

The better twist on the free will defense would be to start from a different position. We should start with the basis for creation, in so far as we can understand it, and then to show how the logical and non self contradictory requirements of the logic of creation require free will. What is usually missing or not pointed out is the necessity of free will in the making of moral choices. This is the step that atheists and Christian apologists alike sometimes overlook; that it is absolutely essential in a non-self contradictory way, that humanity have free will. Thus, free will must out weight any other value. At that point, since it is a matter of self contradiction, omnipotence cannot be played off against free will, because God's omnipotence does not allow God to dispense with Free will!

Before moving to the argument I want to make it clear that I deal with two separate issues: the problem of pain (not a moral issue--tornadoes and diseases and the like) becasue it doesn't involve human choice. Pain, inflicted by accident and nature is not a moral issue, because it involves no choices. Thus I will not deal with that here. I am only concerned in this argument with the the problem of evil that is, the problem of moral choice. The free will defense cannot apply to makes where the will does not apply.

Basic assumptions

There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so obivioius, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.

The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.

(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The argument would look like this:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.

This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it.
Argument on Soteriological Drama:

(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultiamte goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.

In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

Objection:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultaimte adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been tought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.

Objection 2: questions

(from "UCOA" On CARM boards (atheism)

Quote:

In addition, there is no explanation of why god randomly decided to make a "moral universe".

Why do you describe the decision as random? Of course all of this is second guessing God, so the real answer is "I don't know, duh" But far be it form me to give-up without an opinion. My opinion as to why God would create moral universe:

to understand this you must understand my view of God, and that will take some doing. I'll try to just put it in a nut shell. In my view love is the background of the moral universe. The essence of "the good" or of what is moral is that which conforms to "lug." But love in the apogee sense, the will to the good of the other. I do not believe that that this is just derived arbitrarily, but is the outpouring of the wellspring of God's character. God is love, thus love is the background of the moral universe because God is the background of the moral universe.

Now I also describe God as "being itself." Meaning God is the foundation of all that is. I see a connection between love and being. Both are positive and giving and turning on in the face of nothingness, which is negativity. To say that another way, if we think of nothingness as a big drain pipe, it is threatening to **** all that exits into it. Being is the power to resist nothingness, being the stopper in the great cosmic drain pipe of non existence.

The act of bestowing being upon the beings is the nature of God because God is being. Those the two things God does because that's what he is, he "BES" (um, exists) and he gives out being bestowing it upon other beings. This is connected to love which also gives out and bestows. So being and love are connected, thus the moral universe is an outgrowth of the nature of God as giving and bestowing and being and loving.

Quote:
Thus the question isnt really answered. Why does god allow/create evil? To create a "moral universe". Why? The only answer that is given is, because he wants to. Putting it together, Why does god allow/create evil? Because he wants to?

In a nut shell, God allows evil as an inherent risk in allowing moral agency. (the reason for which is given above).

There is a big difference in doing something and allowing it to be done. God does not create evil, he allows the risk of evil to be run by the beings, because that risk is required to have free moral agency. The answer is not "because he wants to" the answer is because he wants free moral agency so that free moral agents will internatize the values of love. To have free moral agency he must allow them to:

(1)run the risk of evil choices

(2) live in a real world where hurt is part of the dice throw.

Now, having said all that: The point about God working miracles is that the working of miracles has to be limited to the over all plan, which requires a search which means it cant' be so obvious that God exists that we don't have to do the searching. We could do a reductio ad absurdum and ask why doesn't God hold a press conference and come clean about all the secrets of the universe? well for that matter why create anything at all? in fact it turns out the only really loving thing God could do would be to kill himself so he would never create and no one would ever have to suffer any pain. But for that matter why not just seek God and not propose absurdities? The reason God doesn't heal everyone at once and make it all obvious is so we will search. Not because sick people are bad or lack something, it's because healing hs to fit within the over schemata of a world in which we have to seek to know truth. God makes a way for us find to truth. It's not so hidden that someone can't find it.

the reason people don't find it is because they don't look in the right place. They keep forgetting the real battle ground is in the heart. That's where you have to look.