(March 23, 2017 at 7:40 am)Esquilax Wrote:(March 23, 2017 at 12:32 am)MysticKnight Wrote: The soul is obvious. It's manifest. Most cultures in the past believed in it not because they were stupid or anything like that.
It's because it's perceived and obvious.
Yeah, sorry, you don't actually get to do an end-run around actually demonstrating your claims, this don't work that way.
Most cultures in the past simply mistook a process that goes on in the brain as a quantity. There is a conscious portion of the human person that cannot be found by looking in the body... it's fairly natural to conclude from there that it's some supernatural thing, if you don't have the technological know-how that would allow you to see the processes that give rise to that consciousness acting within the human body.
Essentially, the cultures of the past believed in the soul for the same reason they believed in a lot of wrong, "obvious" things: it fit with what they observed, they just didn't have the apparatus required to observe further and see that this is incorrect. You, MK, live in a time where you no longer have that excuse, which is why you can't even offer anything other than a simpering "it's obvious," in support of the claim.
I don't think Richard Dawkins gets enough credit for his book "The God Delusion" in that he explains in very scientific terms from a biological evolutionary standpoint why god claims exist. Our species perceptions of what we think we see are notoriously flawed. This flaw in evolution is a result of life not always having time to slow down and assess because life evolved to make sudden decisions on the fight or flight aspect of evolution. Dawkins in The God Delusion describes this gap filling as akin to "The moth mistaking the light bulb for natural moonlight". The antelope on the African plain does not always have time to assess if the swaying grass is mere wind, or a lion stalking it. Our species created god claims as a projection of their own qualities on the world around them, that gap filling created a false sense of having the truth. Early deities/gods were earthy, like storm deities and volcano deities, and animal deities. Humanizing the world by giving it the same characteristics as humans gave humans the false sense that they could have some sort of control by bargaining with nature. Our species real ability to survive was never in begging fictional beings, but in our numbers. Those false perceptions did have a real outcome in creating groups based on those bad guesses.
The only place Allah/Yahweh/God/Brahma/Thor/Isis/Apollo exist are in humans imaginations. They are a mere false perception reflecting our own human attributes. False claims can lead to success, just like one can market cigarettes and get people to smoke them even though they are not good for you.
