Benevolent Creator God?

[pocaracas]

Sorry for taking so long to reply... I've been.. erhmm.... distracted

They simply dismiss prophets as delusional (at best), or charlatans (at worst).

If you dismiss by default any individual who claims being the recipient of some divine revelation, then you will be begging a basic theological question: did God send prophets or not? 

I'd wager that Not!

According to you, we're supposed to immediately assign all such grandiose claims to psychopathology. You need to actually make a case for that, or at worst withhold judgement on what religious experiences should mean. [...]

So, delusion being an umbrella term for many things, you need to find better reasons to dismiss prophets.

It seems you got stuck on my usage of the term "delusional". Remember that I left it as a range of attitudes, delusional being the most charitable one.
And you're right, I was careless with my words. I meant "dismiss prophets as likely delusional (at best), or charlatans (at worst)."

It is my impression, drawn mostly from archaeology, that mankind has been believing in the divine for a longer time than any prophet's existence... at least, any prophet that we know of, given the requirement of writing.

My case for assuming that claims about religious experiences arise from some psychopathology comes from the simple observation that psychopathologies lead to religious experiences, heck, even drug induced mental states lead to such experiences.
Look at this https://www.sciencealert.com/psychedelic...xperiences:

The study plugs some gaps in our knowledge about how drugs such as LSD and psilocybin induce religious-style experiences, and could tell us more about how to use these substances in treatments.

It also shows that drug highs and spiritual highs can produce the same sort of feelings and moods in people.

"Even when taken for the first time, psychedelics may occasion powerful subjective experiences that share many features with those described by mystics, dedicated meditators, and religious practitioners," psychologist Samuli Kangaslampi from Tampere University in Finland told PsyPost.

"Some research is beginning to demonstrate that undergoing a mystical-type experience may be linked to improved relationships with self, others, and the natural environment later on."

The study made use of a Finnish translation of the 30-question Revised Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ30), which asks volunteers to try to quantify some of the feelings and sensations they've had while on psychedelics.

The team assessed different ways of translating MEQ30 to find the most reliable method for accurately reflecting volunteers' experiences. They then went on to exploring the link between the psychedelic and the spiritual.

Those people who scored highly on the MEQ30 were more likely to describe their experience as mystical, spiritual, or religious, and more personally significant.

These feelings might include an increased awareness of an inner world, for example, or getting the impression of transcending time and space. This scientific validation opens up more areas for future research, including the lasting effects of these drugs.

"Those with full mystical experiences reported more positive changes in all areas surveyed, as compared with those without such an experience," the researchers write in their paper.

We are all somewhat delusional, finite brains like ours can't nail down reality with 100%, modern science already exposed many thresholds of knowledge (the uncertainty principle in physics, for example) that we can never exceed. All people who lived before Einstein were delusional about time and gravity, for example

You seem to be confusing delusional with possessing an incomplete or simplified view.
Certainly, Einstein didn't spell the end of Physics... so even his views were incomplete.... as well as the present day scientific views of time and gravity are likely incomplete.

I think you got it backwards.
Mankind has evolved as a social species. Think that chimps, bonobos, gorillas, etc. have all also evolved as social species. This means that humans were social far before being humans.
As mankind evolved and became aware of the world and its own mortality, along with the desire to remain alive, surely many attempts were made to explain the mind, death, and all the physical phenomena around them. Without the right tools for that job, many of those explanations must have been nothing more than guesswork. Some more outlandish, some less.... some stuck around, some were forever forgotten.

As I said before, repeatedly : natural explanations don't preclude supernatural explanations. The fact that we know how and why lightening occurs actually doesn't negate Thor's existence. You are stuck with agnosticism with regards to the supernatural whether you can explain natural phenomena or not.

So, mentioning how our understanding of the world evolved is completely irrelevant to whether there is a creator of this world, or to whether religious interpretations of natural phenomena should be accepted.

That is not how it works.
Since the religious explanations likely came about through the musings of people at a time when mankind had no sophistication to properly explain them, as soon as an accurate enough natural explanation is provided, this one must supersede the religious one.

Of course, I'm well aware that the religious people will cling to their explanations for as long as they can. Such is their power! But it doesn't make them true, nor worthy of consideration by anyone who considers themselves to be rational.

As a social species, one would expect those individuals who were more suited to accept the prevailing explanations to be accepted into the society and thus have better chance at surviving and mating. This forms a feedback loop where selection acts in such a way as to prefer individuals that are ever more accepting of those explanations. This acceptance of the unproven, this belief, became embedded in the human brain and we see it today as a particular structure seemingly dedicated to belief.

Although this point of view is interesting, the problem with it, and with other natural explanations of religion, is that they can be seen both ways. It could be that a creator equipped us with brains that are tilted to memetics and feedblack loops, in such a way that religious ideas like the afterlife survive and become widespread.

Wouldn't you expect the contents of a divine message to somewhat click with the brains of the recipients of this divine message- us ? 

Indeed it could be that the whole Universe was created by some entity.
Should we call that an extraterrestrial?... nah, that applies to beings from other planets still within this Universe.
Shall we call it then an extrauniversal? Still would be a natural being, I'd say. It would probably be impossible to ascertain its existence from within the Universe, so that would still render the psychopathological explanation for religious experiences more likely than the creator actually passing on a message.
Thinking about it... this entity would have generated a whole Universe where 95% of it is dark matter/energy. 5% is matter/energy of the kind that we interact with... and that "observable Universe" is already massive enough to dwarf this planet to a place of insignificance... and that entity would somehow be interested in creating a place just for us, humans. A place that required a few nudges along its way, otherwise, there would now be intelligent reptiles instead of primates, maybe.  But this extrauniversal entity decided that the intelligent ones would be primates and that they would evolve in such a way as to develop an intuition of belief so as to allow them to more readily accept the idea that it exists.
Not only that, but, in its benevolence towards this human species, it decides to communicate certain truths.
However, the communication is made with only a few individuals in a small corner of the globe, restricted to a few certain eras, all in weird and hidden ways (top of mount Sinai, cave in Mount Hira...)

Makes total sense, right?
It's not impossible, I'll give you that.
But come on, it is far fetched!

To my mind, it is far more likely that these people who became prophets were already embedded in a religious culture and simply took it a step further - either due to some psychopathology, or through cunning artifice, or some mix of both. I'm pretty confident that these phenomena, these cults, these religions, aren't made by a single person - they require a following.


If there is a creator entity and this entity is benevolent towards humanity and wishes to pass on a message, don't you think that message would be better passed on equally to everyone, rather than to only a select few and at particular times in human history?
Think of all the religious strife that such a strategy has caused throughout human history... that doesn't seem to be the product of a benevolent intention. Just look at your own religion, how benevolent did Mohammed become, given that he turned into a military leader?


So either the creator entity is not as benevolent as we are told by the leading religions, or that creator entity never contacted anyone and all religions are nothing but mental effort into producing answers to cosmic answers from a time when accurate answers were completely out of our reach. This second part is obviously valid for both existence and inexistence of the creator entity.

From my point of view, if there was to be a powerful being as god is supposed to be, I'd expect that being to be able to communicate with everyone equally and unequivocally. If the guy is said to be so convincing to those who became known as prophets, what's to stop him/it from doing the same to everyone else? Shyness?..I doubt it. So either there is a god who interacts with the whole of humanity and has done so since the beginning of time (which doesn't seem to have happened), or the god is simply not interacting with anyone... or is non-existent.

The question then seems to become why does anyone accept the messages brought forth by the alleged prophets?

Well it's not really clear that God didn't communicate with us at all, there are arguments for the sensus divinitatis, and the observation that we are tilted towards teleology and forming beliefs seems to support them. 

Which can be explained by what I said in my previous post as something that was shaped by evolution and hijacked for keeping difficult questions out of our minds.


To claim that god would communicate clearly with a few individuals and make the rest of mankind have to accept those pronouncements because we have a lean towards religious thought is, again, being very uncharitable towards the benevolence of god.

Besides, it's not really necessary for God to communicate with everyone individually. Almost every fact or true proposition you know about the world came to you through other people, except the very few things you get to experience in your lifespan.

Indeed. And it so happens that many things that come to me from other people are not true.
Part of navigating through this world is learning to discern the true propositions from the untrue ones. Even if the untrue ones are delivered by someone completely convinced of the truthfulness of their propositions.
I am bound to fail on occasion, but I endeavour to fail as little as possible.

The religious proposition, as a representation of the wishes and desires of a creator entity, seem to be very very unlikely so they remain in the untrue column for me.

And, if true, they would represent an entity which is not benevolent... at least, not as benevolent as someone worthy of the title "god" should be. All I see in there is the stoking of human factions against each other when it would be super easy not to.

---

Are you sure that the Qur'an is not the word of God ? Feel free to assert anything you like, you didn't give any good explanation of why Muhammad curiously gets things right? Your only answer was that we argue from incredulity.. not really, we're just trying to find the best explanation of the Qur'an. Is it really difficult to understand that, assuming a God who's willing to communicate with us exists, the Qur'an, and also the original OT/NT, are his words verbatim, that all the noise surrounding these books is the product of people's free will and their ability to corrupt God's message or to communicate it unclearly, and nothing more?

If such a god capable of communicating with us exists, then why would that communication have been allowed to be mangled by whoever wrote those books?

Whatever Muhammad got right in the Qur'an was probably a product of the current knowledge at the time. I mean, it doesn't say anything about magnetism, nor Doppler effect, does it? crystallography? semiconductors?

---

 There can be a god...who never wrote any books.  It's not as if -you- think god was prodigious writer, either........

I agree there can be a god who never inspired a book, in which case he would have never communicated with us, . Now why do you rule out a god who inspires books? What's inherently contradictoy about communicating a message to a human being.. or is it just that you think there no sufficient evidence..?

Absent all known religious books, there is no known sign of divine guidance. Agree? disagree?

This reminds me of the old thought experiment where humanity wakes up tomorrow to find themselves without memory of before and no books or information from back then. Under such a scenario, science would still unfold largely as it has until now. Religion, however, if it would arise, would probably be different.