The Evidence Required Is?

[Whateverist]

That is why I consider it painfully obvious that physical reality occurs either within or adjacent to other transcendent parts. It is equally obvious to me that we can and do interact with those transcendent parts of reality everyday. No belief in deity is required to hold this position. Yet, too many of you appear to believe that being an atheist requires you to be a reductionist.

I find this not at all obvious. What do you mean by transcendent?

Do you doubt that a brain is necessary for consciousness? Are you aware of any reliable accounts of consciousness occuring apart from a living brain? I'm not, except in fiction.

Indeed no belief in deities is required to hold this position but I haven't heard any compelling reason why I should or even why I should want to.


We do talk of experiencing sensations, feelings, emotions, pain and any number of other subjective qualia. But I wouldn't assume they point to parallel yet separate realities. That seems an extravagant hypothesis.

A simpler one is to reason that our brains generate fields of consciousness and that the physical world registers on these fields by way of our senses. Since we are self-aware and possessed of language we can distinguish between the object and the sensation of it by which we become aware of it. We have language to refer to the subjective states which describe what we suppose are our experience of ourselves experiencing and responding to the world, as opposed to describing the world we think we experience.

You seem to think that the nature of our self awareness and the language we use to describe it point to another world something like yet different than the physical world. I can't think of any experience which you might have of subjective qualia which can't as easily be described by my construct as by yours. Plus my construct has the advantage (for me) of being the way that seems right to me.

Now I have no objective evidence that my account of subjective qualia is more correct than your construct, but neither could you. I can't begin to imagine what you would have to show to convince me that your construct is superior. Agree to disagree, or do you think you have something persuasive?

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Joseph Campbell turned up quite a few gods in investigating the beliefs of people from all cultures all over the world. So many and so universally that it can be argued that unless you can account for why that is, you don't really understand human nature. Personally I think it is too easy to say they are just mistakes in attempting to give a natural explanation of the world which were made in our youth as a sapient species. That claim would require evidence.

He turned up quite a few stories, but I don't recall him leading a god back to civilization by the hand for peer review to the astonishment of his fellows. It's a claim with a vast amount of evidence attached. We have attempted to explain what was inexplicable to us by way of cosmic skyhooks that are very familiar to us. Just turns out that we've been consistently wrong.

This is precisely what I think needs explaining. Vast evidence there may be but you haven't provided any yet. It isn't enough to show that what all these early human cultures had in common was the discrepancy between what they thought true and what in fact is true. That explains nothing about how its near universality reflects on human nature. It really just begs the question. (I have a little badger blood in me from my mother's side.)