Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy

[Angrboda]

As an Atheist, how did you know which god to ascribe causality to and how did you eliminate all possible natural explanations for your 'experiences', please?

What specific piece of evidence convinced you a priori that your chosen god actually existed so you could justify including it in the explanation, please?

Very good questions. When I was an atheist, I attributed the totality of mystical experience (for everybody) to the dopamine system in the brain. There is scientific evidence in the field of cognitive neuroscience that suggests mystical experience has correlates in this particular part of the brain (as part of the monoamine system). I am still very keen on the sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology (and all of the subdisciplines), but I now have a different view about mystical experience. Although I do not disagree with the neural correlations associated with mystical experience, I think extreme reductionism of this nature actually undermines the mystical experience itself. I now view this from the perspective of Aristotle: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” That is, the experience is vastly more important than the biological mechanism from which it derives. We postulate that mystical experience does have a material cause, but this does not explain why the experience exists in the first place, hence my reason for attributing it to an external agency.

As someone who has studied philosophy and epistemology, you should know that what you have presented is a classic argument from ignorance and is thus logically invalid, and its conclusions are therefore not reliably true.

For what it's worth, I've gone through several periods in my life, lasting several weeks to a few months, in which religion and questions of religious import took on a greatly amplified urgency. I became an ardent Buddhist several times under the influence of such episodes. However, these episodes all ended the same way, with a sudden "turning off" of whatever had turned on, with my realizing in hindsight that my religious fervor was the result of a change in the way my brain was functioning. It's been very easy for me to recognize it as such and accept it as that because I have been troubled by severe mental illness from a very young age, and so I have developed the skills necessary to monitor my thoughts and behavior and detect when "all is not right with the world." I doubt that you, personally, are either mentally ill or even abnormal. What happens in me in the large, to an extent, happens to ordinary people in the small. So I neither suspect that you are ill or abnormal, but at the same time I see nothing remarkable or exceptional about your experience that requires the explanations you have developed for them. This is unlikely to deter you from continuing on in your current trajectory, but perhaps it may be useful to you to realize that there are people who have also had exceptional experiences that could readily lead them to similar religious explanations, and they have come to less sensational understandings, and also, they have been quite happy with the ability of their answers to explain their experience. That you had an experience, remarkable though it may have been, neither leads you or anyone else to necessarily embrace the conclusions that you have drawn.

Enjoy the forum.