Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

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:

Well, it's definitely true that the brain in an altered state can produce religious experiences. But, again, you seem to miss a critical point I insisted upon before : any experience has a corresponding brain state. Think about it, any experience. Even the experience that would come from God necessarily corresponds to some brain state. And let's say this state is diagnosed as pathological since it deviates from the normal functioning of the brain and somehow resembles some well-known mental illness (and let's not forget a possible bias against mysticism/religion in psychological studies), then it's clear that we have a problem: we're trying to explain away divine revelation by simple nomenclature, we simply think that, if experience x resembles pathology p, then x is not from God.. dubious argument...

The truth is, it's extremely difficult to diagnose a man who lived 14 centuries ago. There is an article I found months ago trying to do just that, providing an objective diagnosis to Muhammad's inspirational spells (i.e. the Qur'an) based on existing knowledge, authored by a practicing physician:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/793843/
(You can access the full article using sci-hub for example, I am not sure if the forum's policy allows me to provide a direct illegal link)

The author concludes that complex partial seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy would be a possible diagnosis if we have to make one. He however provides many reasons to doubt this diagnosis, one of them being that Muhammad didn't experience any mental or physical deterioration as a result of the states of revelation we're trying to explain.

In the same article, he gives a simple refutation to the claim that Muhammad is a charlatan/manipulator : "It seems unlikely that followers intelligent enough to guide the expansion of Islam over thousands of miles and convert millions of people could be inspired by a clever manipulator"

And this is also true about other founders of religious movements. It's difficult for me to say that Joseph Smith, for example, was a full-blown manipulator. But his production (the Book of Mormon) seems to be plagiarized from the OT/NT, it could be that Joseph Smith was so well acquainted with the Bible that his religious experience(his subconscious at work) was more or less some fresh and passionate way to present christianity, but no genuinely new material. Muhammad PBUH, on the other hand, departed from the current doctrine of  christianity/judaism , and provided a comprehensive account of all the prophets' messages through history: they were simply all Muslims -in the sense that they all submitted to God. The majority of people who convert to Islam are impressed by this exact narrative, in addition to Islam's uncompromising monotheism.

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.

Why do you think natural explanations must supersede the religious explanations, why can't they simply coexist ??

Some manifestation of God in this universe could very well be through natural means, and if we manage somehow to figure out some natural explanation of religious experiences, that simply doesn't mean they are not from God... it's a non-sequitur.

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.

You mentioned something I encounter here very frequently: our planet is so tiny and unsignificant that a God shouldn't care about it..... I mean.. really? If this God exists, then he's obviously the one who wanted this tiny planet to exist, and we know that the tiniest things in the universe contain marvellous aspects of complexity and harmony (DNA in a biological cell, the behavior of subatomic particles, etc.) that even one molecule of matter deserves to be called miraculous in some sense. 

Another telling example that comes to mind: everybody agrees that something like a microprocessor is a very impressive product of technological advancements. It required very advanced understanding of matter to design it. It would be really stupid if someone says: why should some tiny chip matter at all or mean something... this tiny chip is evidence of the human designer. Making an analogy with God and the universe is of course a big subject, but I think it's disingenuous to say it's not a compelling argument at all..
And let's satisfy the atheists' request, let's say God simply doesn't care about Earth let alone people. By the same token, God shouldn't care either about the Milky Way, too small compared to the rest of the universe, etc. you can see that we can't go anywhere with this argument.. it's vacuous because, simply put, size is not a relevant criterion ...

You say it's possible that religions may be the product of many people... In the case of Islam, it's really hard to defend this idea, the beginning of Muhammad's religious experience and how it evolved is well-known, he started the religion alone and was the sole author of the Qur'an. It's true that its compilation in a written form came some time later, but this is completely irrelevant, oral transmission was well-established in Arabia, and that's how the Qur'an came about and was preserved, too many people learnt it directly from Muhammad's recitations and many parts of it were even written on parchment during the prophet's lifetime. Many orientalists (Non-muslim western scholars who study Islam and the Muslim world) have no problem admitting it was preserved.

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?

Well, a Muslim apologist will tell you just the opposite: that Muhammad preserved God's message verbatim. I submit that it's inaccessible to us to verify no mangling happened when Muhammad received his revelation from the angel Gabriel (according to Muslim belief), but here's another way to argue for it: God made sure the revelations were received accurately. Surely, an omnibenevolent God will not allow his message to be corrupted in the first step of transmission (i.e. the prophet receiving it). The corruption of previous messages (Like Jesus's, Moses's, ...) was a result of his followers' free will, and their ability to corrupt any message, including the divine message. 

All this is of course far-fetched for someone who is not convinced a God exists. But under the assumption that a benevolent God exists (and therefore, by definition of benevolence, would not leave us astray) it's definitely possible to make a case for Muhammad's religion being divine. Or, to put it more forcefully, a benevolent God must have communicated with us.

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?

And do you think it would make sense if Muhammad actually mentioned technical terms like "Doppler effect" 14 centuries ago, before Doppler was even born....? His companions would surely think his message is unintelligible. 
A message from God that was transmitted 14 centuries ago must also be intelligble to people who lived 14 centuries ago, a trivial point but a frequently forgotten one, especially when we allow our imagination to go too far on what a divine book should look like. 

An additional problem with a divine book containing technical details of modern science: not all people are equipped to understand physics. I mean.. even if you give a very detailed explanation of some phenomenon, say, time dilation in special relativity, people can easily get confused. Why would a divine book meant to instruct people on how to live a meaningful spiritual life delve into highly non trivial natural phenomena? Add that to the fact that modern physics requires really hardcore math, unless one dedicates themselves to a decade of focused study, there is no way to even talk properly about things like riemannian manifolds, metric tensors, etc. all of which are involved in einstein's theory of gravity.