Benevolent Creator God?

[pocaracas]

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.

Oh boy... You really are hung up on certain ideas that have been sold to you.

An Experience that would come from God would be external to the person, to the person's mind and hence would be registered as any other external stimuli.
A delusion, hallucination, vivid dream or equivalent would necessarily come from within the person's own mind.
That's the meaning of "altered state" being used here. But you seem to be deliberately missing that notion for some god brownie points or something...

The truth is, it's extremely difficult to diagnose a man who lived 14 centuries ago.

That is true. That's why I don't even try, I wave it away.
But what would we nowadays say of someone claiming what he claimed? What would we say of someone like Moses?

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.

Mo had extra inspiration, that much can't be argued. He did stem from a place where more than Judaism was available. You had the Egyptians to the West, Judaism/Christianity to the north, the flailing Romans to the North east along with some Greek influences, the Indians from the East and a bit of Chinese/Buddhism  from the North East. He had so much at his disposal.

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.

Then how do you propose one discerns natural events from divine ones?
Is it "Mister so-and-so said so"?
Remember that, in navigating this world, we must be aware that many "misters so-and-so" are lying, and many are mistakenly certain of what they claim. We can't just accept any claim from anyone, regardless of how charismatic that person may be.

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. 

First, If the creator entity god exists, it's not a given that it would care about this tiny planet. It is entirely conceivable that many similar planets exist dotted around the Universe with equivalent life forms.
Second, yes, both the astronomical and the microscopical worlds are fascinating, but they are still just physical systems doing what physical systems do. No miracles.

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 ...

No, size is not very relevant. But it does speak as to the creator's priorities.
If the purpose is to have this planet be somehow important, then why bother with the rest?
All the stars we see in the night sky are from our galaxy, heck, they are from our corner of the galaxy. Why bother with creating a Universe with as many galaxies as we have stars in this galaxy alone if it's only for the benefit of humanity?
For us to wonder and marvel at the extreme power required? That would not have been an issue 14 centuries ago.
It makes more sense to think that we are not special, even if there is a creator god.

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.

I said before that these things aren't the product of one person alone, but I believe I failed to properly convey my idea.
These things, such as Islam, arise because there is a following, a bunch of people who follow those ideas that, in the case of Islam, were allegedly spoken by Mo himself and Mo alone. Same concept as the disciples of Christ, same with the disciples of Socrates, etc.
Of course they come from a cultural position where the ideas were already accepted by that group and, probably, by the majority of the people in the region.
It would be easy to compile a group of things that these people already agreed with and would wish to see spread all over the land, whether or not they were spoken by a particular man is irrelevant. It is a given that this leader would be in agreement (at least the rest of them would think so).

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.

You think?
I believe you missed my argument where the fact that there are multiple religions, multiple prophets, heck, the fact that such a thing as a prophet is how the divine creator decided to communicate with humanity is the clue to the non-benevolence of this creator entity. It's a clue when you combine it with the obvious result in human history.

I'm not saying there was any mangling by the supposed recipient of the message, it's what comes after, the interpretations.
If the message was so perfectly preserved, how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims? The message got mangled and these two factions appeared and have most certainly generated suffering simply due to that.
You may dismiss this as "free will", but I submit that the benevolent creator would, in its infinite wisdom, account for that and proceed accordingly.

I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one... certainly not the most benevolent one.
I present a simple, yet, in my opinion, far better way to pass on the message: communicate with every intelligent being on the planet (and other planets with intelligent life in the Universe).

At this stage, all theists I've discussed with will point out again "free will". My solution inhibits it by having god present itself to everyone, thus excluding any possibility for the individual to reject belief.
As someone who posits no value on belief, I don't see a problem in this.
I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that a creator entity who desires humanity to behave in a certain way, within its characteristic free will, would not care whether those humans believe it to exist or not, but would care about passing on a message in a way that all (or most, not to exclude people with actual mental disorders) would acknowledge and accept. Clearly, if we accept that communication was achieved for a few prophets, the creator entity can do it for anyone... unless there is some limitation from its side.

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.

So... what does it matter if the guy said that the pharaoh was claiming to be a god?
What does it matter if he describes certain anatomy details that are somewhat accurate?
What does it matter that he gets things right?

It matters, because the things he got right, and that people seem so amazed because they think these are things that were unknown to mankind, were actually things known by some scholars well before Muhammad was born. They may have not been widespread knowledge, but they were available knowledge.
And that is why we don't see anything about knowledge that would come afterwards like those I mentioned, or many others.
This renders the sayings of Muhammad rather mundane... as one would expect if he was just a person with no access to anything beyond.