Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy

[Faith No More]

Do you need repeatable scientific evidence that you love your parent, partner or child? How do you know that you love them (if you do, of course)? How can you prove these actual subjective feelings mathematically? I would assume that you just "know" that you love them by intuition alone. That is, you cannot determine this by inference, observation or reason. My conclusion about God is the same.

No, I do not, however, I am not trying to posit that love cannot be reduced to physical phenomena. The love I feel towards my son and wife definitely feel real to me, but I would never dream of claiming that it was anything outside of my own mind. You've had an experience you can't explain, and you have come to the conclusion that this experience is due to external influences based on nothing more than you feel it to be true. What we feel is not equal to what exists. So, knowing this, how can you be certain that your experiences cannot be explained by a materialistic position?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

2 points:

1. An 'atheist' worldview is a nonsense term, unless of course we're describing a world where everyone lacks a belief in a god or gods, in all their infinite forms. Atheism ascribes no meaning to socio-politics or economics, which is the usual connotation implied when people trot out the idea that an atheist's world view will lead to [insert whatever bad words you can think of].

2. Richard Dawkins is not the representative of 'atheism', mainly becuase there are none and never can be, and also becuase atheism has existed for thousands of years before Dawkins was even conceived and will continue to do so after he dies.

Points about using some non-descript transcendental 'sense' to understand the world we inhabit (specifically, a god) is rendered moot based in the fact that there is no evidence to support it.

Also, being resurrected from being dead is impossible. You can evidence this quite easily; go down to your local morgue and wait for one of the cadavers to 'resurrect'. When one does, then that'll be evidence that its possible. Indeed, knowing this to be the case, it leaves us with a few viable alternatives to explain the story:

1. It actually happened and was down entirely to non-physical [???] factors (no evidence to support it, infringes on the known laws of physics)
2. It actually happened and was down entirely to physical (and hence verifiable) factors (eg, it was a lie and he wasn't actually dead etc).
3. It's a story/allegory, either intend to indoctrinate to entertain, and never actually happened.

Now, of course, an absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence, but in this case, as the claim is clearly contrary to what we know be possible within the laws of physics, the only way we can default to option 1 is to have extraordinary evidence to support it. I am continually left wanting, hence my disbelief that it happened at all.

[Love]

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.

Again, I say, just because we haven't found the answer YET, why does this necessarily mean there has to be an external agent?

Again, it is all down to subjective interpretation. The way I am describing mystical experience and God is in the form of textual language, and I have absolutely no idea how you are perceiving the words that I write. You are obviously endeavouring to conceptualise my subjective experience, which is obviously very difficult for anybody. This is what I find with rationalism and reason; I very much doubt that there could ever be anything that would ever convince you that God is exists, as I am sure you would apply skeptical analysis such as: is this an hallucination derived from neural biochemistry? Or: how can I be sure it is god? Personally, I am very confident in the reality and truth that God is real, but obviously my confidence is not very helpful to you due to the aforementioned limits of communication.

Also, I think due to the extreme complexity of God, it is impossible for him/her/it to be expressed in a single form that can be perceived as exactly the same by everybody, hence my belief that it has to be realised by transcendening sensory experience.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

This is a nonsensical statement. There isn't a worldview of atheism... Only a theistic one.
Each atheist's worldview is different in ways that range from minute to astronomical.

One's worldview should not be linked to their atheism.

Atheistic is a describer - those worldviews do not believe in divinity.

There is no atheis't' worldview. There are atheis'tic' ones.

Personal opinion.

I just wanted to post to agree with this entirely. To say atheism is a 'world view' is just ridiculous unless the entire 'world' is composed of a belief in god(s)..

[thesummerqueen]

I think you're using the 'limits of communication' as a special pleading type argument to make sure there's always a moving goal post, personally, and you didn't answer the question.

[Whateverist]

Summer's point as I interpret it is that telling what is absent from one's world view isn't much of a contribution toward telling us about anyone's point of view. Sort of like not being from Arkansas. That leaves a lot of possibilities and doesn't give me much to go on.

Of course Lovey found his world view with god so uplifting after having gone with out it that he is assumes that certain qualities of the experience he had as an atheist must characterize what we experience too. Not a valid inference given that both his before and after experiences were his, and only his.

[Love]

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.

Thank you for the welcome.

I am sorry to hear that you suffer from severe mental illness. From what you're describing, it sounds like Bipolar Disorder. Is this correct? I also suffer from severe mental illess, which is a very severe form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). I also suspect that I have a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome; I am a PhD student studying Computer Science, and basically spend my entire life on my computer.

Could you please highlight the passage(s) that you consider to be illogical?

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Hello,
...
As for applying my experiences to the God of Christ.

Ever notice in the gospels he never says which god that is? And that he is pissed as hell at the one in the temple in Jerusalem?

I suspect he is talking about the male Galilean god rather than the one imposed on them by the Judeans back in the 2nd c. BC.

I would like to make it clear that I did not experience a momentary sacred vision in an instant, it was a gradual process and I found myself feeling beckoned by the history of Christianity and the impact Jesus has had on history and culture; I cannot explain why I felt those desires to read about Christianity and Jesus. There is also something deep inside my consciousness about Christianity that feels "right" and "true" at the same time, which is significant to me. In essence, it was a gradual process after that horrific experience on December 24th 2012.

Cheers.

Last heard the part of the brain that causes that feeling has been identified. If I remember correctly it is about an inch above and forward of the left ear.

[Love]

I think you're using the 'limits of communication' as a special pleading type argument to make sure there's always a moving goal post, personally, and you didn't answer the question.

I am not disingenuously trying to divert away from the question; I really am endeavouring to satisfy it. Would it be possible to write more than a single sentence with your questions and responses? I feel it would be much easier to understand what you're saying if you could elucidate your points and questions further.

[Baalzebutt]

Also, I think due to the extreme complexity of God, it is impossible for him/her/it to be expressed in a single form that can be perceived as exactly the same by everybody, hence my belief that it has to be realised by transcendening sensory experience.

But if god has the power that he is supposed to have, wouldn't making himself known to EVERYONE ON THE PLANET IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY be a pretty easy task? I mean he is god, after all.