The link between God and The Experience

I said there are several points at which we can or must produce a link between God and religious experience, this is the first and most basic link, why associate this experience (Mystical) with God?  Some atheists would have us  reduce the experience to an unrelated set of characteristics and then assert that they cant be linked to anything meaningful beyond  the mere fact of some  dead end experience. The fact is most people who have the kind of experience called  "mystical" find in that experience a notice quality that links to experience to things like the meaning of life, God, the ultimate realty, even though it is notorious hard to explain the meaning itself, We can set up a decision making paradigm that would allow us to compare the object of the experience to the object of religious concern.

Decision Making Paradigm:

God Corrolate: The co-determinate is like the Derridian trace, or like a fingerprint. It's the accompanying sign that is always found with the thing itself. In other words, like trailing the invisible man in the snow. You can't see the invisible man, but you can see his footprints, and wherever he is in the snow his prints will always follow. 

We cannot produce direct observation of God, but we can find the "trace" or the co-determinate, the effects of God in the world.The only question at that point is "How do we know this is the effect, or the accompanying sign of the divine? The Correlate functions like a finger print, or track's in the snow, It;s the mark God leaves when his prances is near,No we can't demonstrate God but it is the basis upon which  discussion of God exits, This the basis of religion, the sense of the Holy is wrapped up in the expereice as the fabric of the event.

The answer is in the argument below. Here let us set out some general parameters:

We can set up criteria based upon what we would expect from encounter with the divine:

A. Life Transforming and vital in a positive life=affirming sense

B. It would give us a sense of the transcendent and the divine.

C. No alternate or naturalistic causality could be proven

These criteria are based upon the writings of the great mystics and religious thinkers of history, especially in the Christian tradition, and distilled into /theory by W.T. Stace. The theory is verified and validated by several hundred studies using various methodologies all of them published in peer reviewed journals. The following argument is based upon the findings of these studies. All of this, the studies, the methods used, Stace's theory, these studies and their methodologies are discussed in depth in The Trace of God: a Rational Warrant for Belief by Joseph Hinman, (all proceeds go to non profit) available on Amazon

Peak experience is validated through a variety of data. It is proven to be a true consciousness change. Moreover, it has powerful and postie affects which last a life time. Since it is an experience of "something" (transcendence at least if not of "God") we must conduce that there is a real external cause at work producing the experience. Rebellious experience is experience of something, something we usually call "God," thus it is logical to conclude that there really is a God to be experienced. At this stage we cannot argue that this is the God of the Bible, but that will be established on other pages. Religious experience is not merely a change in feeling or a veg indefinable sense of niceness set off by beautiful clouds or something of that nature, if that were the case it could not be life changing. That is is subjective is obvious, but that is merely subjective is belied by the fact that is and has been shared my millions of people (in fact on some level by the vast majority of people) thoughout human history.

This notion applies to the feeling of utter dependence, but it can work also with mystical expericne. In this argument I'll focuss just on mystical experience. The argument says:

*There are real affects from Mytical experience.
*These affects cannot be reduced to naturalistic cause and affect, bogus mental states or epiphenomena.
* Since the affects of Mystical consciousness are independent of other explanations we should assume that they are genuine.
*Since mystical experience is usually experience of something, the Holy, the sacred some sort of greater transcendent reality we should assume that the object is real since the affects or real, or that the affects are the result of some real higher reailty.
* The true measure of the reality of the co-determinate is the transfomrative power of the affects.


This last point of course will be hotly disputed, but the reasoning is well documented and based upon the previous two arguments. Since we have seen that religious expedience is highly efficacious in terms of its transformative effects, that it is normative and that it represents a dimension to human being that empirical reduction ism reifies and misses, we should assume that the extent to which religious experience is transformational is a measure of its efficacy. To put it simply, it works, it changes lives, why shouldn't we assume that it is the affect of something real?

Read much about the book on the Trace of God blog..

Argument:


(1) Real effects come from real causes

(2) If effects are real chances are the cause is real

(3) the effects of mystical experience are real

(4) Therefore, the cause of mystical experience is real.

(5) the content of mystical experience is about the divine

(6) Since the content of ME is divine the cause must be the divine

(7) Since the cause is real and it is divine then the divine must be real.

(8) Therefore belief in the divine is warranted by ME