Supernatural emprically proven

I am sicking of atheists saying "there's no proof for the supernatural." Yes, there is! it is proven.


To answer this question we must know what is meant by "supernatural." Thus part I will deal with the issue of defintion and the logic of evidence, part II with actual empirical evidence.

On CARM atheist board Apostate Abe commenting on post by Occam 1/3/08



Abe says: "I was made aware of a post that Occam made back in August. He was challenged by Matt Slick to give reasons for being an atheist. He gave three reasons, and the second one was this:"

Quote:
Originally Posted by Occam View Post

2) It's impossible in principle to find empirical evidence that could count as a warrant for belief in the supernatural.
Suppose tonight you look up at the sky and see that the stars have all shifted. Now, in consecutive constellations, the words "MATT SLICK, I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD." are spelled out above your house. Evidence for a supernatural intervention? Occam's razor says no. There are other, more parsimonious, explanations for this phenomenon. The kids down the block may have set up a big black tent over your house, poking holes for the stars and shining light through the holes, to give but one example. The fact is, there will always be an explanation for a given empirical phenomenon that doesn't invoke the supernatural. Even if there wasn't, you would still be perfectly justified in saying, "I don't know why it happened. Let's try to find out!" and then going to look for a natural explanation.

Is it impossible in principle? If the stars shifted would that not be good indication? This is an absurdity for several reasons, but before listing them, the major point I want to prove here is that it is easy to give empirical evidence of the Supernatural and I do it all the time. But before we can can understand this several things have to be in place:

(1) The concept of the Supernatural which most atheists reject is not the concept the Chruch teaches as Supernatural, and it is not which Christian mystics first began calling "supernature" with Dionysus the Areopoagite the 500's.

(2) If the stars shifted it would certainly be evidence of supernatural power, especially they spelled out a Biblical message; of course it would be easy to verify that the stars had actually shifted, there would be no danger of being food by children that would be quite easy to verify. The star painted tarp would be detected very quickly.

(3) The extent to which one might raise doubt as to the origin of this miracle would be the same extent to which one can doubt own existence, or the rising of the sun tomorrow.

(4) All Occam has really done here is to demonstrate the impossibility of proving anything.

That kind of sophomoric argument is not impressive. Yes we can doubt anything, has za! Is that really a reason to doubt God? This is the kind of amazing realization that fascinates philosophy 101 students when they are Freshmen.

But wait Occam is not through:

There will, I fear, be accusations that I'm irrationally, indefensibly biased against the use of the supernatural as an explanation. I will be accused of constructing this principle just for the sake of closing my eyes to any and all evidence. That simply isn't the case, and to demonstrate that it isn't I will give the basis for the argument here: my argument above is based upon the following principle: any explanation for a phenomenon that doesn't invoke violations of natural regularities will be more parsimonious than one that does. This principle is clearly valid.

Actually, this principle is clearly circular. All he's really said is "you can't prove the supernatural because its not naturalistic and so by definition it can't exist because we can only accept naturalistic concepts as existent." Where does he say? when he says anything that doesn't evoke violations of natural regularity, he's actaullyk saying Only natural regularities are valid as existent. which is the same as saying (just the reverse order of putting it) any supernatural order has to be ignored from reality a prori. Hence all he has really said is "there can't be empirical evidence of the supernatural because by definition we wont allow it!"


Thus his dictum is merely circular: there is not proof of the SN because it's excluded by the rules,and the rules exclude it because there's no proof of it. How could there be proof of it when you don't allow to begin with? Not content to just use circular reasoning, Occam argues from analogy:

Your wallet goes missing, what's more likely: fairies stole it, or there was a massive CIA conspiracy to take your lunch money? Convoluted as the second one sounds, it is the more parsimonious of the two. The fact is that there is no rational, objective criterion by which to say that an empirical event was supernaturally caused. So, we must now constrict our search for God-evidence to the realm of the a priori.

This is argument from analogy because he expects us to believe that sense this case has a parsimonious naturalism then all cases of parsimonious naturalism must be true. Of course this case is merely defend as true because we are told up front that all naturalistic causes must be more rational than supernatural regardless of how inane they are. What Occam says sounds logical to an atheist, because atheists don't think about logic, they think about opinion. They think 'O I don't believe in faeries, we know the CIA exists, even thought hey wouldn't want your lunch money that makes more sense than faeries. The total lack of evidence for faeries is a fine reason not to believe in them, that is why the CIA is a more parsimonious answer, not because its' naturalistic and faeries are supernatural. We know that the CIA exists, even though ti probably doesn't need lunch money. We don't know that faeries exist, thus they are not as logical a solution. We can't say that because fairies are less parsimonious than the CIA therefore supernatural is less parsimonious than naturalistic cause and effect. In the Charles Anne's Lungs the supernatural is more parsimonious because no natural explanation can explain how lungs can grow back over night. This is just not supposed to happen.(scroll down to "an old case but interesting--Society for Little flowers". We cannot rule out evidence of supernatural on the premise that it's not parsimonious. That is backwards reasoning. Being parsimonious is not an argument to justify evidence, the evidence is required to justify parsimony. To rule it out on the grounds that a priori SN cannot be parsimony is just to pre judge the case prior to evidence.


Just another case of atheists confusing their opinions with logic.

Now Here Apostate Abe joins the discussion:

Reading that, it makes a lot of sense, yes? You don't want to believe it, but it seems true.

Yes, the argument is true for an everyday environment that can be made sensible by modern scientific laws and explanations. But, I profess an alternative. If the gods made themselves an ordinary part of the human environment, then that is evidence for the gods. That means that no single "miracle" can ever work to prove the gods for a reasonable person. But, if I were living in one of the magical environments of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Genesis, Exodus or the New Testament gospels, where miracles and magical stuff happen all around and all about and all the time, then the supernatural paradigms easily supersede the naturalistic paradigm, and the gods can more easily follow.

I was watching TV, and I caught the end of the comedy film, Bewitched. The heroine, who is a powerful spell-casting witch, is in love with a TV actor played by Will Ferrell. She feels guilty that she has hidden her powers from him, and she finally professes that she is a witch. Ferrell says, "Oh, a witch, well, don't be so hard on yourself!" And she says that she can cast spells, and she attempts to prove it. She magically puts a mustache on another guy's face, she instantly puts an umbrella in Ferrell's drink, she puts an image of her face on a TV screen and makes her talk. But Ferrell is convinced only that she is a very good amateur magician. She summons a broom from nothingness, and Ferrell thinks it is a collapsible broom from her sleeve. He examines it--the grooves, he thinks, are very well hidden. And then she makes the broom fly, taking Ferrell high up to the air along with it, and he is clutching the broom for his life. He is brought down, finally convinced, and is scared sheetless. He shouts, "Have you made me pregnant? I don't wanna be pregnant!"

I figure my reaction would be similar. There can be a limit to the naturalistic explanations, and a single supernatural explanation may succeed if it becomes normal.

That's a good point, but the fact of the matter is SN does overlap with natural because the definition of Supernatural is not some alien state of affairs such that one negates the other. Atheists think Supernatural means another realm. magic, psychic powers, the stuff Harris believes in. But in fact that is not what it means. It means the power of God to raise human nature to a higher level. That power, in and of itself is of necessity manifest in the natural realm and thus has to overlap in such a way that we find material traces of it. In fact we do, before turning to that I will deal with the definition of supernatural.

See the article: * "Christianity and the Supernatural" by Eugene R. Fairweather. in New Theology No. 1 by Martin E. Marty, Dean G. Peerman

second major source: Scheeben, Mathias Joseph. Nature And Grace. trans. Cyril Vollert, ST. Louis:Herder Book

then: Willey, Basil. The Seventeenth Century Background: studies in The Thought of The Age In Relation to Poetry and Religion. London: Chatto and Windus, 1934, seventh impression, 1957.

To see a complete Bibliography look here



Author(s) of Review: Paul L. Meacham

The notion of "Supernatural" is a misnomer to begin with, because modern people construe the idea as another place, an actual location that you can go to. It's the unseen invisible world that is filled with ghosts and magic and so forth. It's in the realm where God can heaven are, we suppose. But what they don't' realize is that this is the watered down, dilapidated concept. It's not even understood well by Christians because it was destroyed in the reformation.

The term "supernatural" comes from the term "supernauturalator" or "Supernature." Dyonisus the Areogopite (around 500ad) began talking of God as the supernaturalator, meaning that God's higher nature was the telos toward which our "lower" natures were drawn. St.Augustine has spoken of Divine nature as "Supernature" or the higher form of nature, but that is speaking of nature in you, like human nature and divine nature.

In the beginning the issue was not a place, "the realm of the supernatural" but the issue was the nature inside a man. Human nature, vs. divine nature. The Sueprnatural was divine nature that drew the human up to to itself and vivified it with the power (dunimos) to live a holy life. This is the sort of thing Paul was talking about when he said "when I am weak I am strong." Or "we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The weak human nature which can't resist sin is transformed by the power of the Godly nature, through the spirit and became strong enough to resist sin, to be self sacraficing, to die for others ect ect.

This was the "supernatural" prior to the reformation. It was tied in with the sacraments and the mass. That's partly why the Protestants would rebel against it. Austine (late 300s early 400s) spoke of Christians not hating rocks and trees, in answer to the assertion that Christians didn't like nature. But the extension of the natural world as "nature" didn't come until latter. The idea of "the natural" was at first based upon the idea of human nature, of biological life, life form life, that's what the Latin natura is about.

Prior to the reformation Christian theologians did not see the supernatural as a separate reality, an invisible realm, or a place where God dwells that we can't see. After the reformation reality was bifurcated. Now there came to be two realms, and they juxtaposed to each other. The realm of Supernature, is correlated to that of Grace, and is holy and sacred, but the early realm is "natural" and bad it's myered in sin and naural urges.

But all of that represents a degraded form of thinking after going through the mill of the Protestant Catholic split. The basic split is characterized by rationalism vs feideism. The Catholics are rationalists, because they believe God is motivated by divine propose and wisdom, the Protestants were fiedeists, meaning that faith alone apart form reason because God is motived by will and sheer acceptation, the desire to prove sovereignty above all else.

The rationalistic view offered a single harmony, a harmonious reality, governed by God's reasoned nature and orchestrated in a multifarious ways. This single reality continaed a two sided nature, or a mutli-facets, but it was one harmonious reality in wich human nature was regeuvinated thorugh divine nature. But the Protestant view left Christian theology with two waring reality, that which is removed from our empirical knowledge and that in which we live.

The true Christian view of the Sueprnatural doesn't see the two realms as juxtaposed but as one reality in which the natural moves toward its' ground and end in divine nature. It is this tendency to move toward the ground and end, that produces miracles. A miracle is merely nature bending toward the higher aspect of Supernature.

but with the Protestant division between divine sovereignty, acceptation and will motivating the universe, we mistake univocity and equivocity for nature and supernature. We think nature and supernature are not alike they are at war, so difference marks the relationship of the two. But to make the Suepernatural more avaible they stress some aspect of nature and put it over against the rest of nature and pretend that makes it sueprnatuarl, this is univocity, it's the same. So will and acceptation, sovereignty, God has to prove that he is in charge, these are all aspects of univocity.

It's the natural extension of this bifurcation that sets up two realms and sees nature as "everything that exits." or "all of material reality" that sets up the atheist idea that supernatural is unnecessary and doesn't exist.

Historical Overview: SN and Rise of Science



The medieval Christian doctrine of the supernatural has long been misconstrued as a dualistic denigration of nature, opposed to scientific thinking. The concept of supernature, however, is not a dualism in the sense of denigrating nature or of pitting against each other the "alien" realms of spirit and matter. The Christian ontology of the supernatural bound together the realm of nature and the realm of Grace, immanent and transcendent, in a unity of creative wisdom and purpose, which gave theological significance to the natural world. While the doctrine of supernature was at times understood in a dualistic fashion, ultimately, the unity it offered played a positive role in the development of scientific thinking, because it made nature meaningful to the medieval mind. Its dissolution came, not because supernatural thinking opposed scientific thinking, but because culture came to value nature in a different manner, and the old valuation no longer served the purpose of scientific thinking. An understanding of the notion of supernature is essential to an understanding of the attitudes in Western culture toward nature, and to an understanding of the cultural transition to science as an epistemic authority.

The ontology of supernature assumes that the natural participates in the supernatural in an ordered relation of means and immediate ends, with reference to their ultimate ends. The supernatural is the ground and end of the natural; the realm of nature and the realm of Grace are bound up in a harmonious relation. The Ptolemaic system explained the physical lay-out of the universe, supernature explained its theological relation to God. The great chain of being separated the ranking of creatures in relation to creator. The supernatural ontology is, therefore, separate from but related to cosmologies. This ontology stands behind most forms of pre-reformation theology, and it implies an exaltation of nature, rather than denigration. This talk of two realms seems to imply a dualism, yet, it is not a metaphysical dualism, not a dualism of opposition, but as Fairweather points out, "the essential structure of the Christian faith has a real two-sidedness about it, which may at first lead the unwary into dualism, and then to resolve ... an exclusive emphasis on one or the other severed elements of a complete Christianity...such a dissolution is inevitable once we lose our awareness of that ordered relation of the human and the divine, the immanent and the transcendent, which the Gospel assumes." Yet, it is this "two-sidedness" which leads unwary historians of into dualism.

In his famous 1967 article, "The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Lynn White argued that the Christian belief of the Imago Dei created "a dualism of man and nature;" "man shares in God's transcendence of nature." This notion replaced pagan animism, it removed the "sacred" from the natural world, and with it, inhibitions against exploiting nature. Moreover, by the 12th century, nature became a source of revelation through natural theology. In the Latin West, where action prevailed over contemplation, natural theology ceased to be the decoding of natural symbols of the divine and became instead an attempt to understand God through discerning the operation of creation. Western technology flourished, surpassing even that of Islamic culture (although they still led in theoretical pursuits). Thus, White argues, medieval theology did allow science to grow, but at the ultimate expense of the environment.

The insights of feminist scholarship, however, suggest an even more subtle argument for the denigration of nature. Feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruther, argued that there is an identification between the female and nature, the male and transcendence. Women have been disvalued historically through the association between female sexuality and the "baseness" of nature. Londa Schiebinger, calls attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian cosmology placed women in a subordinate position. Gender was more fundamental than biological sex, and it was a cosmological principle, "...Men and women were carefully placed in the great chain of being--their positions were defined relative to plants, animals, and God." The subordination of women was predicated upon their position in nature. "Male" and "Female represented dualistic cosmological principles penetrating all of nature, principles of which sexual organs were only one aspect. One might suspect that the place of women on the great chain of being is indicative of the true status of nature itself in Christian ontology; an overt denigration of women indicates a covert denigration of nature.

Jesus was the Messiah for the Jews and Savior of the world

Jesus Christ King Messaih/Alred Edersheim


On the comment section of my blog, to the previous post about the ancient church, there is a squabble brewing between myself and a guy who claims to follow "Yeshua." He's not a typical Messianic Jew because rejects the Gospels and believes that Jesus, although Messiah, was totally pharisee and would be utterly against any form of the Christian Gospel. I can't help but see this as an attempt to divert Jews from an interest in Jesus to a form of Orthodoxy that recasts Jesus in the shade of Tovia Singer (notorious anti-missionary). The links between Jesus and the early church are solid. Do not let any convince you that they have any sort of secret historical information that would pit Jesus against the church. We do not know this. The only valid evidence we have of Jesus from history is the New Testament documents, the scant traces of remembrance in the "Apostolic fathers" and tantalizing suggestions and speculative maybes teased out of apocryphal literature. There is no secret cache of Rabbinical docs that tell us anything of any real substance about Jesus.

There are some hints in the Talmud. There are a few passages that may talk about him. But these are not of any length and they confirm his existence and few facts about him but nothing more. They do not show us any reason to believe that he was opposed to any sort of teaching that would latter be associated with the Church.The odd thing is that most Orthodox Jews will try to deny that Jesus is in the Talmud at all. The Talmudic passages pretty much prove that Jesus existed. They don't prove much more and most of what they say is defaming propaganda. You can read more about this on my website, Doxa.





The real issue between me and Anders is not so much Jesus, as Paul. I'm sure he rejects Paul as a total hieratic. The Jewish Christians of Jesus day saw him as the man of lawlessness foretold in Daniel. But that doesn't mean they were right. The Jewish Christian church disappears from history in the fourth century, probably re assimilated since it was totally cut off from its gentile counterparts, and dependent upon its Jewish roots for survive. There is no secret repository of Jewish info that disproves the link between Jesus and the church. The Gospels were written by communities started by Jesus' earliest disciples. They followed the Apostles. The Apostles appointed Bishops to guard the teachings that Jesus entrusted to them. The communities produced wittings that would preserve the testimony of the earliest disciples. The Bishops, chosen by Apostles and latter handed down in sequence after their time from prior Bishops, eventually decided which of these works were to be put in special list and given primary status as "cannon."

The problem with these pseudo Orthodox Messianic groups is that They never understand that Judaism was not the same in Jesus day as it is now. It was very diverse. There were groups who absolutely opposed the Pharisees. The probability is high that the twelve Apostles represented heterodox factions that where not Pharisees. Anders tries to appeal to the dead sea scrolls to link Jesus to Pharisees. But the only quote he has that the Pharisees accepted the Tenach. That is not proof that the Qumran sect accepted the Pharisees.

Andres (see comment section):

It’s documented in 4Q MMT Qumran Dead Seascrolls that Pharisees followed Torah including Halakhah.
He would have been a false prophet according to Devarim (some translate it Deuteronomy) 13:1-6.
http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0513.htm

The reason the Qumran sect was in the desert was to escape the faction that stile the priesthood and murdered their guy, the teacher of righteousness who was the valid high priest. In his place the put the wicked priest, and that faction became the Pharisees. The diversity of Judaism is important because it means that the pharisees could not claim they were the true and proper Jews. The only reason the modern Talmudists claim that is because they descended from the pharisees. In AD 70 when the temple was destoryed, the heterodox factions, which were numerous, either died fighting or they had become Christians already. The only surviving faction were the pharisees so by default they got to claim Judaism as their own. But prior to that time there were facts that were messianic, claiming to have the true messiah, claiming to know who he would be when he would come. The pharisees were not doing that. the Qumran guys were doing that. That's a dead giveaway as to why the Pharisees hated Jesus. Anders tries to blame the Saducees for Jesus' execution but it was the pharisees who had the high priesthood and controlled the sandhedron and they are the wones who did Jesus' trial and who crucified him. After the Pharisees took control they began to change the expectations about Messiah. They moved away form the LXX and adopted a new Greek Translation that did not put things the way the LXX did because the LXX is what the chruch used to claim Jesus was Messiah. The Pharisees took out the bits about the Messiah being rejected and executed and returning.

The diversity of Judaism in the second temple period is well documented.

see First Century Jewish Expectations of Messiah (on my website, Doxa).

The Diversity of First century Judaism:"The Essenic movment and heterodox Judaism spread throughout the entire Jewish world. Reflecting the power of the 'splinded isolation' that gave rise to the Hasiedan movement.... Pharisaic Judaism and Christinity represent different offshoots of old Testament religion. The one emphasized the Law of Moses but in terms of oral tradition and adaptability of ancient revelation to contemporary conditions. The other places stress on prophecy and fullfillment of promises in terms of the Messianic fulfillment....It is clear that the Essenes were closer to the Jewish-Christian in terms of Messianic expectation and eschatological fulfillment, although they were at different points on the time table. Thus the people of Qumran awaited royal and preistly Messiahs, while in the New Testament the term "Messiah" is clearly of the Dividic King."

--Gallayah Cornfeld, Archaeology of The Bible Book by Book, New York: Harper and Row, 1976, p. 265.



I. Diversity of Judaism in frist century Palestine.


Most Chrsitian arguments about fulfillment of Messianch prophesies seem unbelievable to skeptics, and that's because we really don't understand the way the early chruch looked at them. We tend to look at them and say "how could so many predictions be fulfilled? The odds are agaisnt it being a natural occurrence." Yet most of these things do not look like prophecies. This is because they did not have the notion of statistical probability. They didn't look at it in that way.They excepted Jesus as Messiah because of his teachings, his miracles and his character, plus some superficial fulfillments such as his linage and place of birth.But the real rason the early church looked at prophsey was to explain his death. Jesus died a shameful death, wehreas the Messiah was expected to reign in triumph. Upon closer examination they realized that there were deeper assumptions and that Jesus fit them, more importantly, his death was in the plan of God for the Messiah. As we look at these expectations which people in Jesus day had for the Messiah,we realize that the stroy they describe is the story of Jesus, right down to his death and ressurrection.

A. Diversity of Jewish Outlook.


It is alledged by Jewish expositors today that the verses sited in the Gospels pertaining to Jesus fulfillment of Messianic prophecy are not really Messianic verses. Hence, the expositors argue, Jesus did not fulfill any propheicies because the Jews did not expect a Messiah like Jesus. They argue the Messianich expectations were never applied to the verses that Christians have sited for 2000 years.

However, ther were many groups, with a diversity of expectations, that even verses wich don't seem to apply at all can be assumed to apply.After all, why whould the Jews of the first century be so daft as to just allow someone to come and tell them what their expectations were? Wouldn't they know? The main point of this page is to argue that he actual Messianic passages and expecations of the Messiah held by the Jews of Jesus day were not only fulfilled by him, but that they actually mark out the Jesus story as it is presnted in the Gospels, with the exception of those verses that pertain to the end of times, but even where those are concenred the Jews expected a gap between the first appearance of the Messiah and his eventual Kingdom.

Rabbinical tradition of Jesus' time was diverse. Judaism today is nothing like it was in the first century."Judaism has not stood still and what may apply for the fourth century may be wholly misleading if applied to the time in which Jesus lived." (Neil, 295). After the temple was destroyed in AD70 several sub-traditions and factions were swept away. Essntially only the Pharaseical tradition survived and became the mainstream of what we know as Judaism today. The Essenic type survived, and became the Hassidem, but they are less "mainstream." The Hassiedics are more fringe, being niether Orthodox, nor conservative, nor even liberal. The groups that were swept away were the bitter rivals of the pharasees. Their opinions are not recognized, and they are forgotten. We can see the efforts of the surviving tradition to change certian facts which favored Christian views. First, the LXX (Greek Translation of the Old Testament) was the favored text for Hellenized judaism before the destruction. It was also the Bible of the early chruch because it favored the Christian views of prophecy. Don't forget, it has already been documented taht the LXX renders Pslam 22 as "peirced hands and feet," and that the LXX is closer to the Dead Sea Scroll. In the early second century Judaism produced another Greek translation, "Aquilla's translation" which replaced the LXX and was taylored to be less Messianic (Steven Neil, The Interpritation of the New Testament).

On the same page see my argument:
Christianity emerged from Heterodox Factions.

quoting from Robert Eisenman (Pof. of Middle East Religions and chair of Religious Studies Department at California state University Long Beach) and Michael Wise (Arimaic, University of Chicago) "So what do we have in these manuscripts? Probably nothing less than a picture of the movement from which Chrsitiantiy sprang in Palestine. But there is more--if we take into consideration the Messianic nature of these texts [Dead Sea Scrolls] we delieniate it in this book, and allied concepts such as 'righteousness,' 'piety,' 'works,' 'justification,' 'the poor, ' 'mysteries,'was we have is a picture of what Chrsitinatity actually was in Palestine....we cannot really speak of a Chrstianity per se in Palestine in the first century. The word was only coined as Acts 11;26 makes clear, to describe a situation in Antioch in Syria in the fifties of the present era. Latter it was coined to describe a large portion of the over seas world that became 'chirstian,' but this Christiaintiy was completely different form the movement..." (Rober Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Shaftisburry, Dorset: Element, 1992, 10)

Eisenman and Wise go on to point out that the Christiantiy of James' circle was legalistic, law oriented, and that their vocabulary was right out of the Scrolls of Qumran; their concepts, their orientation to life, while the Pauline group was its mirror opposite transforming law orieneted notions into Grace. They then go on and speak of the movement which produced the Scrolls, wheather it be called "Saducess, Essene, or Zealot, terms which they find all have some applicability but all really miss the Mark. The Qumran community was warlike, militant, but bore commonalities with all these groups including the Jewish Chrsitians. The say of the movment of which Qumran must have been a part:

"IT is for these reasons that we felt it more appropriate to refer tot he movmeent we have before us [Qurman] as a'Messianic' one, and its literature as the literature of 'the Messianic Movement' in Palestine. In so faar as this literature resembles Essenism, it can be called, Essene, Zealotism, Zealot';Sadduceeism, Sadducee; Jueish Christiantiy--whatever might be meant by that term--Jewish Chrsitian." (11)..
"In fact what one seems to have reflected in this Qumran literature is a Messianic elite retreating or 'separating' into the wilderness as per Isa. 40:3's make a straight way inth eWilderness for our God.'

Though they differ in many detalis, this conclusion has much in common with that of John Allegro who demonstrated many parallels between the Qumran community and the early Chruch, espeically in their view of the Messiah (Dead Sea Scrolls, Pelican, 1956). There is, therefore, no basis for the charge that the early chruch made up any of its Messianich claims.




Clearly there were many diverse vews and many groups: The Essens, the Theraputae, Ebionites. Elkasites, Sadducees, and many more. Jesus fullfilled totally the expectations of many of these groups, as the Elkasties and Ebionites became Christian.

A great deal of the evidence in this section comes form a priceless work of great scholarship The Life And Times of Jesus The Messiah An old 19th century work by Alfred Edersheim; an English Jew who converted to Christianity and became a Cambridge scholar. Edersheim compillied a list of 458 passages which rabbinical authority sites as Messianich. He uses theTargumim, the two Talmuds, The most ancient Midrashim but not the Zohar. Also the uses a work called Yalkut, a collection of 50 of the oldest writtings in rabbinical tradition. Most, but not all of what Edersheim quotes comes from the second century or latter. But he argues that is still an indication of the some ideas floating around in the popular quarters in Christ's time, especially ideas which show up in the NT since we can discount chrsitian influence upon Talmudic Judaism. But the evidence from Qumran and Psuedapigrapha is clearly prior to, or contemporanious with, the time of Jesus.

One of the finest soruces we can produce for Jesus Messianic credentials is the classic work Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. by Alfred Edersheim. Edersheim was trained to be a rabbi, he was a linguistic genius who became a Christian in College. He latter became a professor at both Oxford and Cambrige. I once communicated by email with his great Nephew, who told me many interesting things about his family. The most interesting is that Edersheim ran a ministry to the homeless in his hovel of a house, before he was discovered and made a professor. In the day he worked as minsiter and took in homeless and late and night eaked out his book over the years.

One can now find the text of this work on line Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah

Edersheim also wrote a history of the Jewish high preisthood, an article which explains the developments, some of which I speak of above. This can also be found on line.

here is a page about Ederhseim's life.


see all My Messiah Pages on Doxa

Oldest Church Raises Problelms for Jesus "Mythers"

file footage (ancient church in Crete)


The Oldest known Christian church Has been found Rihab, northern Jordan, near the Syrian border. The church Dates to between AD33 to AD70. That is totally remarkable as no Christian stuff has ever been found that predates mid century.

"We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from AD33 to 70," said the head of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, Abdul Qader al-Husan.

"We have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians - the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ."

A mosaic found in the church describes them as "the 70 beloved by God and Divine". Mr Husan said they were believed to have fled persecution in Jerusalem and founded churches in northern Jordan.

He cited historical sources that suggest they lived and practised religious rituals in the underground church and left it only after Christianity was embraced by Roman rulers in the fourth century.

There is no clear holder of the title of oldest Christian church: various sites claim the honour without definitive evidence.

Pottery shards found suggest that Christians lived there until late Roman times. The problems this Not only does this offer proof of an organized church in the at least the middle of the first century, but also historical evidence of a Biblical event, the sending out of the Seventy. That event involved Jesus himself. Not only is it evidence of Christianity, but indirectly of Jesus as well. Jesus mythers have begun to argue that Christians themselves did not exist in the first century. They have begun to doubt Paul's existence, although no valid scholars do that. Some have argued there is no proof of organized worship of Jesus in the first century.

Mythers will respond with the hackney argument that worship of a mythical Jesus figure goes back to the times before Christ with the Dead Sea sect. Of course this is a fantasy and their attempt to have it both ways. Earl Doherty argues that the concrete historical story of Jesus life did not exist until the early second century. IF this site is really associated with the Seventy disciples that Jesus sent out that would be concrete evidence that Jesus existed and it would wreck the Jesus myth theory.

Another article about it can be found on Directions to Orthodoxy

Inside the cave a circular area of worship with stone seats separated from living quarters were found. This circular element, called an apse, is important says Dr Al-Hassan because there is only one other example of a cave with a similar feature, which was also used for Christian worship. The stone seats are believed to have been for the use of clergy.

Al-Hassan said: "We found beautiful things. I found the cemetery of this church; we found pottery shards and lamps with the inscription 'Georgeous'". There is also a tunnel that leads to a cistern which supplied water to the dwellers. The excavation of the tunnel and the cistern may yield yet more evidence about the lives of these early Christians.

"From the tunnel to the cistern is very important. We want to clean it and make an excavation inside it. We found a very old inscription beside it and coins also, and crosses made from iron."

Other experts say they are cautious about the claim. They want to examine the artifacts and obtain solid dating evidence. The earliest confirmed examples of churches date from the third century.

Simplitic atheists worship Hume and Empiricism

Hume.....................Kant


There are some very ignorant people on message boards. Recently I had a big acrimonious show down with a group of atheists who were incensed because I insisted that Hume has been rendered irrelevant by Kant. They were so upset about this I didn't have the heart to tell them that Kant is pretty irrelevant too now days. These message board atheists practically worship Hume, and they have a fierce commitment to the term "empiricism" even though understand very little about it. I suppose they think Hume assures for them that reality is surface level, what you see is all there is. That keeps them safe from an angry God who wont let them do their little things. Hume is the failsafe for materialism because he's such important philosopher. That's why they are all such stalwart empiricists, because they don't understand that empiricism is a philosophy, they think it's science. They do not see a distinction between scientific method and Hume's ideas. They were so incensed that one of the said I am lying about philosophy and it's a stupid lie, I'm stupid. Then to prove that I am a stupid liar he proceeded to quote an article that confirmed everything I said.

Here is my original post:

It is well known in the history of ideas that Kant destroyed both rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism overestimated the role of reason in understanding the world, and empiricism underrated it. Kant demonstrated this with his categories, and replaced empiricism in its Humean form. That's why Kant is regarded as the major philosopher in the West and not Hume.

The modern scientific notion of empirical data, based upon inductive reasoning and backed by statistical probability, is a replacement for the philosophical empiricism that Hume started. Parsimony is an attempt on the part of scientists to overcome the limitations of empiricism, that is an excuse for not having the sort of first hand accuracy that empiricists like to dream they have. They invented parsimony because they knew empiricism is limited.

The result of brain research in the early part of this new century proves conclusively that Kant was right. There is no such thing as an accurate portrait of the world based upon "objective" observations.

this is born out by the words of the major God Pod researcher, Andrew Newberg (Why God Wont God away, p35)

Quote:Newberg
"The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers hears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view."(end quote)

The alternative to these failed attempts is phenomenology, not empiricism.

Phenomenology is allowing the sense data to suggest its own categories, rather than assigning categories and stuffing sense data into them to back up a pre conceived view such as materialism.

Let the categories suggest themselves out of the appearance of data.

__________________
Metacrock


They asked me to explain and prove how Kant bested Hume. One of them quoted an encyclopedia article that said Hume is the most important philosopher to write in English. I was so angry at being called a "stupid liar" that it did not occur to me to point out that lots of more important people did not write in English. Kant for example, who I say took things further down the road then did Hume, left him behind (although of course building on his work) wrote in German.Hume being the most important in English doesn't mean that Kant is not more important. I think two things drive their comments that I'm a stupid liar.

(1) The guy who said, "Magnus" doesn't know anything about philosophy, and he didn't read the article so all he knows is that first line about Hume being most important English philosopher. Nor does he know that Kant wrote in German. His reasoning says "Hume was most important, therefore, he's important than Kant, therefore he's write and Kant is wrong."

(2) the few of them who have actually read some philosophy know form 101 classes that Kant was influenced by Hume. Kant said it was Hume who woke him from his dogmatic slumber. So they can't have gone further than Hume. I think atheists (at least these kind on message boards) think that since reality is surface level there can only be on truth and its available through empiricism. Thus in their view there is no being influenced by and going beyond. it's all just right there, right or wrong, surface level, no details no nueaunces no developments.

They also know form 101 class and intro books that Kant leaned to empiricism and left behind the previous regime of metaphysics. Therefore, they conclude, Kant was a strict empiricist and disproved metaphysics. Of course anyone who realizes anything about Kant realizes this is quite an overstatement.


Here is the second post I made in response.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
No he is not! You might have some freshman English teacher who told you that in high school but that's laughable. He's not even considered relevant now. Kant is much more important than Hume. Kant agreed with Hume in rejecting rationalism, but he did not become a stark empiricist. the argues in Critique of Pure Reason. The mind limits empirical knowledge to mathematics and science of the natural world. It does not follow that other aspects of realty can be dismissed just because they are beyond empirical means.

This is the Encyclopedia article that "mangus" quoted to show that Hume was the most important Philosopher to write in English.


First a quite from THE STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

Quote:
The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thor

that's the article he quotes to show that I'm a stupid liar.

Here is my response.

"the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access to the empirical realm of space and time" (Mat McCarmick Cal State speaking of Kant's argument). That is in agreement with what Newberg has found.

Kant's argument can be said to be that empiricism underestimates reason, while rationalism over estimates it. That's why he's not an empiricist or a rationalist. He develops the Kantian categories.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
McCarmick



Hume was influenced by Berkely.
[/quote] Yes, but Berkely was a fool who thought god sends things to our senses, which makes us think reality is real. A fool is many ways.

Quote:

I think you guys are just on the wrong track with empiricism. As this article shows it's not the kind of thing you think it is. Locke and Berkeley are the other two in the trinity of empiricism, and they were Christians. for those of you who don't like philosophy, Berkeley was an idealist but he influenced Hume.
Hume was the greatest of the three most agree-and to be honest I think you are underestimating his influence, and also failing to understand what Kant was talking about. He himself thought we could never prove god exists. The following is from another website.

McCarmick:
So time and space are necessary to perception, even though they themselves cannot be perceived apart from the events "in" them. The next step is the transcendental analytic, which says that the mind applies certain categories of thought to ideas. Without these categories, Kant says, we would not be able to think at all, and Hume couldn't have come up with his arguments. Hume, for example, felt that cause and effect were not objectively real; Kant says right! -- they are a priori, in the mind:

1. Quantity: unity, plurality, totality. 2. Quality: reality, negation, limitation.
3. Relation: substance and accidents, cause and effect, reciprocity between active and passive.
4. Modality: possible-impossible, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency.

Finally comes the transcendental dialectic. Kant believed that the mind seeks complete knowledge. But it is limited to dealing with phenomena, appearances, only. It can't reach to noumena, the thing-in-itself. Phenomena are all you have, but they are not real; noumena are real, but you can't have them. So, to discover that real world, we try to construct it. Unfortunately, we err by trying to use the categories (logic), "designed" for phenomena, on the ultimate reality! So we end up with contradictions that are irreconcilable. Regarding cause and effect and free will:

Ultimately, Kant found that the existence of God, the soul, and ultimate reality is not something you can prove, because proof is based on phenomena and the categories. Instead, they are heuristic, that is, we believe in these things because they are useful to us! In saving science and religion from Hume, he proved that they had to be taken on faith! Scholars and churchmen on all sides of the issues criticized the Critique, which ironically guaranteed its success. Kant had no censorship problems to worry about at the time, because Frederick the Great -- a brilliant man himself -- ruled Prussia at that time. Unfortunately for Kant and many others, he died in 1786.

Here is Mangus brilliant comment about me:

He would laugh at you for thinking you can prove god exists. Next time you try to lie about philosophy make it a bit less stupid.

I will prove that the only thing he read is the first line by showing that his article is in almost total agreement with my position.

My position is that Kant demonstrates that rationalism overrated the role of reason, while empiricism underrates it. Even though Kant leaned toward empiricism himself, and he limited empirical knowledge to the physical world, he did not say that one is a fool for thinking of Metaphysics or that there is nothing beyond the material realm. He was still a Christian, he still believed in God and in the Critique of Practical reason he uses the moral argument to justify belief in God.



Standord article:

Quote:
The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith.

Really nothing there with which I disagree. This little intro part is Irrelevant to the discussion.



Standford:

Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes.

I specifically made the statement that Hume awoke Kant from his slumber, as Kant himself put it. I said this on the board before the idiot's statement.



Stanford:

Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most through

Notice there is nothing in that article that even addresses any specifics of any ideas of Hume, let alone a specific idea of Kant in conflict with Hume. There is nothing about Berkeley, which the brilliant thinker Mangus called a "fool," one of the most brilliant that ever existed! Nothing specific nothing to indicate any kind of philosophical issues.

Mangus knows nothing about the things upon which he pontificates. Like most know nothings on message boards, he's just flapping his gums because he reads statment about Hume is the most important, and "richness of empiricism" and this is total absolute vindication for him, there is no God! It's proven because this article says this. One of his Cronies chimes in and says "Philosophy is crap, philosophers don't know anything." Excuse me, for what is Hume most famous? He wasn't a professional philosopher, but he was a philosopher (professionally he was s diplomat). Empiricism is a philosophy. In the course of that argument they tried to say that empiricism is a natural faculty given us by our evolutionary endowment. This is because they can't understand the concept that science is a construct. They have no concept of what that means. It means this: it's based upon a philosophy and used as a lens to understand everything else in connection with it, but it's just a philosophical put up.

These atheists should not be talking about this stuff. They knowing nothing about it, their view on God are based upon appalling ignorance of thought and the world of ideas.


Berkeley

God Pod: Does Nuerology disprove Religious Experience?

We have made great strides in the last two decades, understanding the relation between consciousness and brain chemistry. As a consequence of their reductionistic materialist mentality, atheists assume that any relation between brain and mind sums up all relation between brain and mind. Atheists tend to side with the functionalists, assuming that all consciousness is mere epiphenomena related to brain function. Thus, they quick to argue that RE is nothing more than some sort of miss-fire of the synapse, or a heritable trait of evolution produced by the need of the tribe for unity. This view point is totally disproved, however, by none other than Andrew Newberg, one of the major researches of the “God Pod” (my own term for what is commonly called “the God part of the brain.” Researchers have discovered that there are parts of the brain that reaction to God-Talk. “The God part of the brain” as well as “God Pod” are both misnomers because there are actually several areas that react in this way. Newberg demonstrates that the existence of a “God pod” is not proof that RE can be reduced to brain chemistry, rather, not only is it the only way sentient flesh and blood beings could think or communicate, but it is also prettygood indication that there is more to reality that just atoms in the void. Newberg himself is believer in some form of “Buddhist like” theory about reality; he does not try to present a full-blown God argument. What he does present in clear indication that the matter cannot be easily reduced to nothing more than brain chemistry. Newberg actually does make the argument that what he has discovered could well bolster belief in some notion of the undifferentiated unity of which the mystics speak.1 What Newberg claims to have proven is that religious experience is real. It is not merely a trick of the mind, but something that really happens in the brain and can be studied and understood:

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to al spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.2

Newberg and his colleague Eugene D’Aquili3 have been at this research for many years. They use a SPECT camera, which stands for single photon emission computed topography. They trace a radioactive dye through the blood stream. The dye collects in brain cells, and they know that these are the cells most in use at the time because that’s where the blood is going. They find unusual activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe (PSPL) of those meditating. This area keeps track of up from down, helps judge angels and distances, and enables us to negotiate landscape. In order to perform these functions the PSPL must keep strict tabs upon the distinction between what is “me” and what is “not-me.” How could it negotiate landscape if it could not distinguish us from the things around us? For this reason Newberg and D’Aquili rename the area the OAA (Orientation association area). The two researchers find that this area (OAA or PSPL), which never rests, is strangely inactive while the meditation is in progress. After examining the descriptions “mystics” and those meditating game them, they concluded that the area was working, but it wasn’t getting any data. That would explain the sense mystics make of their experiences when they describe feeling an undifferentiated unity of all things. While skeptics might read this and think “ah ha! There’s the trick of the mind that makes it seem there is some spiritual reality,” Newberg sees much more to the issue than that. 3 Praying Franciscan nuns had similar findings, but their experience was describes as “closeness to God” rather than undifferentiated unity. Newberg argues that the research proves that these experiences are not merely tricks of the mind, wishful thinking or some form of “psychology,” but are instead “observable neurological events…mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.”4

Skeptics are quick to argue that the RE is clearly the product of brain chemistry, and results from the PSPL malfunctioning, thus it is clearly an accident or epiphenomenal, after all, all of consciousness itself is epiphenomenal. This is a misbegotten assumption that Newberg disproves. While skeptics try to ground the origin of religion in this “misfiring,” their argument is merely begging the question. Newberg points out that the use of brain chemistry is really the only way God could communicate with sentient flesh and blood creatures. Our consciousness is transmitted through brain chemistry; this is the way we work. The argument is like saying the function of rabbit ears for television (or a digital converter box) is a mechanism, which makes the instrument function; therefore, it is the rabbit ears or converter box that produces the programming. This is my analogy not Newberg’s. But he does say:

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.5

Newberg is not saying that there can’t be a God, nor is he saying that we understand all reality and can rule out the spiritual. He is saying that all we know of reality is mediated; what we take to be the unvarnished world is just a rendition of the unvarnished and that’s all it can be. Where I take issue with him is in his assertion that even mystical experience itself is mediated. In my view the actual experience at the mystical level is direct experience of the divine. But any attempt to understand it or put it into words is mediated by our brain’s rendition of the world. Thus the only way we ever can empirically comprehend the real, is through the mystical; to discuss it we must use analogical language and cast our experience into the realm of metaphor. Trusting to metaphor to interpret the world would probably make many atheists nervous, since they seem to be afraid of the subjective. But this is the nature of the case for all knowledge. We are separated from the things in themselves by our understanding and perceptions of the world.

Atheists tend to scoff at religious experience anyway because they dichotomize between perceptions gained through scientific means, and perceptions “off the cuff.” The latter are to be scoffed at and rejected as “subjective,” the former are to be sought as somehow guaranteed to be valid; even though they are still filtered through the “construct” created by the brain. The reaction of naturalistic thinkers to all manner of phenomenological apprehension has been to write it off as the subjective (thus untrustworthy) residue of outmoded misconceptions. One such misconception, swept aside in one gesture since the ninetieth century, is the concept of the spiritual. Naturalists tend to write off consciousness as a whole; content to allow their reductionism to saw off anything they can’t study through their methods. On the internet the average atheist makes the assertion that brain creates mind, this is evident since any sort of brain injury changes the nature of mind, thus mind is just a trick of the light, and brain is all there is. Thus experience is a side effect of the autonomic and other systems brains are really about. Newberg demonstrates the foolishness of this view. He does not speak of “holism” but what he says about the brain/mind dichotomy would fit in with that viewpoint. Yes, brain creates mind, but that does not mean that mind reduces to brain. The two are inseparable but they are no more the same thing than are hardware and software. He uses the analogy of waves. We can no more separate brain from mind than we can separate wave from the energy that produces it. Without the energy the wave would lie flat, without the energy the wave would have no expression.6 In my own view spirit = mind, mind = consciousness. The soul is symbolic of the overall life of the individual in relation to God. In other words, “soul” is a symbolic term, it is something we are, and not something we have. “He is a lost soul,” “seventeen souls were lost that day,” that, and other such phrases demonstrate what I mean. I make the case that the Bible more often than not employs the phrase in the way. The soul is a way of speaking about the over all direction of a person’s life in relation to it’s final destiny in God. It is not a little ghost in the machine. I do not blame atheists for their assertion that such notions are outmoded and unscientific, they are. We need to maintain the notion of a Casper the friendly ghost inside us that lives on after we are gone. We need not think of spirit as some special sustenance that is just too special for science to discover. These are outmoded concepts; they are unnecessary even to maintain a concept of life after death.

We do not know what consciousness is per se, science has not come close to pinning it down. Nevertheless, most science rules out the ghost in the machine as a philosophical fallacy. I agree with them. Mind is spirit, and if there is spiritual force or power or substance in this life could as easily been the force of God’s mind (or whatever might be analogous to “mind” for God) as to be a special discreet substance. Spirit, or mind, is created by the brain, that it is not reducible to the brain nor does it mean it has nothing more than epiphenomenal status. Just because the two are inseparable, assuming of course physical existence, does not mean they two the same thing. Just as the wave and the energy that makes the wave are inseparable but they are not the same thing. What of life after death? If we have to think of life after death as the survival of an independent agent that can move around under its own power then one can hardly see how consciousness could survive apart from brain. But if we think of it as not a “place” where one lives, but a larger framework of consciousness which one joins, “God himself” then it might be more intelligible. It is beyond the scope of this essay to speculate about the nature of heaven. The only point I wish to make here, and not to belabor, is that accepting a neurological basis for spirituality need to eliminate or “disprove” anything generic to the Christian faith. No biblical passage says that the spirit is a Casper the friendly ghost type agent floating around out of the body. In no way does this mean that I have abandoned the idea of spirit. We are spiritual beings, but the spirit is consciousness, the mind. I accept the idea that consciousness is a basic property of nature, because it is irreducible. Thus consciousness in humans may be the result of brain chemistry, but it is not identical or reducible to brain chemistry and nothing more. It is the intangible dimension that Newberg proves is necessary for one to understand reality or think. Perhaps it is complexity that produces consciousness. If consciousness is a basic property of nature, than when a certain level of complexity is achieved consciousness is born. Maybe there are different levels of consciousness. Thus rocks have their own little rocky consciousness that doesn’t do much by our estimation. Trees have a bit more consciousness but still can write a poem or go to the moon, and then we have a high level of consciousness but still not divine. This is not the venue for this discussion. I only mention these as hypothetical possibilities. For the sake of my experience arguments I will assume that consciousness emerges at a certain level of complexity just as heat results at a certain degree of friction.
What is this intangible dimension that Newberg proves is necessary for one to understand reality? How does he prove this? By the nature of the way in which the brain understands the word, as seen in what he calls “brain Architecture.” By over viewing this structure of brain interaction with world, he shows that the naïve empiricist view of “objective” observation of the world is outmoded and inaccurate. Our raw observations of the world around are not “plain, unvarnished” “literal” views of the world.

The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers hears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.7

He then goes through a shopping list of brain function, demonstrating how the brain apprehends the world. He covers the autonomic system, with the arousal and quiescent systems; He discusses the relation of this system to spiritual experience, as the relation of the heart rate to meditation is crucial in many forms of meditation. He talks about autonomic states and spiritual experience. Hyper quiescence and hyper arousal are states of relaxation and excitation. These are results of both medication and worship experiences. He covers the limbic system that relates emotional states to higher thoughts and concepts. He calls the limbic system “the transmitter of God.”8 This is how we can put together associations of emotional involvement with theological concepts. These same functions are connected to animal survival and finding food. Newberg is not saying that this proves there’s nothing there to sense in religious experience, no more so than he is saying that there is really no food for animals to find in the forest. All of this is just describing the processes and apparatus by which God communes with us, it does not in any sense demonstrate a lack of veracity to the experiences. He talks about the hypothalamus as the “master controller” for the autonomic nervous system.9 He does discuss other parts of the brain, but major focus for our purpose is what he calls “cognitive operators.” This is how the mind understands the world, Newberg tells us. It is significant that the speaks of “mind” here and not “brain.” He’s clearly saying this higher-level understanding is put together out of the bits of information gathered through all the other sensory inputs.
Newberg uses a very apt analogy; he refers to a robot constructed in one of the first robotic experiments. The robot took a whole day to perform its task of moving across the room and opening a door. The second time it tried it could not do it at all. The reason it took so long was because every time it moved it had to re-photograph the entire room and then re analyze where it was in the room. The room kept changing, as it got closer to the door, so it had to re think itself in relation to everything every time it took a step. It couldn’t open the door at all the second time because the researchers put a big x on the door, and it had not been programmed to understand that doors could be marked with X, so it did not recognize the door. We are like that robot except in one crucial way; we apprehend the room through sensory mechanisms that allow us to distinguish ourselves from the room. The difference is, we do not have to rethink ever thing we know every we take a step, we are capable of extrapolation from our knowledge to the fact that doors could have X’s on them. He does not put it this way, but one could say, we are capable of making leaps of fall all the time. We can look beyond the X and see the dorr, we can make the assumption that doors can have X’s and be confident in it. It is these leaps of faith, metaphors for example that enable us to put information together and understand. Newberg does put in terms of metaphor and symbol. The empiricist might think our perceptions take literal photographs of what is there and thus the more literal our understanding the more accurate. Oddly enough, Newberg shows it is the opposite. Being literal, exacting, empirical, does not give us the truth of the world; being able to make metaphors, extrapolate, guess, and take leaps of faith gives us navigation skills in the world.

The brain is structured such that collective structures contain various functions that Newberg and D’Aquili call “cognitive operators,” which enable us to makes these “leaps of faith.” They speak of the holistic operator, which enables us to group component parts and comprehend a whole structure. The reductionist operator does the opposite; it allows us to see the whole broken down into component parts. “The abstractive operator, results for mt he operations of the parietal lobe in the brains left hemisphere,” allowing the formation of general concepts from individual facts. There’s a quantitative operator, a causal operator, Binary operator (enables dichotomized perception such as “me”/“not-me”), an existential operator, that actually allows us to judge the reality of events, this is why we can understand that jokes are pretend and hypothetical without having to be told so, and an emotional value operator, “exists to assign an emotional valence to all elements of perception and cognition.” In other words, this one allows us to put it all together and sort out. This is why we can hear a job, “a man in New York is ran over by a car every fifteen minutes, and boy is he getting tired of it,” without going “O that poor man! Why can’t they stop it?” All of these operations and functions come together to form man’s basic myth making ability. Through these functions we can interpret a feeling in such a way as to understand something of the divine. We are outfitted to know God. Where translate early myth making, which goes back as far as we can find traces of distant relatives, the Neanderthal (65,000 years) we find the evidence of concepts such as magic, afterlife, and spiritual forces. Certainly these qualities have always been present in modern human beings, as we know them. It would be easy for an atheist or skeptic to write off this argument as indicative of some ancient mistake whereby mankind conjured up a lot of nonsense to explain that which he could no explain by scientific means. This is the usual approach of atheists to understanding religion. Yet at this point Newberg plugs in a much more sophisticated understanding of mythology, via Joseph Campbell. As with afterlife as a means of coping with the harsh realties of death, mythology enables us to find meaning in the world, to extrapolate and thus transcend the literal harsh realities to a point where we feel at home in the universe, a universe of value and meaning. Myth shows us “what is most important, and what in terms of the inner life is more deeply and profoundly true. The power of myth lies beneath its literal interpretation in the ability of its universal symbols and themes to connect us with the most essential parts of ourselves in ways that logic and reason alone cannot.” The point is that this whole myth constructing function is not just some vestige that should be discarded in favor of machine like efferent mathematical abilities, or emotionless Vulcan logic, but that even ordinary sense perceptions require this extrapolation ability to allow us to function in the world. That means that the most atheistic and naturalistic view point of reductionism could not interpret the world for us without the myth making function or the little leaps of faith that allow us to see the door rather than the X. The situation with the “God pod” is a lot more complex than the original term “God part of the brain” implied (or more so than the term “God Pod” for that matter). It is not just one part of the brain; it’s not just that several centers somehow “register” God talk. It’s more that the overall nature of brain architecture is “designed” or at least function over all to use religious type thinking (metaphor, analogy, faith) even in ordinary navigation in the world.


Several writers have tired to show that religion can be accounted for naturalistically. Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (And Man Creates God) and David Sloan Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral), but the most famous among them is probably Daniel Dennett, in his work Breaking the Spell. Dennett doesn’t actually say point blank that the naturalistic nature of religion disproves it. He is sounding a call to study religion scientifically without giving it a special pass to protect people’s sacred cows. I have no problem with that, per se. The problem is that atheists have a tendency to tease out an innuendo that since religion can be accounted for through evolutionary processes, that does disprove any “supernatural origin” for it. The Things Newberg says about myth making, about the neurological basis of religion would be taken by many as a start indication that religion is just another evolutionary accident that wound up benefiting us. What he says about myth making giving us hope the face of the stark realities of death, especially when we consider the nature of the brain as it began to reflect upon itself and to create the mind; this furnishes a powerful argument. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it assumes that the basic reason for religion is to explain things. The atheist approach to understanding belief is empiricist. We want to prove an idea we believe in, so we look for indications in the universe that it’s true. We wish understand why water periodically falls form the sky, and every time it does the clouds come and get black. So we invent the only reason we can think of, big guy up in sky sends water down because he likes us. We can keep him happy by sacrificing sheep to him; he will keep raining on our crops. Of course this is too simplistic to even refute. Religion exists because people have a sense of the numinous. The atheist has to approach belief as primitive failed science. Newberg is telling us that this sense of the numinous is bound up with the very structure of our brains; we have to sense this and we have to make up myths to make sense of it. It is not an attempt to understand the physical workings of the world, although of course the early version of such attempts would draw upon religion, but it is actually an attempt to understand our place in the world, to make peace with death. Atheists tend to approach belief as empirically demonstrated by the contents of it. In other words, they look at the arguments from religious experience as justifying belief because the experience itself is a miracle. Its’ so amazing that anyone would sense God’s presence this must be the basis the argument, and the reason why it would be an argument at all is because it is something wildly amazing that can’t happen without miraculous intervention of the divine. That’s why a naturalistic explanation is so fatal to religious belief, or so they think. Matthew Alper writes The God Part of the Brain, and atheists react as though he’s saved them from eternal fate. E. O, Wilson shows us what they think his findings prove: “Alper uses a Socratic technique to brilliantly and flawlessly argue that our concepts of spirit and God are derived from the mechanics of our brain…enormously important…full of scientific and philosophical truths.” It’s so wonderful he bravely says what Newberg says. Except the atheists treat his work as though he is somehow answering Newberg. So again Wilson, as with Dennett, doesn’t actually say “this is disproves religion,” but the innuendo is there. Least anyone think it this is the natural inference; it simply stands to reason they are thinking in terms of beating a miracle argument.

But, the argument doesn't turn on being able to say, "This is a miracle that people have this experience because it couldn't happen unless God did this directly." That is not the argument. I will argue that there are unique aspects that couldn't happen without divine presence being involved. We must discuss what the supernatural is in order to answer this question. Supernatural is ontology, but it is also the power of God to vivify human nature and raise it to the higher level. These experiences do exactly what the supernatural is supposed to do. Since they are actually mystical experience itself, and that was the original conceit of the supernatural, they are literally the supernatural; no question about it. They are it.

That these experiences can be induced naturally is really not surprising nor does it undermine the argument. It would if the argument was a proof of God in an absolute sense, but since I claim only rational warrant this is a rational warrant for belief:

(1) the content is usually religious

(2) the effects draw people into belief

(3) it fits what we should expect of god

(4) no other aspect of life produces this effect, no other aspect has the data to back it up. When compared with other forms of support, even when smoking is controlled or religious smokers do better than non-religious. We only get these results from religious experience. This means there is validity to religion that justifies in considering these phenomena to be indicative of the co-determinate of God consciousness and thus, rationally warrant belief. If one is determined to construe such phenomena as signs of the veracity of religion it is not illogical to do so.

Natural and supernatural are juxtapositions; they are not antithesis of each other. They are two sides or facets of the same harmony. We should be willing to find supernatural in the natural, and that's just what Maslow says we find:
Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it involves a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? The "primitives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation, which gave them integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numinous, that is the origin of religion."

"In Appendix I and elsewhere in this essay, I have spoken of unitive perception, i.e., fusion of the B-realm with the D-realm, fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane, etc. Someone has called this "the measureless gap between the poetic perception of reality and prosaic, unreal commonsense." Anyone who cannot perceive the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic, is simply blind to an aspect of reality, as I think I have amply demonstrated elsewhere (54), and in Appendix I,

The argument turns on the rational warrant for belief found in the believer’s sense of transformation, and in the prima facie nature of the warrant. That is why no amount of neurological data can reduce the divine to the mundane or dissect the transcendent. No amount of naturalistic ideology can empty heaven of its sacred nature. It is not that these experiences have to miracles and can’t be understood in other way but to resort to God as an explanation, but that if we take them to be indicative of God, we are rationally warranted to do because they do exactly what we expect the touch of God to do in our lives, and they do this in a way that can’t be reduced to naturalistic phenomena without losing the phenomena.

As we say in Chapter (X) the various studies indicate that RE results in long term positive effects. Nothing else produces these kinds of effects; at least, there is no data to indicate that anything does. We should expect God to renovate lives, we should expect integration points into meaning in life, and revitalized inner lives, as a result of contact with the divine. This is what we find in religious experience, we do not find it other areas, even in areas that logically it should exist. Take the example of social support groups. One would theorize that if religion is just a naturalistic development as a result of evolutionary forces (which it is, but it is more than that too) one would find that any sort of positive support group should give one the same health benefits as religious belief. Such is not the case. As shown, even when smoking is controlled for, the religious experiencing believer is better off than people of other groups. This is true even in comparing religious believers to humanistic care groups and ideologically harmonious political groups or any other kind of group. No other support group offers the kind of long-term positive effects, as does religious participation. This is true of either participation or experience. The difference in participating and experience is in that between church attendances vs. actually experiencing God’s presence. Even just going to church seems to have a positive effect upon health even when one never “feels” a thing. It’s not that this is a miracle that is not the argument. The argument is that this is what we should expect from contact with the divine, transformation. Thus the argument turns upon sign. It turns upon the satisfaction of a prima facie burden to produce some valid reason why we should believe. We should believe because experience of the divine pans out as it fits the criteria we should expect form the co-determinate.



Matthew Alper God Part of the Brain

body, only by mere coincidence, it always ends up on our face. Apparently, humans are genetically "hard-wired" to develop in a very specific and particular way.
For every physical characteristic that is universal to a species, there must exist some gene or set of genes responsible for the emergence of that particular trait. For example, the fact that all cats possess whiskers means that somewhere within a cat's chromosomes there must exist "whisker" genes. Of our own species, that all humans possess a nose in the middle of our face means that somewhere within our chromosomes there must exist "nose" genes that instruct our emerging bodies to develop one in that very place. It's not, for instance, as if a nose can develop anywhere on one's body, only by mere coincidence, it always ends up on our face. Apparently, humans are genetically "hard-wired" to develop in a very specific and particular way.




Essentially, what I'm suggesting is that humans are innately "hard-wired" to perceive a spiritual reality. We are "hard-wired" to believe in forces that transcend the limitations of this, our physical reality. Most controversial of all, if what I'm suggesting is true, it would imply that God is not necessarily something that exists "out there," beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists within the human brain. And why would our species have evolved such a seemingly abstract trait? -In order to enable us to deal with our species' unique and otherwise debilitating awareness of death.

atheists might think this disproves religion but i think it proves it. It's what I've been saying about the religious instinct for years.



1 Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, pp. 157-172.
2 Ibid
3 Newberg gives a fine tribute to his late partner who was already gone by the time the book was published. P10
3 Ibid., pp 1-6.
4 Ibid., p7
5 Ibid., p37
6 Ibid. p33
7 Ibid. pp. 35-36
8 Ibid. pp. 36-43
9 Ibid.
he does not say where or who did the experiment. Pp. 11-14
Ibid, p 52
Ibid., p56
Publishers website The God Part of the Brain URL: http://godpart.com/ visited 5/23/08

Debate with Quantum Troll on Utilitarianism

This is QT's response to the article previously published. This debate is taking place eon my boards.


QuantumTroll wrote:In another thread, Metacrock said this:

Metacrock wrote:unfortunately my page on utilitarianism has been down and I've been so wrapped up in the move and everything I forgot. here it is. It's also restored to the index on the social menu of Doxa.

http://www.doxa.ws/Theology/Util.html



OT: So I read the page, and here's my opinion.



Meta: Not that it matters much but I did open a thread on City of God board about this, and included a post of the essay.

QT:I think you're misrepresenting Utilitarianism by focusing on the slogan version. "Greatest good for the greatest number" is just a simple rule-of-thumb, and I don't know any serious ethicist who would claim that this encompasses the entire thought process behind utilitarian moral thought.

Meta: that is clearly more than just a slogan for Mill. That's a callculous. It's the summation of the theory. See Rawls, see the book Consquentialism and Ethics. I think that was the Title.

QT:Utilitarianism is about looking for the optimal outcome in a given situation by thinking about the consequences. Sometimes, sacrificing the few for the many is the best we can do, but that does not mean that this is the only thing to consider.

Meta:that is a contradiction in terms. Ethics is based upon a decision between either teological thinking or deontological thinking. Teleological thinking means the morality is seated in the consequence not the value. To try to back pedal and save a space for values such as human life you are missing the boat and making it into something other than util. Util is based upon Bentham. Pleasure over pain. It doesn't leave a place for a spiritual value system to be nested in the back of the life boat. You can't say "O ok we will save a place for the value of humans as individuals in spite of their relation to the group," and still be a Util.

OT: The rights of the sacrificees need to be taken into consideration, for instance. Sometimes the "greatest good" is not comparable to the sacrifice - like if you let a mobster brutally rape someone every month so he'll let you keep your clubhouse. Sure, 100 club members are not inconvenienced by having to move, but a family's life is destroyed every month.

Meta: you have to introduce another set of values to do that. Its the consquentialist focus that produces the business ledger mentality. For example, there is no basis for talking about "rights" Other than the right to pleasure over pain in the Util world. You have to intorduce some form of denolotocial value system to introduce that concept.

QT: What strikes me as kind of funny is that your analysis is very utilitarian. Your argument about why Utilitarianism is bad is that there are consequences like "It would allow or justify the sacrafice of minority for the relative comfort of the majority.

Meta: that's your misconception about deontology. There's nothing in deontology that says consquences don't matter. The point is the value doesn't derive from the consequences not that we don't care about consequences. Violating duty and rules is a bad outcome to an action and means that such an act is wrong. It doesn't mean we say "Ok ignore that because it's just an outcome." But the outcome in itself is not the essence of the eticality. It's not the outcome alone that makes for ethics.

QT: The contra war could have been jutified perfectly upon util grounds, as could the holocaust." If you're saying that something is bad because it has bad consequences for lots of people, it's Utilitarianism

.


Meta: Nope. if that were true than God would be a Util. The contra war was wrong because it sacrificed the will of the people and democratic elections for the sake of the rich and powerful who were trying to take back their property (which they stole in the first place) from the oppressed masses who rebelled against them. The result of that was 85,000 murders of innocent civilians. Looking at this as a deontologist doesn't mean we ignore the death toll in access why it was an evil act. But we understand that violating duty and obligation has horrible consequences.

Murder isn't wrong because it violates the principle of pleasure over pain, or because it robs the greatest good for the greatest number, but because it violates the sacred principles of right, (the right of the victim to live), commands against killing, and duty to neighbor; the result of doing that is that people are robbed of life. It's not the result alone that makes it wrong, but it adds to the magnitude of the offense.

Now I will grant you that Regan did try to justify the contra war on deontological grounds, and every other kind of grounds as well. I"m not saying that you can't make a bogus argument that violates the premises of the system using any system you choose. But fairly and clearly supporting the Util view the way it was meant to be justifies the contra war. Fairly and clearly using a deontological ethics does not.

QT: Maybe your problem isn't with Utilitarianism itself, but the values that people try to maximize. Some people would say that the ideal should be the greatest amount of physical pleasure summed among all humans, others might say that spiritual well-being is actually important. I'm sure you could come up with a more nuanced formulation of what we should maximize, maybe involving duty, obligation, suffering, and justice (or something).

Meta: I spelled it out:

(1) it reduced to ledger sheet and ignores individual
(2) forces individual to do immoral acts
(3) forces us to ignore principles and values other than Hedonistic calculation.

QT: In short, what I mean to say is that Utilitarianism is not a monolithic system of ethics.

Meta: yes it is, I wish you would try to back that up by qutoing some major ethicist.

QT: It still very much depends on an independent determination of which values are important. Once you have decided on the values you think are important, seeking to maximize these values over the entire world is a very logical step. The question of theodicy is still treatable with utilitarianism, as long as you put a high value on free will (i.e. free will is a greater good than a complete lack of evil).

Meta: that requires starting from a premise that is not based upon UTIL or even upon any sort of consequentialism. It requires that you start from a value system and then find some grounding the axioms of that system over and above Util view, and the util view comes in as a modifyer to "maximize" and at that point you are no longer working form normal Util assumptions.




It's just totally common knowledge among ethics students that Util is dead. Rawls is almost universally credited with destroying it, and almost no ethicists today claim to be Utils. That is something of an appeal to authority, but I'm speaking of experts in the field, not just popular support. The only people that really tag themselves with that label are outside the profession.

The Wages of Utilitarian Thinking

J.S. Mill (father of Utilitarianism)


I find atheists on message boards constantly asserting that the Utilitarian dictum "great good for the greatest number" is the only measure of ethical purity. Evne when they don't assert it so overtly, they still seem to assume it as their basic thinking. Deontological forms of ethics are deemed to be merely rule keeping and legalism, Utilitarian thought is looked upon as modern, beyond reproach, the only enlightened way to think about ethics. God is constantly castigated for not being Utilitarian; this seems to be the supreme point of departure for all questions of theodocy or the problem of pain or evil. It is assumed over and over that God must think like a Until as this is the only way to think and that God is so inadequate becasue he just can't see that it would be the greatest good for the greatest number just to forget about all that sin stuff let everyone in the pearly gates.


In the world professional ethicists, the situation is very different. Utilitarianisms is considered extinct, consequentualism is not that popular and John Rawls with his A Theory of Justice is said to be the man who drove the nail in the coffin. The problem is the consequences of consequential ism and especially Utilitarianism are just too negative to maintain the philosophy:


...like sin, are death. Utilitarianism is guilty of the following flaws:

1) it leads us to treat moral cases like a business ledger, which means that it ignores the moral sense of the individual and treats individuals as an agrigate.

2) It would allow or justify the sacrifice of minority for the relative comfort of the majority. The contra war could have been justified perfectly upon until grounds, as could the holocaust.

3) It places individual moral motions under erasure by eliminating the concept of moral obligation and replacing it with an ends justifies the means notion of moral equations which would allow one to accomplish one's ends at the expense of any individual or minority, thus forgetting completely the concept of morality.

4) act utilitariasm often forces immoral choices upon people thus doing violence to their indiviudal sense of moral motions.

5) it leads us to assess moral conduct only in terms of pleasure over pain thus obscuring the finer points of duty and obligation.

Of course duty and obligation are the bread and butter of moral thinking, without that there is no particular reason to act morally. Thus util is a ruse which has infected the modern mind with shallow understanding that cirrples our ability to relaize our own responsiblity in moral action.

6) In several threads around this and the apologetics board a lot of things about moraity are being debated. But so few really understand the issues. The worse things that Util has done is blind us to an understanding of theodicy which would make God's allowence of evil accessable to the modern mind.

If we assume that pleasure over pain is the only moral good, and that outcome is all that matters, than of course we are going to complie the simplistic equastion, "evil happens, so there is no God." But that is an absurd equasion which overlooks our own complicity in evil doing.

We live in a real world, we have to struggle with faith and doubt. People do evil things, and all of that has to be. Because without the abilty to choose there would be no morall agency. To have free moral agency is to risk the possibility of evil choices. But we make evil choices, God does not make them for us. So we must face our own responsiblity in making them.

There is more to life than just pleasure over pain. The point of creation in the first place, as near as I can figure is to have a place in which the drama of choice can be played out and free moral agents can choose the good and internalize the values of the good. If life were nothing more than pleasure with God stepping in evertime someone wanted to sin than there would be no development of actual moral agency and no internalizing of moral values. IN effect we would not grow as moral individuals.

The existence of evil cannot be used to argue against the existence of God. After all that requires reasoning from the nature of the world ot the existence of God (or lack there of). If you wont allow that in the design argument you don't get to do in the theodicy problem.

I have returned!

Sorry to be away so long. I will resume blogging next week. But I will not be as prolific as I have been in the past. I may take a lot longer to get new stuff up. Moving was a total nightmare. I'll say more about it latter.