Lesson in Argument: Critique of Dialogue with Atheist souper genyus

 


 this is a dialogue I had with an atheist on CARM the message board

Originally Posted  by souper genyus


the context of this post was an argument I made that is basically my old cosmological necessity argument. It says that some from of being is eternal and therefore, not contingent (necessary). Since this primordial being is the basis of all that is, it must be considered the ground of being.That means three of the major attributes of God actually exist and all there is is based upon them. Then we need only consider they are bound together by mind to believe in God. This is a pretty good warrant for belief. No it's not proof, it doesn't have to be proof. It warrants belief. Hey don't look know bu this is far from "no reason to believe" it's far from  the "nothing" upon which atheists think faith is based.

The indented segments attributed to me (Meta) are what I said on the board. The regular segments are what I'm saying in commentary for this post.


SG:

And, everything we observe is "contingent upon prior conditions." Whether or not this applies to the universe as a whole is a matter of contention, which means the answer is not within the scope of human knowledge. To say that there is a condition prior to all other conditions, and that condition is God, is unknowable. 

 Meta:

It's not unknowable. It's unknowable by your means. I know it. Your means are not the only means of knowing. Al thought hey may be the only means that you will accept as proof. Be that as it may I don't argue for proof but for warrant, and I think what you say about prior conditions is enough to warrant the belief.

These means of knowing to which I refer include Logic, intuitive sense such as the feeling of utter dependence, as well as experiential means such as mystical experience. They also include scientific knowledge from disciplines other than cosmology. I support a concept of global knowledge. Knowledge is reducible to just scinece. We have to make use of all the forms of knowledge we have. We discount one's that don't pan like reading tea leaves.

SG:

But you end the contingency of events to prior conditions at God, which is special pleading. Your idea is that one needs "grounding" to make claims about reality, and that "grounding" is God, or Being Itself, or Ideal and Ultimate Being. 

 Meta:

 that is not special pleading. It's still subject to the rules of logic that your assertions are subject to. It's not true that I assume that is the only possible grounding, I just don't see any other that works. to be more precise it so fits the nature of the case that I hold for God I don't see that find of fit elsewhere. I see no reason to deny it when it works.

 The atheists are trying to argue special pleading a lot these days and they don't seem to know what it means. Special pleading means my argument conforms of a special case that doesn't have to fit under the same rules as everything else. I'm saying that. Nowhere did I say "all grounding is God.k" That's BS. I don't say that. I use the same rules of logic for my arguments that I used to refute their objections. They think atheism is entitle to presumption in any argument. So if you don't give presumption they assume you are special pleading.

Of cousre I link being itself with God as does Tillich and the major Christian tradition. I have reasons for doing so. I've spelled out those reasons many times.


 SG:
This is not consistent with the view that you are proposing, a view that I propose as well—that all conditions observed are dependent upon prior conditions. Knowledge is wrought from the intelligent control of concrete conditions.

 Meta:

Sure that is consistent. I've deduced the warrant for belief from that premise, I don't base the premise upon the warrant. By "intelligent control of concrete conclusions" he means reductionism. So what he's really saying is that his ideological basis is the given for all facts and it's permissible to just lose the phenomena anytime it doesn't coordinate with his facts. That is also the Atheist fortress of facts.

what we are about to see here is the atheist question begging in action. He's going to use arguments from taxonomy ("this is metaphysics") and the genetic fallacy (that comes from idealistic assumptions).


SG:

The pursuit of knowledge assumes change, assumes prior conditions, and in fact relies upon it. These principles are "true" without a grounding in metaphysics,

 Meta:
see.


I said:

no they are not! the assume metpahiscs. your views are No  less dependent upon metaphysics that mine. weather you say "the dialectic is made of green cheese" Or "metaphysics is BS" you are making metaphysical assumptions. if you say "Metaphysics is carp" you are making a metaphsyical statement.

your ideology has staked out certain metaphysical assumptions that are cool and others that are not cool.

SG:

without appeal to self-sufficing Ultimate Being, in that they are predictive and applicable to the concrete, measurable conditions that they aim to explain. These principles explain how current conditions came to be, through change, from other conditions, and predict how they will change into other conditions in the future. Why conditions change according to these principles, in an ultimate or metaphysical sense, is not within the scope of human understanding.

 Meta:

no they don't. they don't explain it we don't know it. they certainly don't. we have no idea what brought it all about and don't try to pretend we do becasue we know we don't. you dont' know what it's made of. we don't know lots of things, none of your ideological metaphsyical assumptions can explain mystical experience or give life transformation or meet any of the epistemic criteria required to suffice as warrant for belief.

See the moves he's made? He's first secondment my whole position as "metaphysics." that in itself says "nothing you have to say matters." then tried to establish reasonable sounding rules that steak out his position as the only permissible one: reductionism. From it's a down hill coast just to use taxonomy (which is part of the genetic fallacy) so show my position comes from the forbidden realm of stuff that he doesn't deem as knowledge.


SG:

This is where we disagree and this is where I keep trying to direct the discussion, but you always redirect. Our disagreement is in the usefulness or validity of metaphysics.

 Meta:

no it's in the hidden assumptions you don't know you have which are metaphsyical. you have an implied metaphysics you don't know you have. you are forbidding the positions that ideology counters for no reason except ideological reasons.

I try to redirect it he says, in other words, if I don't agree with him I'm getting us off track! Are the assumptions me makes Metaphysical? Atheists want us to think metaphysics is just about God and unseen realms and miracles. No Heidegger says metaphysics is grouping of sense data under a single organizing principle that defines reality. That's just what these guys are doing, the scientism does it. Reductionism does it. They only allow as "knowledge" and "reality" that which they can control, that which supports their view. Anything that counts against their view they just dismiss as "beyond the pale, this is "metaphysics" it's not knowledge. That move is totalitarian.

SG:

I hold that understanding the fundamental nature of being is not within the scope of human understanding. The scope of human knowledge only contains propositions concerning concrete conditions that are contingent upon prior concrete conditions, and predictions about future conditions based upon these propositions.

 Meta:

that is no different form saying "I refuse to accept any implications but the one's that legitimate my truth regime. unless you accept my conclusions and the whole ideology that it implies then you can't have truth. I say I can. i dont' have to accept your means of knowing truth. I have a broader base for knowing than you do. you are doing the reductionist thing of cutting off the bits you can't control losing the phenomena.

see what he said? first of all if understanding the fundamental nature of being is not in the scope of human understanding what is science working toward? Why can't it be? What he really means is it's not in the scope of the aspects of knowledge that my ideology. Certainly there are such aspects that pepople feel they have come to undersatnd by various means that aer not acceptable to his view but nonetheless have demonstartion that they do impart some form of knowlege.

Mystical experience for example has a quality called "noetic" which means it imparts knowledge about reality. The proof that it has is the universality of the experience and the effects of having it such that one is transformed into a better life. That would be proof of a better understanding of the fundamental basis of being if the fundamental basis of being is about being transformed. Part and parcel of the mystical experience itself is a deep abiding sense that one has come to understand reality and the fundamental nature of being in a deep intuitive way.

Why can't this be so? All it would mean is that the scientism guys don't have the only from of knowledge. What is so unthinkable about that? Then they say "but it doesn't conform to our rules, it doesn't demonstrate it they way we want it to, which means it simply doesn't doesn't conform to their controls, that position is not all of the truth. They are totalitarian they have to feel that have all truth.

SG:

You keep assuming that I am trying to hold up a different metaphysics than yours, when in fact I am affirming strong agnosticism in reference metaphysical claims in general. Please discuss this.

 Meta:

yes of cousre you are. just don't realize what metaphysics is. you think it's just belief in God. It's not. Science is metaphysics too. you are cutting reality becuase it doesn't' your truth regime. that's metaphysics.

 In many ways he's illustrated classic symptoms of them ideologue. He has the only form of knowledge, just identifying the other guy's position as outside the turf of proper bounderies of knowledge is enough to destroy it.

A Chilling Example of Modern Philoshpical Totalitarianism

Yesterday on a message board an atheist assaulted me with a little essay on philosophy that I find most depressing. It's depressing because it basically confirms all the most alarming and anti-human aspects of modern thought I have accused the New atheists of harboring, it affirms in an unabashed, proud and defiant manner as though they are so obvious that to state them is prove them. Yet what's being is proving is basically that none of us have the right to think apart form affirming the ideology handed down form the atheist hierarchy. This "atheist hierarchy" is basically scinece. Not that I think science is an atheist hierarchy, I think that's what the new atheist think it is. I am leaving the interlocutor's name out, because I don't him to feel put on the spot. I'll just call him:

SG

Existentialism is an unfortunate example of how philosophy gets side tracked by bad ideas. Existentialism essentially destroys any meaningful conception of knowledge and resorts to subjectivism to explain the human experience. It's not any better than the Idealism it wished to criticize, simply because it just offers the other extreme as a solution.

Meta: Right away we have what I consider to be pure evil. The vilification of existentialism, if it is not centered around the pretentious nature of his French exemplars, will probably be base upon the desire to control the thinking of others. Existentialism rebelled against imposed structures that filter our understanding of world for us and force us to think in prescribed ways. The criticism made here asserts that to undersatnd reality by understanding our own perceptions of it is a mistake can only mean that the author feels that the prescribed and contorted version of reality is the only one that counts as knowledge. In other words, he wants someone to do his thinking for him. He continues with several several misconceptions about Kierkegaard:

SG

Kierkegaard describes religion as a matter of individual subjective passion, unmediated by others. The reason he favored Christianity was because he lived in a Christian culture. His argument for faith is, even by his own admission, absurd. He denies all reason in it and treats it as something that can never be understood, through experience, by others, which more or less means that the study of human psychology is completely fruitless. He just says faith is a miracle, so there. That's not philosophy, it's art at its best and lazy thinking at its worst. He was a product of his time, and utilizes the same inaccurate theory of mind that rational idealists and empiricists of the time had to rely upon, which explains why all three philosophies are incredibly problematic.

Meta: First of all, as always pointing out that "he's a Christian because he lives in a Christian culture" is just not meaningful to someone who thinks God is working in all cultures. It's no different than saying "he's only a Christian because that's the tradition that speaks to him." You see the contradiction in his thinking here. He says the kind of thinking that recognizes the power of the individual to perceive reality and not be forced a prescribed way of thinking is invalid when it challenges the atheist fortress of facts, that's scinece and science is the only form of knowledge, because it backs atheism (supposedly) but religious belief is based upon a prescribed set of premises then that's proof that it's not true. Yet by his way of thinking the cultural norm should be seen as truth a priori, the individual's understanding of what's true should be shunned a violation of the relationship between perceptions and knowledge (as he talks about above). Wait, the difference is with religion it's not coming through his prescribed form of knowledge (science) so it must be wrong either way. Very convoluted way of thinking.

Moreover, his understanding of SK is sophomoric. SK did not mean that faith is irrational in the sense of being stupid and unjustified. That's a standard misconception. He's just saying that logic is hypothetical and unless faith is experienced, the presence of God first hand, it's not real. He disparaged Cartesian coordinates on the basis that unless doubt is real then faith is not real (by this I mean his philosophical coordinates). Doubt is not real when it's a philosophical exercise and one doesn't really doubt. Therefore, it is not establishing faith to overcome phony doubt with hypothetical. New atheist dread the subjective. They are scared to death by experience. My guess is they are aware of the power of religious experience to convict and turn people to God. The first thing they have to crush is the validity of experiencing God.

He goes on to give a lot phony talk about the history of philosophy which I don't he understands:

SG:

This theory of mind I'm talking about is the nineteenth century paradigm that sees the mind relating to the environment through sensory perception, so experience is seen as passive and observational. Experience can only be described as participatory action with one's environment, which is something that the rational idealists, empiricists, and existentialists failed to recognize. Empiricism grasped the spirit of the modern age, but it lacked the teeth to actualize it. Rational idealists like Kant and existentialists like Kierkegaard understood empiricism to be destructive to knowledge and went in separate directions, the former relying on a transcendental realm of Being that is responsible for absolute truth to restore knowledge and the latter retreating into subjectivism in the personal sphere.

Meta:"Experience can only be described as participatory action with one's environment," I think if I put my mind to it I could describe experience in other ways. What he's really doing there is setting up a the need to actively control things as the basis for knowledge. Anything that doesn't imposes an ideology of atheism is not knowledge. The only proper knowledge is the imposition of control. Defining experimentally based philosophy as a passive reception of sense data is a mistake in understanding the nature of experience. That does not mean, however, the only alternative is the impossition of a pre coincided view.Now to undersand his comments fairly we should probaly think of what he is saying as an active hands-on search for what's out there rather than the imposition of control. Yet what he's prescribing is control because it assumes a set of percipience steps that the only valid steps and screening out of all else that is not part of ht steps (hence the dread of subjective experience). I can relate the notion of knowledge as an active search but why must it be limited to his active search and other those of others? Why just scinece and not all forms of knowledge? Why must it always be active search why can't it be a dialectics where passive gathering of sense data and informed watchful reception is combined with active searching in a global way rather than a prescribed way?

SG:

All of these notions, by today's standards, ought to be considered silly.

Meta:In other words, "all of these notions" existentialism, Phenomenology, experience, individuals thinking for themselves perhaps? Very silly.

SG:

All deny, implicitly, the role of intelligent practice in acquiring knowledge. Sensory perception is merely a stimulus to action, it is not knowledge. Knowledge results from the intelligent modification of habits in relation to environmental stimuli. Knowing is not a matter of passively observing reality, it is a manner of interacting with it... probing it, controlling it, etc.

Meta:Probing it hu? Seriously, this statement confirms all my worst fears. It's a frank admission that it's talking about control. The future belongs to us! How about this definition, knowledge results form "intelligent modification of habits in relation to stimuli " In ohter words knowledge is not about knowing things Perish the thoguht, who would ever think that? Knowledge is about knowing what i want you to know. It's about being trained to look at the world the way we want you to see it. But of course we should just accept that it's all meant for he best, those wonderful science wouldn't do anything wrong would they? They weren't any scientists developing racial scinece for Hitler were there? It's ok to erase the ability of the individual to think for himself, and to decliar everything opposed to out ideology as "non-knowledge." That's just that philosophy stuff that can't get us in any trouble.


SG

This understanding of mind, which is scientifically current, offers a solution to the major criticism of empiricism. The need for transcendental realm of Being in order to have knowledge of the world is gone, which was only needed when the thought was that experience was atomized instead of unified through the very necessities of life.

Meta:What did he just say now? He said the current understanding of mind, which what? According to most new atheist the current understanding of min is that there is none. That mind is just an illusion or a side effect (if it's anything at all) brought on by brain chemistry and it means nothing. So in other words the idea we can erase the mind and thinking of ourselves as deterministic robots is solution to the problem of knowledge. Of cousre it is. There's no problem of knowledge if you dont' seek to know anything. After all his definition of knowledge leaves out the idea that knowledge is about knowing things. Of course he asserts hat transcendental stuff is just an old fashioned for things we don't have any more because scinece has replaced the need. That need was born of pretending that truth is somewhere out there and we have to seek it in ways that are not prescribed by the ideology. So course we course we don't need that now because we have the ideology. Because the ideology frees us form needing it the potential reality of it just goes away. There is no reality in transcendent realm because we we don't need it with the ideology telling us what to think. Yet the worse is still to come:

SG

The absolute subjectivity of human experience disappears because knowledge exists as real interactions... one can judge whether their actions are ones informed by knowledge or not.

Meta:

Subjectivity disappeared? Our qualia and sense data are no longer subjective? We cut that off an let it go away. It's not there we don't have to think about it. I can see how we can ignore the subjective and pretend that all becomes objective. Yet how do we get your experience of it into my head? you can dictate that I must think as you do but you cannot dictate that I experience what you expedience. my experience is still mind. I still perceive the world though my own perceptions and not yours. Now matter how ardently you seek to pretend that all now share the same perceptions we do not. Subjectivity can't ever go away. That's just the epistemological fallacy. you can't get outside your own perceptions to check them and you can't make them become those of others just by trying to impose the same ideas upon the thinking of others. The subjectivity of human experience disappears. What extreme arrogance and nonsense. We don't all start having the same experiences just becuase one imposes a party line.

SG:

While there is still room for authenticity in this view, the notion of it in the existentialist view is overblown.

Meta: Room for authenticity where? Where can there be authenticity when subjectivity is gone? There can only be authenticity if we accept that we have different view points and different sets of perceptions. But we he just said subjectivity is gone. After all, like the transcendent, if we don't need it anymore it must go away.

SG:

Much of what existentialists refer to as "authentic" is merely a product of culture as opposed to something really authentic to that particular individual. It is true that each individual has his own unique impulses, but how he acts on them is largely a product of the given social environment. Kierkegaard, for instance, decided that Christianity was authentic to him, when in reality it was a product of the habits and customs of his culture.

Meta: So in other words there's still some authenticity but only the bit that agrees with the party line. The bit that doesn't is "merely product of culture." There's that contradiction again. He's supposed to think that knowledge is imposing an active view point where everyone has these objective facts that makes them right and they don't need to wonder about things, anything we have to wonder about is not worth keeping around. We reduce knowledge to just the answers that result from the question we can answer our way. There's some authenticity around but not the kind that disagrees with the party line?

web definition of existentialism:

ex·is·ten·tial·ism/ˌegziˈstenCHəˌlizəm/

Noun:

A philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining...

isn't that what's being replaced, the silly idea we don't need anymore? So where's this authenticity going to come from?
part 2 on friday.

Atheism and Froms of Knowledge

To see the world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wild flower;
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour--William Blake.




The other day there was a comment made on the comment section which was filled with childish insults and all sorts of personal crap. The poster said that I don't take my blog seriously because I don't respond to serious challenges. Actually I kicked his ass already in a previous comment section and he never answered those arguments. Instead he came back with some crap about how I fallen into clever little trap that he set. It really just amounted to mumbling a bunch of cryptic and childish insults to him that's some ultra clever trap. When I saw that "you don't take your blog seriously" I said to myself, "self, I take my blog seriously, too seriously to post this garbage and cater to this childish person's need for attention." So even though I had a whole post already done I scrapped it. But the one thing this guy said that I thought deserved a serious answer was "prove that feelings can provide any sort of knowledge." I thought that, even though based upon a misconception, deserves some answer.

The misconception is that when I talk about religious experience or "realizing God" or "feeling of utter dependence" that I'm just talking about "feelings" is ordinary sense like being happy or being sad. That is far form the case. Actually I have said repeatedly that the experience arguments don't turn on the experience themselves. That means it's no the actual "feelings" that make the argument. It's the effects of having had the experience. Before I get back to that I want make a quite but connected and relevant side trip into the issue of the atheist obsession with empirical data. This is really what's at the heart of the issue. Because the atheists have deceived themselves their brain washing of ideology that only facts can provide and knowledge and that their selective and biased reading of the "facts" constitutes a pure and unbiased understanding of "truth" in the world.


A poster on CARM who I think is a pretty good apologist (Chaplin Brad) made a fine post that I think really puts the Atheist fetish for empiricism in its place:


Poster on CARM July, 27, 2009

Chaplin Brad:

Greetings. Got a break in the schedule, so I thougth I would give us all something to chew on for a bit.

What is it, inherent in science, which makes empiricism the only viable explanatory device? Is it somehow obvious in the cosmos that empiricism is exclusive in its ability to comprehend the universe? In othre words... What OBSERVABLE data, phenomena, or laws make this assumption scientifically inevitable?[/SIZE]

If nothing can be brought forward to answer this challenge… as we should all honestly admit that there is nothing… then the assertion that empiricism is exclusively capable of describing the universe is UNSCIENTIFIC, as it is, in and of itself, NOT empirical!

How, then, do we find ourselves arguing over whether or not empiricism is adequate and exclusive, when it isn’t even empirical in it’s own right?

Of course they aren't going to take that lying down.




Quote:

Atheists:

Science provides a POSSIBLE, yet ALSO unverifiable explanation for the physical universe. Is THAT what you mean by "works"?
You say that as if there is some other method that gets us verifiable explanations. I'd like to hear what it is.

The first atheist comment to him I find extremely interesting:

Atheist:

It should be obvious that science works. You're reading this on a computer, aren't you? Do you think computer engineers meditated or prayed or studied ancient religious texts to find out how semiconductors and electric circuits work? Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, we needed experiments to gain the necessary knowledge?

The thing that interests me so much about that is that when I argue that religious experience works because the transformative power it gives our lives is exactly the point of religion, the atheists say "working is not a sing of being true." Yet here this atheists is telling us that it is. Let's just take quite note of the fact that these results, gadgets and inventions, computers, electrical things, this is the atheist benchmark of truth; you have to accept hat science because you are reading this on a computer. That just proves that science supplys all truth. But wait how is that analogous to questions like "where did the universe come from, why is it here?" "where did man come from?" "Is there a purpose to life?" "Is There a God?" There's no analogous basis between the invention of products that people buy to make life more convenient and belief in God. The God sort of question is on a totally different plane than is the invention of windows vista. These are fundamentally different kinds of questions. Questions about organizing information systems electronically do not require basic existential apprehension of the universe or an understanding of the basis of reality. Computers assume one's epistemology is in place. All of science assumes epistemology is taken for granted. But science doesn't answer any epistemological questions, it only raises them. Science cannot answer any fundamental questions about how we know what we know. God is not given in sense data. We can't step outside of being or outside of our own perceptions to check them. So we have to go around the sense data.

Brad answers again:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaplain Brad View Post

I don't need an ALTERNATIVE... I propose an ADDITION. Personal experience is also a viable determinant of truth for the individual: after all, that really is all we have anyway (empiricism not personally experienced is indeterminant as well.)

The same atheist says:

Apparently, you don't know what empiricism means. You need to look it up in the dictionary, methinks.

Actually the atheist doesn't know what empiricism means. It's a philosophical term.It's adapted from philosophy to scinece and it means personally observed data. From the Greek Epistemic, or epistome meaning "to experience."


This is just indicative of the atheist ignorance. They think they have the market cornered on truth. They think they have this fool proof thing, science, that tell all there is to know and all that's worth knowing and all you have to do stick to "facts" and reduce anything you can't answer down to where it's basically nothing, then you never have any challenges to your world view. But to carry out this program they have to brain wash themselves into accepting an Orwellian approach to knowledge and live in a fantasy world telling themselves that they are totally unbiased and totally all knowing. They adopt this totalizing view point that is basically circular reasoning.

Now we come back to "feelings." what they are calling "feelings" are actually one of the other methods of knowing once you come to the end of what scientific, empirical and factual knowledge can tell you. Their ideology does not accept additions. It cannot compete. It must be the one and only view and it must kill out all other view points. It must do this because if admits any other kind of view then the reductionist thing is blown wide open. If that happens they have to let God in.

Religious experience is not about "feelings" in the conventional sense. It's not about being happy or being sad. The arguments I made do not turn on the sensation of God's presence they turn on the effects. Just like the guy above says "you are using a computer. you must accept that science works. So you must accept that it's true." There's nothing in science that rules out God. that's bedside the point. He just said "working is a standard of truth." So, God works, therefore, we know God is real. The long term positive effects are the pay off to religion. That's working, religion works, God works! That feelings of some kind (although much deeper than just "being happy") are a side effect but they are not the main point.

When Schleiermacher speaks of "the feeling of utter dependence" he doesn't mean "O I feel so dependent! How can I do anything God telling me??" He doesn't mean "feeling" in the sense of "I am so happy." He's talking about an intuitive sense, he's talking about a sense of consciousness. He even uses a synonym, "God consciousness" instead of "feeling." So it's not an emotive sensation but an intuitive one, a phenomenological apprehension. When I say "phenomenological" I mean (in the sense that Heidegger extracted from Schleiermacher) the sense in which one allows the sense data of one's perceptions to suggest the categories of reason without burying the data under preconceived notions. The reductionists, the atheists, the scientismists file it all away int he preconceive compartments and pigeon holes of their circular reasoning and their ideology.

There is a long tradition in human knowledge that deals with feelings. The ignorance of the modernist who asks the question is astounding. The concept of religious affections did not start with Schleiermacher, although he was a major theorize of their meaning. Jonnathan Edwards embarked upon a similar path and he took his ques from the Platonic as did Schleiermacher. The notion that religious affections reveal to us the co-determinate of God in our experiences come right out Plato's myth of the cave. The Platonic theory of knowledge is at work in these assumptions, no less in mine. Of course mine is an Augustinian form of Platonism; the forms are in the mind of God. So the Augustinian version of Platonic knowledge is what god puts in us as images of him. God creates man to be a mirror of himself. So we are God finder tools. We are like spiritual giger counters. We start to click when we get near God. That clicking is the long term positive effects of God's presence upon our lives.

In my notion of "realizing God" I am not talking about feelings. I'm talking about a phenomenological apprehension. It's an understanding of one's self and one's place in the world in relation to the rest of being. Its' a realization that being contains within itself as aspect that is not mundane, that transcends our understanding and that is based upon love. The root assumption of this realization is mystical experience, and all the assumptions that take us back to the Platonic. If God exists and if he made us to commune with him then he made us to detect his presence. This is exactly what we see and it is born out by the long term positive effects; religion works. Religion does what it's supposed to do. It identifies the problem with being human (the human problematic) and it resolves it by mediation of an ultimate transformative experience. That is exactly what religion is meant to do.



This is not meant to be an all consuming system as is the scientism of the reductionists. It is not totalizing. It's open ended, it's the true form of free thought. The atheist reveal their true nature as fascists who are not free thinkers in their abhorrence of anything not of the ideology. Knowledge must be global. It can't extract or eliminate any method of reasoning. God arguments depend upon scientific data, some depend upon pure logic and nothing more, some depend upon experience and reasoned extrapolation, some depend upon everything. The is a multiplicity in God arguments. No one making God arguments is reducing the world to one ideology as are the atheists.