Answering Austin Cline's "Argument from Religious Experience:Do We Experience God's Existence?"

William James (1842–1910)

Atheist pundit Austin  Cline can often be found pontificating about religion on about.com. He has an article around religious experience as a God argument, [1] his prejudicial dismissal of the argument is tailormade for my new book, The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief, by Joseph Hinman (paperback, soon to be e book available on Amazon) to answer. First I want to clear the way by a knit pick. the phrase "Do we experience God's existence?" is an awkward and odd phrase. It's redundant because the only way we could actually experience God as a reality is if God is real, what we call "existing," thus even though this is a misuse of the term on his part according to Paul Tillich's theology [2] to experience God is to say that God is real and thus the idea that we are experiencing God's existence is just redundant. If we experience God as a reality then God must be real or we are not truly experiencing God's reality. We don't say that we experience the existence of things apart form experiencing those things. I've experienced losing my parents, I don't say 'I have experienced the existence of my parent's deaths.'

Be that as it may Cline opens his argument:

According to the Argument from Religious Experience, people have “religious experiences” — experiences of the supernatural, like heaven or angels or even a god. Because we believe other experiential claims people make — like that they went to the store or own a car — then we should believe these claims as well. It is also argued that when skeptics apply higher standards for claims based on religious experiences than they do for claims based on other experiences, they exhibiting a prejudice against religious claims. This prevents them from understanding and ultimately believing. 

 Here we see a totally inadequate understanding of religious experience. There is no sense here that religious experience is mystical experience or "peak" experience or that it is even a form of consciousnesses. He tries to justify the kind of dismissal tactics atheists use to reduce and mislabel religious experience. He's already demonstrated that he's mislabeling it. The understanding of super nature such that religious experience is "experience of the supernatural" is merely the modern enlightenment misunderstanding of the concept. Super nature is the power of God to raise human nature to a higher level (of consciousness) thus "the supernatural" is mystical experience. See my article "the Empirical Supernatural."[3]

 Cline bases his argument on the work of William James:

William James offers a classic version of this argument in his influential Varieties of Religious Experience. He argues that all normal persons have religious experience and, since experience is the final arbiter of truth, then God — as the object of religious experiences — must be accepted as factually true. James further observes that the religious experiences in question tend to have a profound effect on the lives of people and even whole societies, implying that such effects cannot reasonably be attributed to hallucinations. Instead, it is much more reasonable to believe that a real God is responsible for religious experiences than to attribute the profound effects of those experiences to a mere imaginary being. 

 As profoundly important as James still is in the study of religious experience, and this argument is good in so far as it goes, there are better and more updated versions of the argument. Notice he doesn't  take on William Alston, who is one of the major philosophers of religion of the late twentieth century. Nor does he deal with any of the modern empirical scientific data in favor of religious experience.[4] Cline decides to pick on James as the best example of the argument.

The first problem is in James’ assertion that “all normal people” have “religious experiences.” It is uncertain what exactly he means by this, but it is a much easier assertion to make than to support. If he means experiences of the supernatural — gods, angels, etc. — then he is wrong. If he means something much more vague, like that everyone has experienced awe when contemplating the universe, then he might be right but he isn’t supporting his claim.[5]

 I doubt that James said "normal people" I can't find where he did say it. I notice that Cline doesn't document  it. That could be crucial weather or not he ascribes it to normality. What he actually says is referenced by Wuthnow in his study (this can be seen in my book) where he says there is a continuum in experience that all people (I don't think he says "normal")

As far as the argument itself goes it is perfectly logical. We don't experience things that are not real. We could actually mistake experiences of one thing for another, so that must be answered. We might also have a false experience, that is hallucination or some other trick of the mind. These things are easily disproved in the case of mystical experience. The argument I sustain throughout the Trace of God is designed to answer this argument. The first answer I would give is:

 (1)  that I go to great lengths in my book to show that we habitually use a certain criteria for judging the reality of experience. The studies on religious experience, with the aid of Hood's M scale show us that religious experience of the mystical kind meets this criteria. Thus we must on principle accept it as real and trust it, or doubt our own existences.[6] This arguemnt is made in a simpler way on my lis of God arguments, no. 8 "The Thomas Reid argument," or "Argument from epistemic judgement."[7] The criteria is that we judge experiences real if hey are regular, consistent, shared (inter-subjective) and enable navigation in the world. If other forms of coutner causation are eliminated so that we can be fairly certain that we not expericing falsely logic forces us to conclude that we are experiencing rightly and there is something there to be experinced.

(2) the effects of the experience of are real. I go to great lengths to show (see all of chapter 2) that the outcome of having such experiences is life life transformation, that is a bold dramatic positive long term life changing result. I further argue that long term positive changes consistently are indicative of reality. Pathological states, mental illness and delusion are degenerative, they bring us down and destroy us over time. Nothing false builds us up and is vital too our well being over a long term period. These experiences are transforming over the long term.

(3) At the end of Chapter 7 I present eight tie breakers. The "tie" is conceived of as between brain chemicals as the most likely explanation for the origin of the experience, vs. brain chemistry as merely God's tool for enabling us to experience his presence. That's a stand off it could be either option. The tie breakers tell us it makes much more sense to accept the latter as the most likely possibility.

(4) I also rule out placebo effects in chapter 7. placebo requires that one expect the desired result, but in that chapter I show several ways in which religious experience does not conform to expected norms but often surprises such that it is often unsought, unexpected, a conversion experience, or also it can contradicts cherished doctrines.[8] For some of the studies as much as half the sample received their experiences in childhood. I show that children are not hung up on doctrines so they are not expecting experiences to conform to doctrines. Yet they have these uniform experiences that indicates the experiences are really of  an objective reality.[9]

Cline sticks with his sustained attack against James.In any case his arguments are easy to answer if one knows Jame's  works. My understanding of James is only passing fair. In my book I bring together a much larger body of empirical work which has been done over the last 50 years, armed with this knoweldge it is easy to pick off Cline's bromides. Cline refuses to think past cultural influence  and makes the argument that difference in religious traditions disprove the idea of one reality behind them all. Here's he's trying to play the old atheist divide and conquer game:

The second problem is in the variety of religious experiences: if there is just one God, why is there such wide variety in the reports of religious experiences? Indeed, they are mutually incompatible. They can’t all be true, so at least some must be false. How do we differentiate? What reasons can the religious believer give to accept her reports over the reports made by others? 

 I would argue that the studies on Hood's mysticism scale ("M scale") prove that mystical experience around the world is universally experienced in the same way. They are not conditioned by doctrines, even though they are explained by doctrines and culture that makes them seem different. When the explanation is ignored and the experiences themselves are compared they are the same. That means they have a good reason to assume they are expericing something real, something objectively there (since it's not just a matter of culture of psychology). A more detailed version documented by Hood's M scale studies can be found on The Religious  a priori.[10]

 Cline asserts that there is no criteria that enables us to determine false from true experiences. While I agree that there is no criteria that proves the difference, I have already demonstrated that he's wrong in his assertion:

There are no independent criteria we can use to separate the genuine experiences from false or flawed experiences — not only in the reports of others, but in ourselves. The only criteria which might exist rely upon the validity of some religious system. For example, some argue that a religious experience which does not agree with the Bible is flawed or false — but since this ultimately assumes the truth of what is supposed to be proven, such criteria are unacceptable. 

There is a criteria that we habitually use to assert the reality of experience, we go by that criteria every time: regular, consistent, sheared, navigational. We don't think about it. We dont say to ourselves "I'm going to use that criteria" we just do it. If an experience is anomalous, it's not regular or consistent we assume it's bogus. If we experience things they same way all the time we assume it's normal and its alright. It's only the stuff that stands out as rare or one of a kind that bothers us. If we want confirmation of our view we seek it in others, "is it hot in here to you?" "Did you see that?" If it works we can live by it we assume it's true. Thus we don't stand on the freeway deliberating about Cartesian doubt we get out of the way of oncoming traffic. The studies on religious experience that are discussed in the Trace of God demonstrate that religious experiences fit that criteria thus we should trust them as indicative of reality.[11]

 From there Cline tries to disparage the link between the effects of the experience and an assumption of its truth aptness:

The third problem is in the idea that the profound effects these experiences have is any indicator of the truth. We can grant that people have some sort of experience and we can certainly grant that the experiences have a profound effect; but does this mean we must accept the reported content of these experiences — that they were of a supernatural nature? No. 

 Again he raises the false specter of the hijack version of the supernatural. Real supernatural--the original meaning of the term--referred to mystical experience not to some ookie spookie reality zone that houses all manor of stings that go "bump" in the night. Mystical experience is proved to be real. It is a real phenomena that people have such experiences and those experiences tend to have a certain effect upon the lives of those who have them. The atheists try to turn that phrase "SN" into some kind of badge of dishonor, the fantasy world one dare not believe in. In resorting to that ploy he is dogging the real issue that he himself raised, do these effects of having had such experiences indicate the truth of the object of experience? He says "no" based upon the proviso that it is indicative of the forbidden realm. But if we ask the question in terms of reality and the object of the experience we must say yes.

First of all atheists are inconsistent in that they will argue that the advantage of having an experience is not indicative of truth but then they turn around and affirm this very idea of scinece. Every time I ask atheists how do you know science is true? They always say "because it works, you are using a computer aren't you? Science produced that computer because it works." All hail science! In any case, so saying the affirm the principle that working is related to being true. This is one of my tie breakers in chapter 7. Then Cline dazzels us with more of his fallacious reasoning: "Real experiences that have a profound impact on a person can have completely natural sources without any divine connections."

That just illustrate the atheist misunderstanding of the true concept of SN and the way they use it as a ploy to ward off belief in God by lumping it into the forbidden zone of belief. They make still absurd dichotomy anything natural must lack God and could be the product of evolution. That is an assumption not in evidence. A Gambler getting 100 royal flushes in a row as random chance would be naturalistic but it would not be natural, it would be the greatest of flukes. God created the natural realm and he works in all the time. The assumption atheists make that if it's naturalistic then God can't be in it is absurd. That's why we need the tie breakers, because the naturalistic element of brain chemistry could go either way. It  could be indicative of a Godless origin or it could be God's tool in giving us a sense of his presence.

Yet Cline goes further he makes a foolish assertion that: "Mystical experiences can be reproduced in anyone, both with chemical substances and mechanical equipment. With this being the case, what reason is there to think that other reports actually stem from a supernatural, rather than a natural, cause?" Well if you really want to know:

(1) buy my book and read the end of chapter 7 for the eight tie brakers and you have eight different reasons to assume the answer to that.

(2) The assertion that religious experiences can be reproduced is not proved. There are tons of claims to that effect, but in the book I point out (ala Philosopher John Hick) that those researchers do not have a standard criteria for control in understanding what constitutes religious experience. They do not use the M scale or any other valid scale to determine this. [12] I analyze the Borg study which is hostile to religion and show that their standard is totally unsuited.[13] Because they do not use such criteria they cannot prove that ever produce religious experience. They merely take the presence of cultural icons of religion as indicative of religious experience but there's no sense of consciousness. As I have said dichotomizing bewteen natural and SN is not a valid means of determining God's handiwork since God can work int he natural as easily as he can in the SN. Rather it is God's power to life us up to a higher state of consciousness that is Super nature. The basic state of such consciousness is a matter of fact, regardless of proof about it's origin.

Cline goes on dictonomizing:

If at least some of the alleged religious experiences are wholly natural, how do we separate them from the “truly” supernatural ones? Even if an experience changes the course of a society, that does not testify that the experiences had supernatural origins. At most, it might point to the persuasiveness of the believers or the appeal of the claims. 

 As I said already we do that by buying my book and reading the end of chapter 7 where I list the tie breakers. Then at the end of the article he takes on Swinebrune's argument:

Some, like Richard Swineburne, argue that the degree to which it seems to a person that something has happened should translate into the probability that something has happened. It is true that when people say that it seems to them that a chair is in a room that, therefore, we tend to accept that a chair is in the room. It is not true, however, that every time someone genuinely and seriously believes something, we also accept that whatever they believe is probably true.
We only accept this when it comes to more mundane things which we all have experiences of. When someone says that it seems to them very strongly that an elf is in the room, we do not accept that there is probably an elf in the room, do we?

 I don't argue Swineburne's argument. I've only read it one time. So I wont try to defined it here except to say that the condition of the argument seems to be the extent to which is seem that the person has actually experinced something. We are talking about warrant. If there is a warrant to believe this then there is no logical reason to discount it on face value. That doesn't mean one can't come up with an argument, it does mean the burden of proof is on the sketpic to show that the warrant is invalid and that there is good reason to doubt. Playing dichotomy game and hinting that "O no this leads to the forbidden zone of he SN" is not going to cut it. That is an ideological assumptino that some aspect aspect of reality must be doubted because it is the aspect that it seems to be and and brings too close to God so we must doubt it.

At this point Cline leaves us with the most dubious argument of tall, that failure to obtain mystical experience is a reason to doubt it's validity.

 Even if we accept Swineburne’s argument, we must also accept that when people try to have an experience of a god and fail, that this is good reason to believe that a god probably does not exist. After all, it would be prejudiced to dismiss the experiences of nonbelievers but privilege the experiences of those who already believe.

This argument is open to immediate reversal becasue then one must accept results as indicative of truth. If this is the case then why don't successes reflect that reality of God? The fact that it works has to be understood as truth indicative. Moreover, if results are indicative the fact that the experience is transformative and that being such it fulfills the basic function religion promises to fill in the first place, offers a rational warrant for belief that it is true. I suspect that Cline based his argument upon the arrangements I make because his contains all the basic elements of mine but he didn't bother study how I defend them. Or that may be my own arrogance and conciet.

Either way the Trace of God, my book,  arms the chruch with a power body of scientific data that backs up this and all other experience based arguments. This work injects fiber into the content of experience arguments and no Christian ever need fear the atheists jibes about no facts, no God, atheism has scinece. Atheists have not touched these arguments in five years of battle on CARM. This book serves as a compindium that will enable anyone to defend experience arguments against all commers.

Order The Trace of God On AMAZON in paper back, (soon to be avaible in Hard back and Electronic).

Sources

[1] Austin Cline, "Argument from Religious Experience:Do We Experience God's Existence?" About.com. no date listed. http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsforgod/a/religexperience.htm  accessed 6/27/14

[2] Tillich famously argued that we can' use the term "existence" in relation to God becuase exist is what contingent things do. God is being itself and thus is above the level of mere "existing." see Shaking of the Foundations, by Paul Tillich.

[3] Metacrock, "The Empirical Supernatural," The Religious a priori, no date given.http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-empirical-supernatural.html accessed 6/28/14.

[4] Willam Alston,Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, no page indicated. see also The Trace of God, the entire book is about this huge body of data that has heretofore been neglected by both atheists and theists.

[5] Cline, ibid.

[6] Joseph Hinman, The Trace of God: Rational Warrant for Belief.  Colorado Springs: Grand Viaduct Publishing.2014, see the whole of chapter 2.

[7] Metacrock, "8, on list of God arguments: The Thomas Reid Argument,"  Doxa, website, http://www.doxa.ws/experience/Reid.html  accessed 6/27/14. 

[8]  Hinman,The Trace of God... op cit., 286-296.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Metacrock, "The M Scale and The Universal Nature of Mystical Experience," The Religious a priori, website, http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-m-sacle-and-universal-nature-of.html accessed 6/26/14.

 [11] Hinman, The Trace of God, op.cit, 103-127

 [12] Hinman, Ibid.,262-3, 306.

 [13] Ibid., 309

 

 Order The Trace of God On AMAZON

Is Love Just a Little Feeling from Chrmiclas in Your Head?

 


This is an exchange I had with an atheist on CARM. I don't even remember the context that prompted it, but it brings up two issues that I think are very important. The first one deals with the near universal atheist acceptance of reductionism and how they truncate reality by reducing ideals such as love and justice to mere momentary feelings, which they dis-value as the result of chemicals and nothing more. The second issue deals with a notion I see more and more, the reduction of concepts to the realm of the un-real. Both of these are extremely important issues because they amount to nothing more than gimmicks, yet I see atheists trading on them all the time as ways of disparaging belief.

(1) feelings are bad, they are subjective, according to most atheists, they are only the result of chemicals in the head, they have no further use or value beyond this.

(2) concepts are always unreal, God is a concept, thus God is unreal (this gimmicky "argument" pulled by "Big Thinker" on CARM incessantly. No matter how many times one disproves it he's always bringing it up again.

So in argument with a particular atheist the issue of love came up. Is it a feeling or is there something more important and wider than just the feelings and physical response that go with the notion of "love?" I say there's a concept to it which of course he says means it's not real.

Below I said to him (in blue) "no it's not' meaning "no love is not just a feeling." Love is more than just the racing heart beat and butterfly stomach of momentary infatuation, in fact love is much more than just romantic infatuation; there are different kinds of love but they all revolve around the idea of the will to the good of the other (agope, the highest form of love).

He says it's just a reaction to chemicals firing across the synapse.


Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
no it is not. It's not a feeling at all. It's a concept, the will to the good of the other. The feeling is something that comes with it and reinforces it.

Of course it's a concept. Everything is. But it's not "the will to the good of the other". That's something you have decided to attach to it. And please don't drag out some nonsense like "Oh, so you don't want good things for those you love?"

Meta:

you are reducing it to little butterfly feeling that's not really even the thing itself. Those are the results of love not love itself. It's a concept.

In saying that this is a concept I've added to love, he's also adding something to it. He's assuming that certain physiological responses typify the term "love" which means he's using a concept to designate a stimulus response, and he is no less evoking a conceptual understanding of a set of responses than am I.


Atheist:

The feeling is love - whatever else comes with that (and, of course, that varies wildly from person to person) is not love - it's a consequence of it for that particular person.

The idea doesn't come with the feeling, how could it? the feel is a consequence of the concept. That's like saying feeling good about voting is all there is to democracy.



Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
obviously it would. you can't just have chemicals promoting a feeling and also have that backing up an idea. There is no such thing as innate ideas.

Atheist:

Who said anything about innate ideas? We are talking about an emotion - love. One which is caused by certain chemical reactions in the brain. That feeling existed before we put the label 'love' on it.

The reason I brought up Innate ideas is becuase we are both attacking a term to a set of stimulus responses. He is limited the set to just certain physiological responses that go with romantic or ludic stimuli while I am taking in a large use that has often been made of the limited English term, "love." He's limited the use of the term in order to cut off the wider concept because that would disprove the propagandist notion that love is nothing more than this little narrow range of physical feeling. His view still henges upon the very thing he says mine henges upon, attaching a term to set of feelings.

Innate idea come in to it because for thousands of years people have been using concepts to describes things they feel that are deeper than just this one little set of ideological responses. Al the conceptual talk that goes with the idea of love (such as "will to the good of the other," agope, koinonia and the like) are descriptions of things people feel. If they weren't feelings that refer to a broader conception there would not be such elaboration on this one concept. To say that it's just chemicals is like saying the concepts that go with it must be innate because they too are suggested by the chemicals.

My position is that love is not just a feeling its an emotion. There's more depth to emotion than just a little momentary feeling. He's arguing that if you attack a broader concept to it then you are just making up a bunch of stuff becuase it's not confined this the narrow range. His view just arbitrarily cuts off most of the what had histrionically been used for. This is done for ideological reasons:

No you have reduced the meaning of emotion:

(1) atheist are scared to death of feelings
(2) anything involving feelings must be discredited by atheist
(3) you reduce love to just a feeling because if you did not it would destroy your world view.
(4) you are dogmatically asserting that the feeling is the thing itself and the word is made up to describe the feeling. that's arbitrary.

that is proved by the fact that other languages have different words for different kinds of love. English doesn't' have that. Greeks were highly educated, the Anglo Saxons were barbarian. The Anglo Saxon's stopped with the feeling,the Greek cataloged all the related phenomena.

Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
then you don't have argument against religious experience. so religious experience is a chemically induced feeling about something real. what's the problem?

Atheist

Did you actually read what I wrote? I have no problem at all with religious experience in as much as it is a chemically induced feeling. The problem comes up with someone claims that the cause for that religious experience is external - that is, that it is a chemically induced feeling about something real. That you cannot evidence.

The fact of the feelings in relation to the concepts, and the effect of religious experience upon that process, such that one's life is transformed in valuable ways across the board, is the proof that it has to be external. If not you have to accept that it's innate ideas, which against are supposed to be impossible so that would indicate some higher origin. As a direct result of religoius experiencing the person doing the experiencing senses undifferentiated unity, or an all pervasive sense of love (and in that feeling of "love" there is a grander and broader and deeper correspondence to concepts such as "will to the good of the other" than in any other kind of set of feelings to which we attach the term "love).


The effects found by two of the major studies include:

Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow's Sutdy:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble's study:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

The reason for assuming it's an external cause is that these effects are in direct correlation to a sense of presence that the expericer citified as "God" or "higher power" most of the time. One of the most common effects is that the experience is drawn into religious belief, either first time or a deeper sense of commitment, as a result of the experience. This is all in relation to the correlation bewteen sense of presence and the all pervasive sense of love, which the person experiencing identities with the broader concepts not with just the little truckled set of physiological response.

The atheist gimmick would be to say concepts are about unreal ideas in the mind. Yet concepts are about anything. Everything we think is a concept. I have a concept of the world around me. I have concepts of millions of real things all the time. You hae two things working there, the concept and the referent that it is a concept of. Some referents are only in the mind, like Superman. Some referents are real, like the world around me. All concepts are in relation to their referents. Being a concept in no way means the referent is unreal. So the the referent of the concept of Love includes but is not limited to the little set of physiological feelings, but also the deep and broader senses that are attached to the various words that English reduces to the one word "love."


the Greeks even had about several words for different kinds.


eros--the desire to have sex (simiar to ludos)
koinonia--comradeship
phileo--brotherhood
agope--the will to the good of the other.

All of those are both feelings and concepts. I have a concept of willing the good of the other, but I also feel a sense of the rightness of this. The strong feelings I have for it reinforce the idea that it's right enable me to be committed to it. It's not less just becasue I can put it into words. The words are probable inadequate to give full justice to what is being felt.

If we look though the literature of the world we find vast amounts of evidence for this idea. In Huckleberry Finn when he decides slavery is wrong and feels it deeply enough to say "Ok I'll go to hell then." He's willing to go to hell for the rightness of freeing slaves, and he knows it's true, but he feels it. There the concept is correlated with a physical feeling in connection with it. The feeling backs up the concept. Its' not just an "illusion" brought of my physiology it's concept that he knows is right by the concept of the concept.

We see this reflected all the time in literature around the world, complex idea accompany deep feelings and we call them "emotions." In reducing concepts to feelings and then dis-valuing feelings the atheist reductionists are merely truncating reality and setting up a situation where your world view so automatically privileged and the data that disproves it is lost.

The concept of agope, sometimes translated "charity," although that's inadequate, or "God's love," is not only a Christian concept but had a currency in Greek culture. It is defined by Tillich as the willingness to according the other the basic human dignity due him/her. That requries a complex and compound conceptual referent. Not only does it involve the idea of "good of the other" but also the concept of "human dignity." The reductionist says "you are just sticking a bunch of things on this simple set of physiological responses." Of cousre truncating it in that way takes away the concepts which are felt in themselves. One can have passionate feelings about the good of the other, and about willing the good, about human dignity and according it to people who are being denied it.

I have always sensed that the feelings I feel when responding to something like civil rights workers singing "we shall over come" are must different kind of feeling than a response to the stimulus of a beautiful woman, and I consciously understand that they are and can feel that depth in the feelings at the moment. These are not the same feelings. When thinking of the term "love" in the broader context of agope I clearly sense the connection. There is something in that amalgum of feelings I have about political committment to ideals I care about that I can easily term "love." Che Guevara said Marxism is a strange kind of love, not for gleaming steel factories but for people.

Is Love Just a Little Feeling form Chemicals in The Head?

This is an exchange I had with an atheist on CARM. I don't even remember the context that prompted it, but it brings up two issues that I think are very important. The first one deals with the near universal atheist acceptance of reductionism and how they truncate reality by reducing ideals such as love and justice to mere momentary feelings, which they dis-value as the result of chemicals and nothing more. The second issue deals with a notion I see more and more, the reduction of concepts to the realm of the un-real. Both of these are extremely important issues because they amount to nothing more than gimmicks, yet I see atheists trading on them all the time as ways of disparaging belief.

(1) feelings are bad, they are subjective, according to most atheists, they are only the result of chemicals in the head, they have no further use or value beyond this.

(2) concepts are always unreal, God is a concept, thus God is unreal (this gimmicky "argument" pulled by "Big Thinker" on CARM incessantly. No matter how many times one disproves it he's always bringing it up again.

So in argument with a particular atheist the issue of love came up. Is it a feeling or is there something more important and wider than just the feelings and physical response that go with the notion of "love?" I say there's a concept to it which of course he says means it's not real.

Below I said to him (in blue) "no it's not' meaning "no love is not just a feeling." Love is more than just the racing heart beat and butterfly stomach of momentary infatuation, in fact love is much more than just romantic infatuation; there are different kinds of love but they all revolve around the idea of the will to the good of the other (agope, the highest form of love).

He says it's just a reaction to chemicals firing across the synapse.



Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
no it is not. It's not a feeling at all. It's a concept, the will to the good of the other. The feeling is something that comes with it and reinforces it.

Of course it's a concept. Everything is. But it's not "the will to the good of the other". That's something you have decided to attach to it. And please don't drag out some nonsense like "Oh, so you don't want good things for those you love?"

Meta:

you are reducing it to little butterfly feeling that's not really even the thing itself. Those are the results of love not love itself. It's a concept.

In saying that this is a concept I've added to love, he's also adding something to it. He's assuming that certain physiological responses typify the term "love" which means he's using a concept to designate a stimulus response, and he is no less evoking a conceptual understanding of a set of responses than am I.


Atheist:

The feeling is love - whatever else comes with that (and, of course, that varies wildly from person to person) is not love - it's a consequence of it for that particular person.

The idea doesn't come with the feeling, how could it? the feel is a consequence of the concept. That's like saying feeling good about voting is all there is to democracy.



Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
obviously it would. you can't just have chemicals promoting a feeling and also have that backing up an idea. There is no such thing as innate ideas.

Atheist:

Who said anything about innate ideas? We are talking about an emotion - love. One which is caused by certain chemical reactions in the brain. That feeling existed before we put the label 'love' on it.

The reason I brought up Innate ideas is becuase we are both attacking a term to a set of stimulus responses. He is limited the set to just certain physiological responses that go with romantic or ludic stimuli while I am taking in a large use that has often been made of the limited English term, "love." He's limited the use of the term in order to cut off the wider concept because that would disprove the propagandist notion that love is nothing more than this little narrow range of physical feeling. His view still henges upon the very thing he says mine henges upon, attaching a term to set of feelings.

Innate idea come in to it because for thousands of years people have been using concepts to describes things they feel that are deeper than just this one little set of ideological responses. Al the conceptual talk that goes with the idea of love (such as "will to the good of the other," agope, koinonia and the like) are descriptions of things people feel. If they weren't feelings that refer to a broader conception there would not be such elaboration on this one concept. To say that it's just chemicals is like saying the concepts that go with it must be innate because they too are suggested by the chemicals.

My position is that love is not just a feeling its an emotion. There's more depth to emotion than just a little momentary feeling. He's arguing that if you attack a broader concept to it then you are just making up a bunch of stuff becuase it's not confined this the narrow range. His view just arbitrarily cuts off most of the what had histrionically been used for. This is done for ideological reasons:

No you have reduced the meaning of emotion:

(1) atheist are scared to death of feelings
(2) anything involving feelings must be discredited by atheist
(3) you reduce love to just a feeling because if you did not it would destroy your world view.
(4) you are dogmatically asserting that the feeling is the thing itself and the word is made up to describe the feeling. that's arbitrary.

that is proved by the fact that other languages have different words for different kinds of love. English doesn't' have that. Greeks were highly educated, the Anglo Saxons were barbarian. The Anglo Saxon's stopped with the feeling,the Greek cataloged all the related phenomena.

Quote Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
then you don't have argument against religious experience. so religious experience is a chemically induced feeling about something real. what's the problem?

Atheist

Did you actually read what I wrote? I have no problem at all with religious experience in as much as it is a chemically induced feeling. The problem comes up with someone claims that the cause for that religious experience is external - that is, that it is a chemically induced feeling about something real. That you cannot evidence.

The fact of the feelings in relation to the concepts, and the effect of religious experience upon that process, such that one's life is transformed in valuable ways across the board, is the proof that it has to be external. If not you have to accept that it's innate ideas, which against are supposed to be impossible so that would indicate some higher origin. As a direct result of religoius experiencing the person doing the experiencing senses undifferentiated unity, or an all pervasive sense of love (and in that feeling of "love" there is a grander and broader and deeper correspondence to concepts such as "will to the good of the other" than in any other kind of set of feelings to which we attach the term "love).


The effects found by two of the major studies include:

Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow's Sutdy:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble's study:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

The reason for assuming it's an external cause is that these effects are in direct correlation to a sense of presence that the expericer citified as "God" or "higher power" most of the time. One of the most common effects is that the experience is drawn into religious belief, either first time or a deeper sense of commitment, as a result of the experience. This is all in relation to the correlation bewteen sense of presence and the all pervasive sense of love, which the person experiencing identities with the broader concepts not with just the little truckled set of physiological response.

The atheist gimmick would be to say concepts are about unreal ideas in the mind. Yet concepts are about anything. Everything we think is a concept. I have a concept of the world around me. I have concepts of millions of real things all the time. You hae two things working there, the concept and the referent that it is a concept of. Some referents are only in the mind, like Superman. Some referents are real, like the world around me. All concepts are in relation to their referents. Being a concept in no way means the referent is unreal. So the the referent of the concept of Love includes but is not limited to the little set of physiological feelings, but also the deep and broader senses that are attached to the various words that English reduces to the one word "love."


the Greeks even had about several words for different kinds.


eros--the desire to have sex (simiar to ludos)
koinonia--comradeship
phileo--brotherhood
agope--the will to the good of the other.

All of those are both feelings and concepts. I have a concept of willing the good of the other, but I also feel a sense of the rightness of this. The strong feelings I have for it reinforce the idea that it's right enable me to be committed to it. It's not less just becasue I can put it into words. The words are probable inadequate to give full justice to what is being felt.

If we look though the literature of the world we find vast amounts of evidence for this idea. In Huckleberry Finn when he decides slavery is wrong and feels it deeply enough to say "Ok I'll go to hell then." He's willing to go to hell for the rightness of freeing slaves, and he knows it's true, but he feels it. There the concept is correlated with a physical feeling in connection with it. The feeling backs up the concept. Its' not just an "illusion" brought of my physiology it's concept that he knows is right by the concept of the concept.

We see this reflected all the time in literature around the world, complex idea accompany deep feelings and we call them "emotions." In reducing concepts to feelings and then dis-valuing feelings the atheist reductionists are merely truncating reality and setting up a situation where your world view so automatically privileged and the data that disproves it is lost.

The concept of agope, sometimes translated "charity," although that's inadequate, or "God's love," is not only a Christian concept but had a currency in Greek culture. It is defined by Tillich as the willingness to according the other the basic human dignity due him/her. That requries a complex and compound conceptual referent. Not only does it involve the idea of "good of the other" but also the concept of "human dignity." The reductionist says "you are just sticking a bunch of things on this simple set of physiological responses." Of cousre truncating it in that way takes away the concepts which are felt in themselves. One can have passionate feelings about the good of the other, and about willing the good, about human dignity and according it to people who are being denied it.

I have always sensed that the feelings I feel when responding to something like civil rights workers singing "we shall over come" are must different kind of feeling than a response to the stimulus of a beautiful woman, and I consciously understand that they are and can feel that depth in the feelings at the moment. These are not the same feelings. When thinking of the term "love" in the broader context of agope I clearly sense the connection. There is something in that amalgum of feelings I have about political committment to ideals I care about that I can easily term "love." Che Guevara said Marxism is a strange kind of love, not for gleaming steel factories but for people.

Brap Gronk 3

Brap Gronk said..Part 3 of 3 (hopefully):

Meta: "Religious evolved out of the human contact with the sense of the numinous. . . . Mystical experince at the root of all religions"

Brap: I have read your links in the past where you discuss the studies about mystical experiences and their documented transformations. The reason this atheist doesn’t view that evidence as a rational reason to believe in God is that the cause of the mystical experiences themselves is too easily explained by the current state of knowledge about neuropsychology, cognitive sciences, etc.

 That is total absolute bull shit. I've demonstrated over and over again that it is not the case! That's the usual atheist tendency to say "Ok if one littel tiny connection is made tot he natural realm then the the whole thing is explained naturally. Here's an analogy to what's going on there. That's like if you argue with a young earth guy and shows conclusively that one fossil is really much younger than it's supposed to be, they says "see that proves the whole age of the earth is off and it's really only 10,000 years old." Then he doesn't' listen to your answer and goes off for the next 40 years telling people he's proved that the earth is only 10,000 years old. That's exactly what you and all other atheists are doing. Its' become an easy mantra for dismissing one of the most powerful arguments for belief that has ever been. People should be coming to God in droves if they understood the research, but it's easy to muddle and easy to dismiss since people are not concerned with details and not careful with facts and couple of buzz words like "naturalistic" can through off years of research for no reason.

Brap:They have natural explanations, in other words. (See Valerie Tarico’s work) 

 Wrong there are several problems with that.

(1) no research, not Tarico or anyone who claims to have evoked religious experience by manipulating the brain has actually  used the M scale (invented by Ralph Hood Jr. University of Tennessee Chattanooga) (except the Grifiths study of Johns Hopkins, I will deal with that in a moment).

 That means they can't prove they did evoke mystical experience because they can't demonstrate what it is. The M scale is the most valid measurement scale because it has been validated in the field cross culturally many times. Without that there is no proof that mystical experience can be evoked by brain chemistry or stimulating parts of the brain.

(2) Grifiths said that his study does not disprove divine presence in mystical experience.

(3)  Andrew Newberg, one of the pioneers in research on the genetic basis for religious experience tells us that the brain is constructed such that if God spoke to us he would have to use brain chemistry. So the fact that we find a link form Religious experience to brain chemistry no more proves it's only naturalistic than does the fact that we have ears. If God wishes to speak to Moses he must gives Moses ears, and if he wishes us to feel his presence he has to go through brain chemistry. God himself made us that way (if God made us) so we should not find it odd that there is a connection, it doesn't mean that much.

(4) There is no research that links the naturalistic processes to thee outcomes.

Brap:I think you had a blog post a few months ago arguing that it doesn’t matter if there are natural explanations for these mystical experiences or the sense of the numinous. If I’m getting the gist of that right, it takes me back to a question I asked earlier in this comment, which is how can we tell the difference between a God that interacts with our world in a way that doesn’t violate the laws of nature and a God that does not exist? 

 I answered that question too and you have not responded to it. The result of having the experience cannot be explained. The qulia that make up the experience itself are linked to brain chemistry and manipulation of the brain, but what is not linked to anything is the link to the result; the life transforming effects. There is no external cause that can be linked to long term positive effects of such a dramatic nature, and all the organic processes are degenerative. There is nothing that can explain how it is that having this experience changes your life so.

There's also no way to explain how such experiences would give such noetic qualities. So there is an explanatory gap.

Meta: "Creation myths as we know them are late inventions." 

Brap: Is “late” anything after the Pentateuch was written? 

 Pentateuch guy did not invent creation myth. That was written and redacted in the form we have it in the inter-testamental period, very recent. But even it's invention in oral form which pre-dates Summer is relatively recent in anthropological and world history terms. Anything after the last great ice age is "recent." Humans were sensing the numinous and burying their dead with herbs and flowers and celebrations of after life 30,000 years ago.

Meta: "Creation myths as we know them are mythology and mythology is about archetypes . . . It's about the psyche not about history." 

Brap: The creation myth in Genesis does seem fairly important for Christianity, though, because that is the reason, as I understand it, humans are burdened with original sin.

 The point is, besides the fact that you used creation myth as supposedly religious explanation for scientific fact and I said it's theological tenet not an explainable for the world, the major point is that humans have been sensing the numinous since before they were actually humans (Neanderthal 60,000 years ago give evidence o burying the dead prepared for afterlife and decorating knives and other implements--which indicates magical ideas). So religion has been a part of humanity from the inception of modern humans. Creation myths are relatively recent (within 5000 years). they are not the reason anyone believes and they aer not designed to explain stuff like rain. But of cousre the question "where did we come from" is in there but it had more metaphysical import than it did scientific curiosity. Religion is not must primitive failed scinece. It's an existential response to existential questions.

Brap:I have asked this question on other blogs, but never have gotten an answer: Without a literal Adam and Eve, how are humans burdened with original sin? 

 We are not. That's why I don't bleieve in a literal Adam and Eve. Not all Christians believe in orignial sin. That's a Catholic (Augustinian) doctrine and it's been distorted anyway. Augustine just said it's the basic capacity to sin. Its' not surplus guilt. Original sin dos not say we are born guilty of sin. I think the question you really want to ask is "how is the capacity of sin transmitted to humanity if there is no one original sinner that led humanity down into the ditch, right?"

Answer: There does not have to be a one original sin that leads people down. The basic tendency of being sentient and being self transcendent that leads to anxiety and causes people to sin. It happens to everyone just like getting sexual urges and wanting to master-bait when you reach a certain level of development happens to everyone. I'm not equate sex with sin, but it's that kind of thing, you come of ge, Its lose of innocence.

Brap: 7. I have read “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan, and I can’t think of anything in that book I disagree with.

Meta: "I have not read that book, but I'd be willing to bet that he got it wrong. If what Brap is saying is an accurate reflection I would assume that Sagan makes the same fallacious assumptions that Brap does." 

Brap: I would estimate that less than 5% of the book deals directly with religion, and Sagan is much gentler on religion than Dawkins or Hitchens would be while heavily sedated. I would love to see a review of that book by a person of faith, to see if they disagree with any sections not dealing with religion, and why. 

I have no doubt that he is not raving like Dawkins and Hitchens.  I like Sagan's personality, he came across as a nice guy. I enjoyed Cosmos on PBS. Maybe I'll review the book if I get a chance to get it. On the other hand, the things I'm calling "fallacies" are ideas form the nineteenth century that even benign liberals get wrong, such as the assumption that religion was invented to explain nature.



Brap:As I recall there are sections where he does focus on the mythological aspects of religion, so you wouldn’t like those parts.

Depends upon what he says

Meta: "We need to move beyond the simplistic understanding of the world that seeks to set "scientifically proved" "facts" as the foundation of the world view off against all other forms of knowledge. . . . Thus we need to shed this delimiting crutch that only "scientific proof" counts as a valid reason to believe something and move toward a global understanding of knowledge in general."

Brap: “The Demon-Haunted World” clearly spells out the dangers of believing in things with insufficient proof, providing examples throughout history and in modern times. It’s easy to come away from that book both scared for and disappointed in humanity. Groupthink is a powerful and potentially dangerous phenomenon, and nobody and no group is immune from it, including scientists and atheists.

 Sagan's assertions about religion are not backed by real facts or studies. I'm sure he never new anything about the research I've done. A lot of it was not done until after he died. you are basing the case on fiction. I don't need a diatribe against religion to be disappointed in human history. I can understand (I say "can" I share) disappointment of fellow political liberals in the nature of fundamentalism especially when it comes to the politics of the era.

Belief in God is not based upon lack of evidence. Atheists join my parade of shame of things humans do that disappoint me when it comes to discussion of reasons for bleief in God.

I have a ton of evidence for God. the inability of atheists to evaluate it fairly or rationally is shocking and disheartening. The atheist ability to fairly evaluate evidence for God is like the ability of people in the deep south in the 1950s to fairly evaluate the notion of integration. God is speaking to our hearts. Atheists are people who closet heir hearts to the truth God is speaking because they seek to protect little pet sins. The junkie analogy would fit there. It's like trying to get junkies to rationally decide to quite drugs.

Answering Baggini's Short Intro to Atheism

Julian Baggini

There's a website called Arguing with Atheism. I know who does the sit but for some reason he doesn't include his name so I don't know if he wants the public to know. I'll honor what I imagine to be his wish for anonymity and just refer to the site itself. The point of the site is to carefully examine the very best sources of atheist thinking and to investigate the "better side" of atheism. The site takes this "better side" of atheism (the non hate group side, the real thinking core of the atheist community) and seeks to really understand their point of view; in so doing to test one's own belief.

The first project toward this end is a review and summary of a book by Julian Baggini called




Julian Baggini (editor of The Philospher Magazine)

Author Atheism a very short introduction.
Atheism a Very Short Introduction. Baggini is the editor of The Philosopher Magazine.


Baggini talks about his personal background, his childhood, his road to his current outlook. While he agrees with the usual self definitions of most atheists, the lack of belief in God, Baggini holds out for more than just the negation of a set of beliefs. This is will be important because Christianity is not just a set of beliefs, its not just adding information to the universe. But this phrase is used by the website to describe what Baggini tags onto the conventional definition of atheism:

But atheism is not merely or even principally a series of negations or denials; rather, it is a positive view of what the world consists of and the nature of human beings. At the core of atheism lies a commitment to naturalism, broadly construed as the assertion that “only the objects of the physical sciences-physics, chemistry and biology-exist.” (4) Atheists, however, are not necessarily committed to strong forms of physicalism such as eliminative materialism. The upshot of this description is that the evidence for atheism, according to Baggini, is not primarily counterevidence to the existence of God, but rather consists of the positive evidence for naturalism, broadly construed. This is an important move because it enables him to sidestep the interminable debates in philosophy of religion over the problem of evil, etc. and instead focus on the evidence for naturalism provided primarily by the sciences.

My first reaction to this novel approach is to wonder why reductionists, which Baggini clearly is, make such a big thing out of the little nub of being that's left after they go through tearing away everything in life that is worth living for, then declare the wonder and joy of this nub of a universe that's left. It's a ridiculous outlook. They lose the phenomena of all view points that don't cow tow to their ideology of reduction and then declare their view is the only one of substance because it's the only one standing after they get through stripping away the evdience for any other view. Their approach to hiding the evidence of other views is varied but basically boils down to circular reasoning. Baggini is no exception. The circular reasoning runs like this:

There can't be any evidence for the supernatural because evidence for the supernatural would contradict the ideology and the ideology must be right because science depends upon it. Science is the only form of knowledge, therefore, it has to be protected. Thus any evidence for the supernatural is automatically invalidated and thus must be dismissed.

Now there is no evdience for the supernatural(because any evdience for is automatically wrong since there can't be a supernatural) and that's why the supernatural must be false, therefore, the claims of the supernatural are a priori false. Thus we know there is no supernatural because all the claims for it keep getting dismissed, therefore, there is no evidence for the supernatural.

In Chapter 2 Baggini outlines the positive case for atheism he has in mind. He begins by outlining the components of a persuasive case for any particular point of view: evidence, arguments and rhetoric. The latter, however, can only make the case more persuasive, whether it is reasonable or not, so Baggini focuses on the first two.

Baggini demonstrates this tendency in the very first description of his argument. He sets out criteria whereby one can judge good evdience from bad. The first principle he lays out (this is according the Arguing with Atheism Website)is that anecdotal evdience is not good, evidence but be replicable and public. That is more people who see it the better. The more times it can be repeated the better. That's all find and good, but then it starts getting a little biased. He sets out the example of ice freezing. Of course this is something we all see so its' common, it' also trivial and doesn't have any bearing the question of God. But the image of rock solid science is offered to the reader's mind. What is religious believe contrasted with? The spontaneous combustion of dogs. Yes, dogs, burning up spontaneously.

So evidence that ice freezes at zero degrees centigrade, for example, is strong evidence because it is publicly and universally accessible, whereas the evidence for the spontaneous combustion of dogs is weak because it is anecdotal, that is “it relies upon the testimony of a single person relating one incident.”(13)

Obviously that is pretty anecdotal. So we have this daily event of making ice vs something the vast majority of people live their whole lives and never see. Now for those whose concept of religious experince is the parting of the read sea this may seem like a fair comparison. But there really is a lot more ordinary and available stuff going on God-wise than incendiary K nines.

He could contrast that with mystical experinces, because they are so common some researcher estimate they are had by one in four people. But then he would not be able to set up the premise that supernatural evidence is all anecdotal because mystical experince is demonstrated by 350 or more empirical studies over a four decade period. If you start factoring in studies on religious belief and participation and the effects on health you could have about 2000 studies, and most of them are very good scientific studies. But he would not be able to put up the image that atheists thrive on that "o there's no evidence for the supernatural" not one little bitty piece. Of course if you define the supernatural not as it is in the theology but as atheists want to see, as that which cannot happen because it contradicts reality, then of course there's no evidence for it.

Based on this criterion, Baggini’s contention is that “all the strong evidence tells in favor of atheism, and only weak evidence tells against it.” This is so because, as we saw earlier, in Baggini’s view the evidence for atheism is not merely or even primarily counter-evidence to the existence of God, but rather consists of the evidence for naturalism, broadly construed: “This is only evidence against God’s existence in a negative sense: that is to say, evidence for God’s existence will be found to be lacking and so we will be left with no reason to suppose he exists.” (16)

This move does not strike me as a particularly fair way to evaluate the claims of religious belief.First of all,it is slanted to deny the opportunity for the believer to present best evdience. It practically lays down a guideline if evdience for religious belief doesn't' such it doesn't count as real evdience. This clearly an exercise in begging the question. I will be very interested to see what he trying to analyze as "best evidence." I am so far not impressed because I see no mention of anything that really exists as evidence believers actually use. I suspect that the subtext to his guides are really the idea that science is the only form of knowledge and anything that doesn't count as empirical scientific view point is not admissible as evidence. Clearly this is a move aimed at disposing of the best evidence the believer has before the debate can begin because it compares two things that cannot be compared. God is not given in sense data so the nature of the physical world and sciences ability to discover the workings of the physical world can never be taken as proof against the existence of God. Those are also part of the believer's belief system, I don't know any believers who don't believe in the physical world. Thus he's just crossing categories. He's ruling out the best evdience before the debate starts.

I would term this move as a "trick," and this trick is grossly unfair becasue it's just trying to turn scientists only success (the production of scientific data) into a monopoly for atheist thought and deny the believer any recourse to scientific thought, thus creating the stigma that belief is unscientific. In reality the idea of comparing factual accounts of belief or unbelief to scientific rigor is a huge mistake. Not only do people research according to their biases but science is not a pristine march from ignorance to totally knowledge over the mountains of data. It's a cultural construct. It turns upon paradigm shifts. when the paradigm shifts the whole world turns over all the good little facts from the farmer paradigm become embarrassing old anatomies in the new one. This is why secular minded scientists and atheists have to be skeptical of supernatural effects because their paradigm rules out the supernatural a prori. In other words. it's not the result factual investigation but of ideology.Baggini is hip enough to have read Thomas Kuhn.

He knows that he's just skating over this stuff without even acknowledging it.Because the "cultural constructivist school" has said that science is a social or cultural construct (really the same thing) this has been understood to mean that "science is wrong," or "science doesn't work." He is not saying that Science doesn't work, but he is saying that science is not cumulative progress. The old image of the scientist faithfully stacking one fact upon another, facts patiently gathered from totally objective and therefore totally true observations, is old hat and has to be replaced. Sorry to break the news to the reductionists, but the concept of "progress" is, itself, a cultural construct. There is nothing in nature called "progress." That is a Western notion that comes to us through philosophy and is not strictly speaking, a scientific term. Scientists don't record in their experimental observations "I found the progress in my subject matter." Progress is social and cultural, and it is a relative notion. When we decide we are making progress it is always at the expense of someone elses notion of progress. Due to the nature of paradigm shifts, science does not stack up facts one upon another until x amount of progress is achieved. Science regularly wipes the slate clean and starts over on new paradigms and each new bust of "progress" has to be judged relative to many factors, such as it's social effects.

What then is the positive evidence for naturalism? Baggini uses the example of the nature of persons: the verdict of science is that human beings are mortal animals composed of biological bodies. This is what the atheist’s naturalism would lead her to expect. Any evidence to the contrary, i.e. that points to the existence of a disembodied immortal soul, is weak and anecdotal.

But you see by the nature of this statement, even this is the paraphrase of the guy with the website, the circular reasoning I've already described. He assumes from the outside without presenting any evidence that the believers evidence will be weak and anecdotal. He's also arguing against a straw man version of religious belief as the notion of an Immortal soul in the sense of the ghost in the machine is not indicative of modern Christian theology. This is not what modern Christian thinkers believe, it's an old fashioned verse designed to bring shame to believers. The assertion that the evidence for believe must be wrong and outmoded without knowing what it is is hilarious and I did predict it. The soul is not a Casper the friendly Ghost living inside you. Nor does the Bible tell us that it is. The Bible says that the soul is the life of the believer from the standpoint of the relationship with God. So we do not have souls, we are souls. what might live on after death, if anything, is consciousness, or mind. This is analogous to "spirit" in the Bible. Spirit = mind.

The notion that consciousness is reducible to brain chemistry and nothing that survives exists is totally un-demonstrated and flies in the face of a ton of good scientific evidence. A ton of data supports mind over body. There are basically three arguments:

(1) the hard problem

(2) Top down causality

(3) Veto Power.

There is a movement in property dualism led by David Chalmers, such scientific heavy weights as Penrose are on his side. There is no victory for the brain/mind functionalists yet, far from it. In fact this dichotomy hints at a much larger conceptual frame work that threatens to break open into a total paradigm shift. The handwriting is on the wall for materialism. Major scientific thinkers have already began to see consciousness as other than just some individualistic qualities in each individual person's head caused by brain chemistry and have begun to think of it as something broader, a basic property of nature that we share in, that we exhibit rather than just a side effect of the wiring in our heads.

this is a statement by Peter Russell who was a Cambridge physicists and student of Hawking. I've quoted it on this blog quite recently.

The 'Hard Problem' of Consciousness

The really hard problem-as David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, has said-is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

This paradox-namely, the absolutely undeniable existence of human consciousness set against the complete absence of any satisfactory scientific account for it-suggests to me that something is seriously amiss with the contemporary scientific worldview. For a long time I could not put my finger on exactly what it was. Then suddenly, about four years ago on a flight back to San Francisco, I saw where the error lay.

If consciousness is not some emergent property of life, as Western science supposes, but is instead a primary quality of the cosmos-as fundamental as space, time, and matter, perhaps even more fundamental-then we arrive at a very different picture of reality. As far as our understanding of the material world goes, nothing much changes; but when it comes to our understanding of mind, we are led to a very different worldview indeed. I realized that the hard problem of consciousness was not a problem to be solved so much as the trigger that would, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift."

The continued failure of science to make any appreciable headway into this fundamental problem suggests that, to date, all approaches may be on the wrong track. They are all based on the assumption that consciousness emerges from, or is dependent upon, the physical world of space, time, and matter. In one way or another they are trying to accommodate the anomaly of consciousness within a worldview that is intrinsically materialist. As happened with the medieval astronomers, who kept adding more and more epicycles to explain the anomalous motions of the planets, the underlying assumptions are seldom, if ever, questioned.

I now believe that rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, we should be developing a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental component of reality. The key ingredients for this new paradigm-a "superparadigm"-are already in place. We need not wait for any new discoveries. All we need do is put various pieces of our existing knowledge together, and consider the new picture of reality that emerges.

Consciousness and Reality

Because the word "consciousness" can be used in so many different ways, confusion often arises around statements about its nature. The way I use the word is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness itself-the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the "contents of consciousness." The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to the faculty of consciousness.

We know all the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself. Yet without this faculty there would be no experience of any kind.

The faculty of consciousness is one thing we all share, but what goes on in our consciousness, the content of our consciousness, varies widely. This is our personal reality, the reality we each know and experience. Most of the time, however, we forget that this is just our personal reality and think we are experiencing physical reality directly. We see the ground beneath our feet; we can pick up a rock, and throw it through the air; we feel the heat from a fire, and smell its burning wood. It feels as if we are in direct contact with the world "out there." But this is not so. The colors, textures, smells, and sounds we experience are not really "out there"; they are all images of reality constructed in the mind.

It was this aspect of perception that most caught my attention during my studies of experimental psychology (and amplified by my readings of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant). At that time, scientists were beginning to discover the ways in which the brain pieces together its perception of the world, and I was fascinated by the implications of these discoveries for the way we construct our picture of reality. It was clear that what we perceive and what is actually out there are two different things.

This, I know, runs counter to common sense. Right now you are aware of the pages in front of you, various objects around you, sensations in your own body, and sounds in the air. Even though you may understand that all of this is just your reconstruction of reality, it still seems as if you are having a direct perception of the physical world. And I am not suggesting you should try to see it otherwise. What is important for now is the understanding that all our experience is an image of reality constructed in the mind.

Rosenberg's 'liberal naturalism' [CS:JCS:3.1.77]:

"The question of scientific objectivity becomes more compelling when one considers that doubts about the reductive paradigm are by no means new. William James (1890), Charles Sherrington (1951), Erwin Schrodinger (1944, 1958), Karl Popper and John Eccles (1977)--among others--have insisted that the reductive view is inadequate to describe reality. This is not a fringe group. They are among the most thoughtful and highly honored philosophers and scientists of the past century. How is it that their deeply held and vividly expressed views have been so widely ignored? Is it not that we need to see the world as better organized than the evidence suggests?

"Appropriately, the most ambitious chapter of this section is the final one by Willis Harman. Is the conceptual framework of science sufficiently broad to encompass the phenomenon of consciousness, he asks, or must it be somehow enlarged to fit the facts of mental reality? Attempting an answer, he considers the degree to which science can claim to be objective and to what extent it is influenced by the culture in which it is immersed. Those who disagree might pause to consider the religious perspective from which modern science has emerged.

"There is reason to suppose that the roots of our bias toward determinism lie deeper in our cultural history than many are accustomed to suppose. Indeed, it is possible that this bias may even predate modern scientific methods. In his analysis of thirteenth-century European philosophy, Henry Adams (1904) archly observed: "Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures." One wonders to what extent reductive science has merely replaced Thomas's God with the theory of everything."

The brave atheist physicalist wishes to pretend that his side has total absolute triumph and the silly little religious view point is going "gluge gluge gluge" as it sinks into the sun lite waters of the ocean, but the truth of it is the paradigm shift is already underway. Materialism has vanished. I call my essay "Materialism Vanishes" but it is already gone. Atheists put a happy face on it and call it "phsyicalism" and say it's gotten better, but the truth of it is materialism is gone and it left behind a form of physicalism which incorporates all sorts of idea that just one hundred years ago would have been seen as magical thinking and nonsense. That essay I link to itself offers a wealth of first rate evdience for the supernatural.


Back to the review of Baggini we find more comparisons of non evidence to irrelevant psychical processes of nature that we all agree exist.

Mediums, for example, who claim to be able to communicate with the dead “are unreliable…no medium has ever been able to tell us something that proves beyond reasonable doubt that they are party to information from the ’spirit world’.” (19) Baggini rejects the burden of having to examine each and every possible case of evidence for life after death, because these cases can plausibly be explained by human gullibility and the emotional need to believe in an afterlife. Retreating to the claim that life after death has not been conclusively disproven is not a desirable move either, because many other beliefs which we think are patently absurd are also unfalsifiable.

That just beats the hell out of Christianity. I know so many theolgoians who base their world views on mediums. But notice he refuses to investigate on a case by case basis. I don't care about mediums but this also means that he wont investigate on a case by case basis when it comes to real sure enough God-miracles. That means he's just chucking best evdience without even examining it as I predicted he would. It's just part of that scientific double talk that amounts to circular reasoning; all the cases of claims for supernatural must be wrong because there can't be a supernatural since there's no evidence, we know there's no evdience because we can rule it out without examining it. He says the cases can be explain by human gullibility, but then he's just dumping the while class of evidence without examining it, begging the question that it's all gullibility. How does he know that? Because it violates his ideology so he can just assume so.

The existence (or lack thereof) of life after death contributes to an inductive case for atheistic naturalism: “The evidence of experience is that we live in a world governed by natural laws, that everything that happens in it is explained by natural phenomena.”

What is his assertion based upon? Upon mediums? Mediums can be swept aside without examining their claims, therefore, there's no life after death? This guy is a scientist? How does he know there is no life after death? Of course we are not dealing with his arguments directly, but the website is in capable hands and the one who does the site is very fair minded and I'm sure he's giving Baggini the best possible hearing.

Baggini also offers an argument to the best explanation, contrasting atheism as a worldview with other worldviews. Among the advantages of an atheistic worldview: 1) “It is simple in that it requires us to posit only the existence of the natural world,” whereas “alternatives also require us to posit the existence of an unobserved supernatural world”

I think it would come as a huge shock to most atheists I encounter that atheism is a world view. Most of them relish the arguemnt that its' merely the absence of belief thus freeing it from any responsibility to really explain the world.

2) “the naturalistic worldview…is also more coherent, because it has everything in the universe fitting into one scheme of being. Those who posit a supernatural realm have to explain how this realm and the natural one interact and coexist” 3) “Atheism has great explanatory power when it comes to the existence of divergent religious beliefs”, and so on.

This is an extremely troubling statement because as a world view based upon naturalism and nothing more he's leaving out all sorts of things that even other atheists had the sense to include, but he can't include them unless he's willing to admit that science is not the only form of knowledge. If he does admit that then he has to admit the best evdience of belief, which is philosophical,deductive, and/or phenomenological in nature. What he's leaving out is demonstrably among that which makes life wroth living and yet is naturalistic but inter-subjective and thus opens the door to other form of knowledge that are not naturalistic. I speak of things like Music, art, literature, philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology.

So we can summarize Baggini’s case for atheistic naturalism as follows: naturalism is inductively supported by the (strong) evidence we have for the regularity of the natural world and the fact that many if not all phenomena we observe have natural explanations, and is the best explanation for a variety of phenomena which are puzzling to the theist.

That there is a physical world and it can be studied scientifically is not in question. Therefore, any attempt to compare this to religious belief is mere a chimera. It has nothing to do with a religious view point.

There is a great deal of empriical evidence supporting the supernatural. But of course it depends upon the Peroper Understanding of the Sueprnatural because the atheist's notion of the supernatural as an unseen realm filled with ghosts and demons, angels and major power is the degraded false watered down version that is left in the wake of enlightenment reductionism and Reformation equicicalism. The great psychologist and social scientist Abraham Maslow equated the supernatural with ordinary psychology and he said:

Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it invovles a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? (For more on archetypes see Jesus Chrsit and Mythology page II) The "prematives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation which gave them an integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numenous, 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, fromPeak Experience

--Abrham Maslow

He was not far wrong. Religious experince is an empirical example of the supernatural. It is exactly what the supernatural was suppossed to be according to Mathias Joheph Scheeben (Natural and Grace, 1865) the nature of God elevating human nature to the higher level.This is studied empirically and is demonstrated in 350 empirical studies. Some of the distillation of those studies can be seen on Doxa. There is fine scientific empriical evdience for Miracles at Lourdes but one must go on a case by case basis. This is what's so phony about Baggini's approach, becasue in denying case by case basis he's merely ruling out best evidence. The miracles committee uses strict rules,the committees seat the finest medical experts in Europe and even have skeptics on the committee. Best medical evidence is required and rules are designed to screen out remission.

But there's no point to any of this because the best evdience for belief is not empirical evdience at all but the realization of what what it means to be. For that one must face life holistically. The problem with Baggini's approach, and to the extent that he represents a form of atheism, the problem with atheism itself is that it resists a holistic approach to life. It's a reductionist approach. you can't holistically. This is the problem with the empiricist view, it ultimately destroys all forms of knowledge and reduces life to a dull set of facts that aren't worth knowing. The minute one begins thinking about what life means and what its for, the minute one begins thinking there must be something more than just this dull bombardment of atoms in the void,(I don't mean thinking of God I just mean thinking about art or music or what life exists, or why be alive or what is there to live for) one is transgressing, moving over the life of good scientific evdience into the dreaded no man's land of the horrible "subjective."

Belief in God is a realization of what it means to be. Denial of belief is a rejection of everything life is about and everything worth while about living. The reductionist view is an anti-life view.