Cris said:
No, it was a typing error. Should have read indistinguishable from delusion.
Not if you know why you believe one thing and not another. Like CS Lewis said, "Nonsense remains nonsense even if we talk it about God". But considering your beliefs I can understand why it must be indistinguishable for you.
The requirement for a super being capable of creating universes and with unlimited power is neither simpler nor more credible than ANY more mundane natural speculation.
The initial belief in God says nothing about who or what God is - it might be a purely intuitive realization at the time. An encounter with the numinous is
evidently not an encounter with the mundane, so explaining it as an encounter with the mundane would be the more strained explanation.
Like the fact that billions of people over several millennia believed the world was flat because it seemed reasonable. Your suggestion is standard logical fallacy. Truth is in no way determined by how many people believe something.
That's quite correct - truth is truth where the majority or the minority believes it. If you look carefully, you'll see I did not make an argument from popularity, as I did not say it was
true because Israel believed what they did. My question was about how you explain their belief, whether it is true or not. I'm not so naive to think I'm right because I share their beliefs. Judaism has been a minority religion for its entire history, yet I believe their God is true, not the majority of gods.
There is a reasonable perspective from which someone can believe the earth (the ground beneath their feet)
is flat, but you seem to say there is
no perspective from which God's existence may be reasonably believed.
But you’re the one claiming it isn’t a delusion. How do you know without any form of independent evidence? Again it is significantly more credible to accept the far simpler natural explanation of delusion than the super being fantasy of your claim.
That's the thing. You claim it is a fantasy while at the same to you say you make no claims; you define my claim
in terms of yours and expect me to provide proof that satisfies those terms. You seem unable to consider any evidence to the contrary, simultaneously dismissing all evidence and claiming none is or has been provided. If you claim the evidence is invalid, it's up to you to substantiate it.
I've told you the problems that should be expected with belief in God - things that have to be considered when
looking for any evidence - that in a greater sense all of creation may be evidence for God if He
is its Creator, and because the evidence is everywhere it might seem to be nowhere... and in the most basic sense there can
be no "independent" evidence, since there is always an observer or observers involved, whom you can simply doubt if you are so inclined. For better or worse, those are the boundaries within which any productive discussion must take place, and it would be unreasonable to expect evidence that won't be limited by them.
In this case, I don’t think so. The choice is simple understandable natural delusion versus a super being capable of creating……..etc. This is not a matter of marginal degree but many orders of magnitude for something with absolutely no precedent.
Again, if He exists, God would
by nature be without precedent, anywhere and
every time - He would remain a unique being no matter how many times He is encountered, and it would remain a unique encounter for any human being. And any such encounter with Him would be distinguishable from a natural delusion
for its uniqueness. Like I said, such an experience would not be initially perceived as "a super being capable of creating" through any theological/intellectual process, but
simply as "God". Because of his uniqueness, his unquestionable separation from mere nature, He would
naturally be perceived as "God" - an unfathomable, extremely complex and consistent
reality - rather than an unfathomable, extremely complex and consistent part of creation, that they would imaginatively call "God" and worship... an ignorant belief that "better explanation" (presumably by less naive minds) would in retrospect expose as a delusion.
Contrast this with all other kinds of beliefs that proved to be wrong: the general favourite, unicorns, was never believed to be supernatural. Man eating ants, the gryphons of Scythia, giants, magnetic islands, mermaids, dragons... Santa Claus. Whatever people believed when they took their existence for granted, no matter how great their ignorance of modern science, they were never described as anything outside creation itself, never confused with
God. Even something like the belief that lighting came from the gods wasn't so much a belief about "God" as a belief about
lightning.
Yes I understand and I used to think the same way. But, as mentioned earlier, your belief is factually baseless. You simply appear to feel comfortable with that explanation, but it is nevertheless irrational since there are no facts to support you.
And I maintain it's no more irrational than believing there are other minds outside your own. My belief may be hanging in the same metaphysical "mid-air" as our own existence and our experience of "others", but it is nevertheless based on facts, albeit facts that would challenge strict naturalistic presumptions. If they are true, one would certainly expect them to. I simply don't have the same faith in naturalism's ability to describe all of
reality, just because it's so well suited to describe
nature.
Why would I if there were independent verification?
In other words: objectivity. What do you consider objective or independent? Things attested to by nature, or verified by people, or what?
One doesn’t have to be an object to show that an object exists.
But one has to be able to access it at will. I.e. it should
submit to independent verification. That's fine for everything that's part of or subserviant to nature, but not for something nature, and by implication, mankind, is subserviant to. I would have to be God to prove that God exists for the same reason one has to be part of nature (arguably even a little above it) to prove anything in nature exists (anthropic principle).
You're essentially refusing to believe in God until skeptics also believe in Him, but you dismiss any skeptic who becomes a believer, and believe those who remain unconvinced. Hence my question above.
Not quite. My point is that those who claim the speculations are true cannot show how they can be distinguished from delusion.
On the level you're talking about, how does anyone distinguish
anything from delusion? We simply call our most fundamental assumptions "reality" and proceed from there. The reason faith persists in so many forms despite all "odds" is that it's so fundamental to our thinking. So fundamental in fact that most people would deny having any kind of faith - we simply don't start our everyday thinking processes that far back - or the only "reasonable" belief would have been solipsism (if even that).
But after we
admit our basic assumptions, it's quite simple to distinguish between illusion and reality. One criterium is consistency, which is what you would rely on if you said miracles cannot occur (the uniformity of nature). This is also one of the reasons why we rely on the Bible so heavily as a measurement ("canon") of our faith, and why the Bible relies on itself, and so on. Either way, we both assert it's possible to distinguish between delusion and reality, even if we don't agree on the fundamental assumptions that inform our perceptions.
No. I fully accept that belief in God occurs. Your usual confusing sentences are tying you in knots again. My position is very clear – I find the claims made by theists unbelievable.
But your arguments attempt to go further than that. That you see any religious diversion from your beliefs as "delusion", implies that you claim not to be deluded yourself. Consequently, you are convinced it's only the theist's responsiblity to defend his "claim", while he may be equally convinced that his is the natural explanation for things, and that disbelief requires complex explanations for self-evident events. I'm simplifying, of course, but I hope you will see my point.
This has no meaning, it is not an assertion.
Disbelief in God, obviously. I.e. that skepticism is a more "natural" state, and faith is contrived.
What rationality is being questioned? That is my point, without any evidence in this case rational conclusions cannot be drawn.
Don't you see? Your
point calls their rationality into question.
Clearly they are not rational since there is no evidence to support such things.
How many ways can I say it? You don't
believe the evidence. You said so yourself: "I find the claims made by theists unbelievable".
Jenyar said:
- surely you have a better reason to dismiss [their conclusion of a higher power, of a transcendant order,] than their flailing, diverse and often contradictory attempts to express and come to terms with it?
Another confused sentence. It is unclear what you are saying here.
This applies more to Godless's argument of contradictions, so if you don't use it as a reason, it won't apply to you. My point is that the conclusion that a higher power exists isn't necessarily damaged by inconsistent attempts to formulate it.
We don’t know this is evidence, these are for the moment only claims of evidence. And you are incorrect. You missed the third, and the infinitely more likely natural conclusion – simple delusion.
What might be keeping you from "knowing" that it's evidence is the limits you put on what is
admissable as evidence, or the low regard you have for those most likely to report it (those who believe the evidence to be evidence).
"We can call the attempt to refute theism by displaying the continuity of the belief in God with primitive delusion the method of Anthropological intimidation." -- Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief, ch.2.
What does that mean? What does outside of creation mean? Certainly any claim that is not accompanied by factual support should be appropriately dismissed.
And it
was, in the past just as in the present. But you account for the facts that were admitted from outside a strictly naturalistic view of the universe (that creation, "nature", is all that exists) as the result of delusion. That's why "outside creation" can mean nothing to you, not even theoretically. You don't seem able to consider it.
Well not quite. The issue is that you cannot demonstrate that what you claim as evidence is more believable than the more credible and mundane explanation of simple delusion.
I have no wish to. This is what I referred to earlier when I said it would be unreasonable to expect evidence that isn't limited to the boundary conditions imposed by our own perspective. What I claim as evidence
isn't more believable/unbelievable than mundane explanations, it's
equally believable/unbelievable from a human perspective (which is
always in play).
Whether these people were delusional or not should be judged with the same measure by which you judge your own assumptions about reality. If you're certain you're not delusional, how do you manage to say these people were deluded if they were equally rational, equally able to discern between delusion and reality. And if you say they weren't able to discern, how can you be certain you are able? You're fighting with a double-edged sword.
Again you only have claims of evidence, more appropriately referred to as imaginative speculations or fantasies. But proposing a speculative idea does not constitute evidence or truth. You still need to substantiate your claims before expecting them to be believed. Remember your claims are really quite fantastic and have no precedent so it is quite right that more credible natural explanations would be offered instead.
These claims were not especially "fantastic" for thousands of years - especially Christianity's central thesis about the coming Messiah of a single God is quite bland compared to the beliefs that many religions are/were made up of. It is because of how the world has changed in just the past 200 years that these beliefs have come to seem more imaginative (as people turned to the more concrete aspects of the universe for security). It's typical of this age to expect someone/something else to compensate for any deficiencies, whether it is imagination (cue myth, religion and entertainment), direction (cue politics or spirituality) or love and excitement (cue sex, hedonism and entertainment).
The evidence and their explanations will stay the same - the way any event that occurred or evidence that was given throughout history would remain what it was at the time - no matter
how much our need to be convinced or persuaded by it grows or diminishes over time.
No. You were erroneously trying to create two issues, e.g. (1) belief of existence and (2) belief of non-existence. I have neither, but simply disbelieve yours – the only issue of relevance when discussing your claims.
I understand what you mean, but this is how I see it: "I have neither, but simply disbelieve yours" is the only issue of relevance when discussing my claims. If you profess to have no belief about the existence/non-existence of God, you must have some other reason to disbelieve my claims and the evidence - one that still isn't clear to me.