Evidence for God

Ruv Draba said:

It's really simple, and it's the flip-side of the argument you've been making...

Objective information is that which remains unchanged when you change the observer to arbitrary but reasonable viewpoints.

What's 'reasonable'? It depends on the purpose of observation. If you don't know why you observe, you may have trouble deciding what's a reasonable viewpoint and therefore you can't decide what's objective.

One description of 'rational' is to know why you do what you do, not to wait for the results to tell you why you did what you did.

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Can we at least agree that you've run aground here? This form of reasoning obviously doesn't work.

And it's not me alone whose been making this argument. This has been the one major elephant in the room for all science and philosophy throughout the 20'th century until today.

You might find "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn interesting? It deals with just this problem within science, and what we can do about it. The book is also the most famous book on the topic...and I should add...among scientists.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0226458083/?tag=absolutewritedm-20

Have any of you god-forsaking atheists taken any decent hallucingens?

Trip a few times and get back to me about objective knowledge and God.

Diana Hignutt said:

Have any of you god-forsaking atheists taken any decent hallucingens?

Trip a few times and get back to me about objective knowledge and God.

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So deliberately frying your brain will show you truth? I'll pass on that one.

Priene said:

So deliberately frying your brain will show you truth? I'll pass on that one.

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I'll take that as a no. There's little evidence that simple hallucingens do any sort of permanent damage to the brain. But, they do open "the doors of perception" as Huxley said. And once you've stepped outside the box of prescribed "objective reality" you never look at it the same. It encourages lateral thinking. Might help some of you folks get over your linear blockages and supernatural beliefs in the God, Science.

DrZoidberg said:

Can we at least agree that you've run aground here? This form of reasoning obviously doesn't work.

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I don't agree, but you're welcome to that position -- though I'd expect someone who believed that to act like that's their position. Refuse all dentistry, say... don't ever go into a three storey building that you hadn't built yourself, or fly, or eat canned foods. If you act like the world is stable and shareable to the extent of trusting your safety to the experience and designs of others, then whatever you tell me, I'll consider you to functionally believe in an objective world. You may not believe the objectivity is perfectly precise (e.g. a building could fall down), but your presence in the building tells me what you think the likelihood of that is.

Diana Hignutt said:

Trip a few times and get back to me about objective knowledge and God.

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There are certainly non-theists and magical skeptics who have experimented with hallucinogens for religious or spiritual purposes, e.g. the Australian entertainer and Jewish non-theist John Safran.

I'm not one of them.

I am however a person with a fairly diverse circle of friends, some of whom have suffered psychosis from the actions of psychoactive drugs.

One bit off the ear of his sister-in-law and lost his wife and daughter, home and job. He exhibits continuing signs of thought disorder.

Another, suffering paranoid hallucinations, ran into heavy traffic and was almost killed. He was prone to outbursts of violence for all the time I knew him.

In my view, people who have no medical, psychiatric or pharmaceutical competence should not advise others to take psychoactive drugs. If you understand why this is, you'll also understand why objective knowledge is so important.

If we believe that the world is entirely subjective, it's only a short hop to imagine that our fantasies and biases are not only legitimate, but authoritative. I think my examples above of fantasies gone mad, illustrate just how dangerous that can be.

Diana Hignutt said:

Have any of you god-forsaking atheists taken any decent hallucingens?

Trip a few times and get back to me about objective knowledge and God.

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I have to agree, I don't believe in god, or all knowing deities of any kind.
But would never argue their existence. I can attribute that in large part to LSD experiences.

I find it troubling that science is trying to figure out the LSD experience. It's something that actually exist, partly man made, thats effects are beyond explanation. I'm all for keeping it that way.

Ruv Draba said:

I am however a person with a fairly diverse circle of friends, some of whom have suffered psychosis from the actions of psychoactive drugs.

One bit off the ear of his sister-in-law and lost his wife and daughter, home and job. He exhibits continuing signs of thought disorder.

Another, suffering paranoid hallucinations, ran into heavy traffic and was almost killed. He was prone to outbursts of violence for all the time I knew him.

In my view, people who have no medical, psychiatric or pharmaceutical competence should not advise others to take psychoactive drugs. If you understand why this is, you'll also understand why objective knowledge is so important..

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Sounds a bit like PCP Phencyclidine, not LSD, mescaline, or mushrooms. I could be wrong, but that certainly would be PCP behavior, I know from first hand experience, not bragging, just liked being mildly handicapped for 10 hours when I was younger. PCP is the best drug for that, also the best for seeing Jesus in person and taking your clothes off.

The LSD experience is much different. It's currently being used to treat cluster headaches, none hallucinagenic form. Standard LSD is being used as an aid to help terminally ill patients cope with dying, thats where the whole god experience comes in. Also being experimented with, by doctors legally in america to possibly treat severe personality disorders. The funny thing is, they have to give it to normal people first to watch the effects.

I'm not encouraging LSD usage. I haven't used it in almost 20 years. And PCP is the most dangerous drug I've ever taken, so thats a just say NO.
But Diana is correct, LSD will forever alter your perception, for the better.

WOW, I know way too much about drugs.

Diana Hignutt said:

I'll take that as a no. There's little evidence that simple hallucingens do any sort of permanent damage to the brain. But, they do open "the doors of perception" as Huxley said. And once you've stepped outside the box of prescribed "objective reality" you never look at it the same. It encourages lateral thinking. Might help some of you folks get over your linear blockages and supernatural beliefs in the God, Science.

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So if we give up objectivity we'll have objective proof? Please explain.

I don't see they ability to tamper with our subjective experiences with pharmeceuticals has to do with things. I would also say that it alters perceptions. Hallucinagens "broaden" your mind much in the same way that biploar disorder "broadens" mood. It isn't always a good thing.

I agree it's not always a good thing, but it's definitely relevant to a evidence of god subject.

Hallucinagens have been used by more cultures that i would dare try and count to find evidence of their god or gods. It's still pretty widely practiced by shamin in the Americas north and south.

bigb said:

But Diana is correct, LSD will forever alter your perception, for the better.

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Bigb, this forum is not a coffee-shop chat with friends you know well. It's published internationally and permanently to a wide audience potentially including minors and people with psychiatric disorders. In some jurisdictions such advocacy may make you liable to anyone who takes your advice and suffers ill effects. In other jurisdictions, exhortation to criminal activity may itself be a crime. By the time you're an internationally-famous bestselling author, your fans will be digging this stuff out of Google cache.

So all things considered, is this a terribly responsible claim?

WOW, I know way too much about drugs.

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Nah... I have friends who'd have written six pages on the chemical composition and cerebrochemical effects of the six most popular psychoactives at the first excuse (probably back on p19 by now), and do it from memory. One such friend is now dead, but the point is, there's a lot of passion about drugs, as there is about sport, and religion, and politics... but passion doesn't give us the right to ignore the impacts of our advocacy. (You're also wrong about what my friends had taken in each case.)

It was originally Di's throwaway line to link drugs and God to atheistic 'ignorance', and I thought it was dismissive and ill-conceived. If someone wants to put forward a serious, well-informed discussion about drugs and how people use them to explore divinity and spirituality, and what they perceive and how that works with shared-world knowledge, this current superficial arm-waving and opinionated advocacy isn't it.

I remember hearing about a Tibetan Lama who could ingest vast amounts of LSD without suffering the notorious effects of the drug. He reportedly did this to impress his students.

If true, it speaks volumes over the man's mental control. I wish I could provide a source, but it's a story I heard as a child, and Google does not produce a similar legend.

Bartholomew said:

I remember hearing about a Tibetan Lama who could ingest vast amounts of LCD without suffering the notorious effects of the drug. He reportedly did this to impress his students.

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I doubt I could ingest much LCD at all... I couldn't even eat a small plasma screen.

Ruv Draba said:

I doubt I could ingest much LCD at all... I couldn't even eat a small plasma screen.

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MY HANDS. I TYPE WITH GIANT HAMHOCKS IN THEM.

Ruv Draba said:

I don't agree, but you're welcome to that position -- though I'd expect someone who believed that to act like that's their position. Refuse all dentistry, say... don't ever go into a three storey building that you hadn't built yourself, or fly, or eat canned foods. If you act like the world is stable and shareable to the extent of trusting your safety to the experience and designs of others, then whatever you tell me, I'll consider you to functionally believe in an objective world. You may not believe the objectivity is perfectly precise (e.g. a building could fall down), but your presence in the building tells me what you think the likelihood of that is.

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That's a false dichotomy. The choices aren't "use your theory of epistemology" or "reject science as an authority".

I still claim that I'm batting for team science, while you're at best undermining scientific authority.

Applying your system, if all we need to establish "objective knowledge" is that a bunch of our friends corroborate our observations. I think you're leaving walk over to the religious fundamentalists. Witness psychology is another field you may want to look into. People habitually "see" whatever it is they already believe. There's hard scientific data to back that up. So in your system whoever has the strongest faith, will be the ones who define what is "objective knowledge". And you can't beat the fundies in faith, can you? That's not what you had in mind, is it?

And don't come and claim it isn't a problem for science as well. There's no shortage of, in hind-sight dumb ass, scientific theories that have been accepted by the great majority of scientists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

In my view, the strength of science is that it is dependable. We can trust science. Why can we trust science? Because within the scientific method, it has an inbuilt honesty system. Claims that overstate what science can and can't say or do, will get torn apart sooner or later through the peer-review system. The fact that the theories of Phrenology or the Aether have been thrown out, isn't a evidence of a weakness of science. It's evidence of the strength of science. But it's also irrefutable evidence that "objective knowledge" is just something we can dream of. Wishful thinking does not a bridge build.

DrZoidberg said:

And don't come and claim it isn't a problem for science as well. There's no shortage of, in hind-sight dumb ass, scientific theories that have been accepted by the wide majority of scientists.

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Dr Z, I'm sorry but if you don't understand the difference between theory and observation, or after all my examples of double blind experiments and independent corroboration, if you think I was advocating for a 'bunch of friends' to confirm any old thought, I can't see any point in continuing to discuss this with you.

Ruv Draba said:

Dr Z, I'm sorry but if you don't understand the difference between theory and observation, or after all my examples of double blind experiments and independent corroboration, if you think I was advocating for a 'bunch of friends' to confirm any old thought, I can't see any point in continuing.

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As I told you before. I'm pretty firmly in camp science. I think I have an excellent grasp of the terminology. What I am less sure of is if you know what you are advocating. All I can see is you swerving all over the map with no clear direction. If what you're saying is vague, nobody will know what you mean. No offence, but I think that's the problem you need to address.

I understood Ruv.

Dear God, I'm the Ruv Whisperer!

No, Bart. That means you speak Parseltongue.

But, yes, I thought his meaning was quite clear.

Diana Hignutt said:

We also will never know if the red one person sees is the same color another person sees--for all we know they might being seeing green but green is their red.

It all remains subjective. Objective knowledge is a convenient fallacy with some uses. That is all.

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My red and green are very, very different from most people's. I have a rare and severe form of R/G colorblindness. If everyone had vastly different reds or greens, we'd see differences in opinion the way I occasionally encounter them.

For instance, I discovered a few years ago that stop signs are not black. I know from the people around me that most vegetables and plants are not blue or yellow - but I still occasionally slip up when I describe them. I generally warn my beta readers to correct me if I make some stupid comment about color, and I generally avoid directly refering to a color at all.

The phrases "the red of night" and "the black of night" carry the same meanings for me.

Bartholomew said:

I understood Ruv.

Dear God, I'm the Ruv Whisperer!

No, Bart. That means you speak Parseltongue.

But, yes, I thought his meaning was quite clear.

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That's not the point. It's the conclusions he then draws that worry me.

Ruv Draba said:

Bigb, this forum is not a coffee-shop chat with friends you know well. It's published internationally and permanently to a wide audience potentially including minors and people with psychiatric disorders. In some jurisdictions such advocacy may make you liable to anyone who takes your advice and suffers ill effects. In other jurisdictions, exhortation to criminal activity may itself be a crime. By the time you're an internationally-famous bestselling author, your fans will be digging this stuff out of Google cache.

So all things considered, is this a terribly responsible claim?.

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If any of that were true, a good portion of songwriters, authors, forum posters, movie makers and TV show makers, would all be in jail, or in court 24 hours a day.

The current culture uses such substances very irresponsibly.
That doesn't really negate the fact of other cultures use of Hallucinagens to experience evidence of their god, or gods.

In my defence, I asked a question and made a statement regarding the use of hallucigens and their impact of the perception of objective reality and God. If someone takes that as advice to use such substances, that's on them.*

Further, yes, some hallucigens have been known to bring out pre-existing mental illnesses. But, what should the proper reaction be when discovering that everything you've been told and thought about objective reality is bullshit (though useful and convenient bullshit, admittedly)?

It's not my job nor my intention to discredit the amazing things science has given us, but it is my job to point out that it ain't the only game in town.

*Legal disclaimer: Diana Hignutt does not necessarily endorse the use or disuse of any drugs.

bigb said:

I'm not encouraging LSD usage. I haven't used it in almost 20 years. And PCP is the most dangerous drug I've ever taken, so thats a just say NO. .

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My previously posted disclaimer, incase some one missed it.

Good, I think we're both safe now...

Gotta love this debate, team science thinks team god needs a lawyer.