Evidence for God

Team science just think that taking power psychoactive drugs to try and find God is possibly not a brilliant idea.

I'm not condoning it, myself. But I would point out it worked for Alan Watts and Ram Dass.

Diana Hignutt said:

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

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Actually, I don't much care about your liability; I just thought you would (and it seems I was right). What I care about personally is the impact of bad advice on vulnerable people. That was a part that from your commentary, you and Bigb may have missed.

There's a values question hiding under here, and I think it's been hiding there all along: scientists hate giving people bad advice. That's really why they go through all the ceremony of clinical controls, double blind testing, peer reviews. When you made the implicit jump from 'good for me' to 'good for everyone', without ever asking why you believe that, it qualified you to cheer for team science, Diana, but not to bat for them.

But perhaps underneath the values question is a mind-function question, and it's this...

One of the first things you have to do as a scientist is clobber your emotions: literally, set them aside and let them play no part in your thinking. It doesn't mean that you don't have feelings, but it does mean you keep them locked in a cupboard, and any time they bust out you have to stop what you're doing and put them back.

That's not something everyone can do, or wants to. But some are quite good at it -- indeed they may have learned to do it before they learned to be scientists. Such people often flock to science as a job, since it rewards them for doing what they naturally do anyway.

There's no emotional validation of scientific truth. Scientists quickly learn that the more emotion there is in their thinking, the less likely their thought is to be validated. So their thinking becomes very detached from themselves... it's thought that one scientist can put down and another can pick up almost seamlessly.

Fiction-writers and poets can't really do that. If I half-write a novel and hand it over, another author can complete it but they won't complete the thing I started. They'll simply be writing their own thing over the top of my thing.

In science though, that's exactly what will happen. One scientist will start an investigation, and another will complete it. There's very little of an individual scientist in the science. If Einstein hadn't proposed Special Relativity, Neils Bohr probably would have, and it'd have been exactly the same formula. Einstein himself acknowledged this. When Newton was developing calculus, so was Leibnitz. Different notation, but exactly the same ideas.

If we set our emotions aside (and if you can't do this, you'll have to take it on faith that some folk can), then all we have in common is shared observations. We quickly learn which observations are shareable and which are not (e.g. Bartholomew's colour-blindness). The shareable ones aren't simply practical... they exist independently of our own lives. This is why one scientist can die with her work incomplete, and another can pick up the same work twenty years later.

We live in an objective world, and the world itself tells us its truths -- not from how we feel, but from what we see when our feelings are locked in a cupboard.

you keep them locked in a cupboard, and any time they bust out you have to stop what you're doing and put them back.

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How do you do that?



AMC

I would like to take this time to apologize. I didn't realize this was the scientific evidence of god thread.

I've always taken personal experience very seriously, and found it to be credible in most aspects of my life including but not limited too, business, friendships, social situations, and whether or not to worship.

Now that I know that the evidence presented here needs to be peer reviewed, have no emotional attachment or enthusiasm, double blind tested and done in a cotrolled environment I realize that I am not qualified to be post here.

I don't bat for team god or team science, and as I said in my first post on the subject, I don't believe in any god, of any kind. This doesn't make me a scientist or an athiest, just some random guy who hasn't seen anything to convince him otherwise.

If i would have known the scientific requirements for my post to be considered, responsible and of value, I would have never bothered to talk about my LSD experience. After all it's only some random guys personal experince and of no scientific value.

Maybe an evidence of god thread will start where personal experince will considered valueble.

Since science and religion haven't given us anything of value to the existence of god, personal experience may actually be useful.

Why are God and Science on different teams, again? God is an entity, and Science is a method of untangling experiences into measurable data.

I have no idea, cause I'm not a team player.

But love your anteater pic (if that is an anteater, love it either way)

AMCrenshaw said:

How do you do that?

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I assume that's a serious question, AMC. Here's a serious, if personal answer.

If we feel too good or too happy or too right or too sure or too cranky or too knowledgable, or too certain of something that hasn't been independently tested, or too smug, or too important, or desperate to find an answer, or too bored or too... anything... I think we have to stop and ask 'what am I overlooking?' 'how wrong might I be right now?' 'how might I find evidence of that?' Then we hunt relentlessly until we find evidence of an error or an oversight and/or some explanation as to why our emotions were ruling us.

Doing this doesn't mean that one doesn't get emotional at inopportune times, or that one won't hold to untenable or ill-justified positions. But it helps ensure that if we could notice it and deal with it on the basis of self-knowledge and past experience, we have opportunity to do so. Speaking personally, stopping whenever my emotions felt too strong (once I decided to do that) made a huge difference to the quality of my scientific output.

bigb said:

Maybe an evidence of god thread will start where personal experince will considered valueble.

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I think that personal stories are valuable, Bigb. I've previously respected Diana's and would certainly respect yours.

I haven't seen your story yet though. Just advice and sweeping opinion.

Bartholomew said:

Why are God and Science on different teams, again? God is an entity, and Science is a method of untangling experiences into measurable data.

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Team mislabelling. 'Team science' may be a fair label, but I don't believe that the other team is 'team god' or that they're a single team, or that the real 'team god' (i.e. all its members) are entirely incompatible with science, or that most consider taking psychotropics to be anything but dangerous (you'd think that if there were a god who endorsed psychotropics, more of the faithful would take them.)

Ruv Draba said:

or that most consider taking psychotropics to be anything but dangerous (you'd think that if there were a god who endorsed psychotropics, more of the faithful would take them.)

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I must be really late to this barbaque, looked through several pages and haven't found this statement even implied.

Ruv,
I have no personal stories, I could make some up but it's hard enough to write fiction.
i do have experience, which, tend to be more reliable than stories, and it's simple. I don't believe in god, but because of an experience with a psychotropic don't believe an argument exist for either side.

I don't mean any disrespect, but the Buddha figure out objective and subjective thinking 2500 years ago.

I'm pretty cash and carry, so I thought evidence of god was just that.

I must be really late to this barbaque, looked through several pages and haven't found this statement even implied.

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It's an implication of Diana's suggestion that if atheists took drugs, they'd discover God. My thinking is that if that were true, or even if most religious people thought it were true, they'd be licking a lot more toads and blotting paper than they presently are.

It also goes to a multi-page discussion about what evidence is.

My position is that evidence is not just any experience we have. It's the repeatable experiences that anyone can have. Especially, its those experiences viewed skeptically (i.e. without pre-conviction).

I have an etymological reason for this position, to do with what its original Latin root 'evidentia' actually means, which is consistent with the way it's used in science and business and courtrooms these days...

evidence (n.) c.1300, "appearance from which inferences may be drawn," from Fr. évidence, from L.L. evidentia "proof," originally "distinction," from L. evidentem (see evident). Meaning "ground for belief" is from late 14c., that of "obviousness" is 1660s. Legal senses are from c.1500, when it began to oust witness. As a verb, from c.1600. Related: Evidenced; evidencing.

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(You can see that the meaning has slipped in common usage from 'supporting proof' to 'grounds for belief', which are quite different things. I think the word has lost value somewhat because of that.)

I also have some epistomological reasons associated with what I think knowledge and truth ought to mean, but I won't pursue those here.

I realise that people also make judgements based on unportable personal experiences, and experiences interpreted with pre-conviction. I do this myself at times too, but I don't consider it to be evidence, though I realise that a lot of people do.

So why does it matter?

One reason I think it matters is the ethics of giving advice to others. Let's say that I'm a priest. I may have religious reasons to believe that you shouldn't undertake a certain medical procedure. Those reasons may be based on my holy scriptures, my personal pre-convictions and some personal revelations I had while undertaking a long, prayer-filled religious fast.

Unfortunately, none of that is evidence under my definition. The scriptures aren't because evidence is experiences viewed skeptically. My personal pre-convictions aren't -- they simply influence how I see my own experiences. Lastly, any hallucinations I had while fasting aren't even portable experiences, so I can't use those either. So ethically, if that's all I've got then I shouldn't try and advise you.

But if I've been reading independent clinical trials (and understood the studies), or I found a well-documented story about a person who recently undertook the medical procedure and suffered adverse reactions, then I could offer you advice based on that -- though I'd have to be careful to only claim what the evidence can support.

My point is: ethical advice hands you evidence you can verify, and well-qualified independent expertise, and lets you make your own mind up. Unethical advice claims authority it doesn't have, swaps personal convictions, scriptural references and subjective experiences for evidence and generally messes with your head.

I don't mean any disrespect, but the Buddha figure out objective and subjective thinking 2500 years ago.

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In fairness, the Buddha drew on a lot of quite advanced Hindu and Jainist thinking that preceded him. I also think that in the end, he did what Plato did -- decided where he wanted to go, and then found a preferred road to get there. I think he does a fairly elegant job of connecting reason to compassion, but I don't think he got in the first word on the topic of evidence, or gets the last.

He did however have a sensible suggestion about drugs. From the fifth precept of the Pancasilani:

Buddha on drugs said:

I undertake the training rule to abstain from fermented drink that causes heedlessness.

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I can't argue with that at all.

Ruv Draba said:

It's an implication of Diana's suggestion that if atheists took drugs, they'd discover God. My thinking is that if that were true, or even if most religious people thought it were true, they'd be licking a lot more toads and blotting paper than they presently are.

I'm not sure about discovering god with drugs, there would be many religious junkies running around if that were true.

I will say, and the majority of people who have experimented with LSD would agree, that it's a permanent perception altering experience. Is that good or bad? Well were back to the definition of good and bad, and, neither exist in concrete. Things are, how we perceive them.
What's the experience thats so altering(which I would have ask out of curiosity if only for entertainment) You experience Creation. How, i have no clue, and that's what science is working on right now, because there is no other substance known to man that is capable of such an experience. Scientist believe there to be several possible uses for the drug, in it's psychotropic form and non psychotropic form.

In fairness, the Buddha drew on a lot of quite advanced Hindu and Jainist thinking that preceded him. I also think that in the end, he did what Plato did -- decided where he wanted to go, and then found a preferred road to get there. I think he does a fairly elegant job of connecting reason to compassion, but I don't think he got in the first word on the topic of evidence, or gets the last.

Unless I was always to dumb to understand everybody else I read, Plato included, Buddha put it in terms that the average person could understand and apply to everyday life. He found the connection between meditation and present time awareness, was he the first or last, no, but he did want that info available for all who were interested.

He did however have a sensible suggestion about drugs. From the fifth precept of the Pancasilani:

I can't argue with that at all.

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It's been twenty years since I've had anything stronger than an expresso(of which I'm a junky)

I don't claim to be a scientist.

But, I do claim to be an explorer of reality, and have been for the majority of my life. I have peeked around the edges of what you (Ruv and company) laughingly call objective reality. It would be cute if reality were really that simple.

It is the vanity of science to claim that no one can know anything unless science stamps its seal of approval. I reject this argument.

Drugs can break the barriers to a larger awareness of the nature of reality. I do not recommend such a course of action to anyone, and certainly not minors or imbeciles. You decide if you fit those category.

The hubris from team science here is amusing. And, sure, team God, is a disparate group (fuck, some people in team God think I'm the fucking anti-christ--I'm not, really). So?

Diana Hignutt said:

It is the vanity of science to claim that no one can know anything unless science stamps its seal of approval. I reject this argument.

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I've never said that, but I have said that if it's not evidence it's unreliable, and that if it's not shareable and viewed skeptically then it's not evidence.

team God, is a disparate group [..] So?

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So if they're pulling in disparate directions, how are they a team?

I can accept that science might be a team. Its team motto might be something like 'the shared truth, whatever it is'. That team certainly doesn't reject religious members, mystical members, and members who believe in magic. It doesn't even reject people who disagree with the established wisdom. But it does require them to play the same way -- with shareable experiences viewed skeptically. If you don't want to play the same way, they kick you out.

But what would be the shared motto of 'team god'? They have so little in common, and they pull in such different directions...

Maybe it's 'team God: nobody's right but me'.

I'd be careful about tossing around words like hubris and vanity if that's the team I thought I played for.

So, Team God has descended patronising the heathens and implying unproveable but profound superiority.

Heh, based on that I guess I'll worship Edward.

In my humble opinion, this thread was more useful w/out teams.



AMC

Endorsed, Mr Crenshaw.

Don't knock imbeciles on drugs, much like reality TV, just more entertaining.

Definitely not a team player here.

I am curious who would coach team God?

ColoradoGuy said:

We're all on Team Humanity.

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O I don't know Earth Creature

ColoradoGuy said:

We're all on Team Humanity.

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Endorsed again... (Or at least, we're all in the same boat...)

bigb said:

I will say, and the majority of people who have experimented with LSD would agree, that it's a permanent perception altering experience. Is that good or bad? Well were back to the definition of good and bad, and, neither exist in concrete.

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My readings support that LSD can have long-term effects on perception. What I don't agree with is what that perception means (because it's wildly diverse), or that 'good' is arbitrary. We can tell ourselves stories about 'good', but we can also assess independently whether a person is functional, and whether that function is enhanced or diminished. There is plenty of evidence to show people suffering dysfunction on psychotropics including LSD, including long-term dysfunction, including dysfunction that the sufferer regrets.

Diana Hignutt said:

Drugs can break the barriers to a larger awareness of the nature of reality. I do not recommend such a course of action to anyone, and certainly not minors or imbeciles. You decide if you fit those category.

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The brain is the organ that untangles our experiences into data we can interpret. When you mess with its chemistry, it untangles the data differently.

This is an effect on the person who took the drugs, not the universe. And there's no evidence to support that the effects of mind-altering drugs are linked to any sorts of meta-physical phenomena.

That's not hubris; it's logical deduction.

That's not to say that such an experience can have no value. It probably can.

But so can a full round of REM sleep.

so, em, there's no evidence then?


or perhaps the thread title should change?

still, beats writin...