Dear Theist...

[devogue]

Please deposit evidence for god here.

[Feck]

That would make a great sign on a toilet Dev.

[Fanny]

That would make a great sign on a toilet Dev.

[devogue]

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I'm starting to believe in the Resurrection now.

[hiyymer]

Please deposit evidence for god here.

Please deposit evidence for you here. (not your body. The "you" in your head)

[Azathoth]

The gibberish from the me in my head goes through my fingers and gets posted on ratz. That is evidence enough that it exists for me

[hiyymer]

The gibberish from the me in my head goes through my fingers and gets posted on ratz. That is evidence enough that it exists for me

"It" exists? Or "I" exist? There is no evidence, no scientific causal theory, that what happened was produced by the self-caused agent "you". You is a story created by your brain. Neuroscience has yet to find any little you directing traffic in your brain. People experience God. That's good enough for them. God talks to them and God tells them to love everyone. It's just another self-caused agent, like you; an habitual metaphor created by the brain to represent the irrational innate drives of our biological regulation.

[devogue]

Please deposit evidence for god here.

Why?

Just because.

[devogue]

You is a story created by your brain.

And it is manifested in reality.

Neuroscience has yet to find any little you directing traffic in your brain.

Yet. Big jump to God though, innit?

People experience God.

Or perhaps the illusion of God?

That's good enough for them.

Indeed - fair play to them as long as they don't hurt anyone.

God talks to them and God tells them to love everyone.

Or they think God talks to them and they think God tells them to love everyone.

It's just another self-caused agent, like you; an habitual metaphor created by the brain to represent the irrational innate drives of our biological regulation.

I'm too thick to understand that bit.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

A Deer-Theist? Is that someone who believes Bambi is god?

[charlou]

That would make a great sign on a toilet Dev.

[hiyymer]

You is a story created by your brain.

And it is manifested in reality.

Uh. Can you explain that? Do you mean the "reality" that you experience, or the objective physical reality independent of your experience that you refer to when you assert that God doesn't exist?

Neuroscience has yet to find any little you directing traffic in your brain.

Yet. Big jump to God though, innit?

People experience God.

Or perhaps the illusion of God?

Do you experience you, or perhaps the illusion of you? Science is not an arbiter of what is "illusion". Everything in our experience is "illusion", for it is all a representation created by the brain. The experience of "red" is an illusion. There is no red out there. Every time someone says the traffic light is red, do you go immediately to "well no it's actually not the traffic light that is red. The red is created by our brain as an experience in our mind to help up distinguish a certain wavelength of light" as you speed through the light and get whacked by a car coming in the other direction. If someone experiences God as transparently real, they experience God as transparently real. It is you who are stating that you are color blind and demanding that they be color blind as well.
[/quote]

It's just another self-caused agent, like you; an habitual metaphor created by the brain to represent the irrational innate drives of our biological regulation.

I'm too thick to understand that bit.

If you really want to think of God from a scientific point of view, then "God is an illusion" is a trivial observation. Everything else in our experience is too. The question is what does God represent that is really out there. Why has eons of natural selection produced how the brain creates the illusion in the way that it does. Our experience has to be a functional representation of what's out there, or we wouldn't be here. It doesn't have to be an accurate representation. Functionally, what does the God representation do? Scientifically does it matter whether what the God representation does is good or bad? Does natural selection care whether we replicate by a mechanism of experience that feels good to us, or a mechanism of experience that feels bad to us? God is an illusion and we SHOULD get rid of it is a statement that is totally inside the mechanism and totally unscientific. The idea that anyone would pass it off as "rational" or "scientific" is ludicrous, and only gives science a bad name.

[devogue]

You is a story created by your brain.

And it is manifested in reality.

Uh. Can you explain that? Do you mean the "reality" that you experience, or the objective physical reality independent of your experience that you refer to when you assert that God doesn't exist?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. My keyboard exists. I type. I am manifesting my "story" in reality, "reality" being the wider world outside of my own brain.

Neuroscience has yet to find any little you directing traffic in your brain.

Yet. Big jump to God though, innit?

People experience God.

Or perhaps the illusion of God?

Do you experience you, or perhaps the illusion of you? Science is not an arbiter of what is "illusion". Everything in our experience is "illusion", for it is all a representation created by the brain.

If I am looking at a glass of water my perception may be an "illusion" in the same way that a dragonfly's perception is an "illusion". Our impression of the glass of water as formed by our brains, how the information is processed may be an extremely different, specific illusion within each species, but it doesn't detract from the reality of the glass of water.

The experience of "red" is an illusion. There is no red out there. Every time someone says the traffic light is red, do you go immediately to "well no it's actually not the traffic light that is red. The red is created by our brain as an experience in our mind to help up distinguish a certain wavelength of light" as you speed through the light and get whacked by a car coming in the other direction.

No. "Red" is a real perception - "red" is the name for how our minds decode the information that light with a wavelength of about 700nm has hit our retinas. I suppose the interesting question is why is red "red"? - I don't think we know what qualia are, perhaps we never will, but is it better to say that we don't know, or that God did it?

If someone experiences God as transparently real, they experience God as transparently real. It is you who are stating that you are color blind and demanding that they be color blind as well.

Hang on...everything mentioned so far - cigars, keyboards, glasses of water, light waves - are external objects interpreted and perceived by our brains in certain ways. Our minds react to their existence - the reaction may be illusory, an attempt to make sense as best we can of external objects - but they are our experience of reality. The "God Experience" is not dependent on external reality, ie there isn't an external object that can be described as "godly" - an object that could be experienced by all and universally regarded as empirical evidence (the Bible sure isn't universally regarded as godly). The "God Experience" manifests itself within the individual - it is purely of the mind. To quote one online dictionary:

the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses

...is the definition of imagination. Imaginary...

The crux of this is that "God" cannot be smelt, tasted, touched, heard or seen, so he is not "present to the senses" even in an illusory way. Of course the really important part of the definition above is "not perceived as real" - theists do perceive God as real, but the grounds for a real God are as strong as the grounds for unicorns, demons and angels - they all come from the imagination, within the mind.

It's just another self-caused agent, like you; an habitual metaphor created by the brain to represent the irrational innate drives of our biological regulation.

I'm too thick to understand that bit.

If you really want to think of God from a scientific point of view, then "God is an illusion" is a trivial observation. Everything else in our experience is too.

As I said, even if our senses create illusory perceptions which help us to deal with external objects (reality), those external objects still exist. The God Experience is different. It's an entirely internal matter.

The question is what does God represent that is really out there. Why has eons of natural selection produced how the brain creates the illusion in the way that it does. Our experience has to be a functional representation of what's out there, or we wouldn't be here. It doesn't have to be an accurate representation. Functionally, what does the God representation do? Scientifically does it matter whether what the God representation does is good or bad?

There is no doubt that there is a God illusion (some call it a delusion) and that study of the phenomenon is warranted. Of course, the phenomenon in itself is not evidence for the existence of God.

Does natural selection care whether we replicate by a mechanism of experience that feels good to us, or a mechanism of experience that feels bad to us? God is an illusion and we SHOULD get rid of it is a statement that is totally inside the mechanism and totally unscientific. The idea that anyone would pass it off as "rational" or "scientific" is ludicrous, and only gives science a bad name.

Natural selection "developed" pain as a warning signal against danger and harm for certain life forms. But reproduction is the bottom line for life - so why mix warning signals for danger and harm in to the desirable reproductive experience? Any poor creatures that by some bad wiring did experience that were no doubt filtered out of the gene pool as quickly as possible. I am open to arguments about why it would be to our detriment as a species to get rid of the God illusion, but I do not believe that the selfish, deep-seated, natural human desire for a God can become something real and tangible.

[hiyymer]

Hang on...everything mentioned so far - cigars, keyboards, glasses of water, light waves - are external objects interpreted and perceived by our brains in certain ways. Our minds react to their existence - the reaction may be illusory, an attempt to make sense as best we can of external objects - but they are our experience of reality. The "God Experience" is not dependent on external reality, ie there isn't an external object that can be described as "godly" - an object that could be experienced by all and universally regarded as empirical evidence (the Bible sure isn't universally regarded as godly). The "God Experience" manifests itself within the individual - it is purely of the mind. To quote one online dictionary:

the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses

...is the definition of imagination. Imaginary...

So I guess God is not imaginary, because God IS "perceived as real". Just not by you. It is also present to the senses. It is a feeling. When you feel angry are you sensing something? Is your anger real? There is a chemical state of your body that you feel and label anger. There is a chemical state of the body that people attribute to God. This is in fact the principle argument that God "exists", like your argument that "red" exists even though red has no existence independent of the "perception". (Out there are only molecules and photons bouncing around.)

The argument has been made that God must exist because we know right from wrong. In terms of your definition of "exist" this is exactly right. The only way that we know right from wrong is as a feeling, a sensed bodily emotional state. If you doubt this, read the book "Descartes Error" by the neurologist Antonio Damasio. He also argues that the associations between the representations in your brain and the bodily emotional states that they produce are in some part innate, or hard-wired at birth. Some people hold onto the illusion that all choices in life are resolved by some kind of rational conscious cost/benefit analysis of the incoming representations. Not likely. But that cognitive illusion does obviate the need to be present to the power of the limbic driver over our responses. We can always have reasons after the fact, so we can still avoid the reality that our life decisions are not consciously owned and there is no 'I' to make them.

God is mostly that thing which tells us right from wrong and champions the "right", which is really nothing but our innate "social" drives in conflict with our innate "selfish" drives. It's why God gets blamed for all the groupish things we do with our pecking orders and territoriality (again apparently quite necessary to our replication although unpleasant from our individual perspective). It's all just the kind of agent metaphor that the brain finds comfortable, like Zeus throwing down the lightning bolts, or you manifesting yourself at your keyboard.

When we want to hold onto our illusion of rationality and the conscious control of our agent 'I', then the power of the limbic driver seems too scary to deal with (particularly when manifested as the power of the group over our individual 'I'). It is natural to want to dismiss it all as a delusion.