Dear Theist...

[hiyymer]

I have no problem
I've no reason to doubt that they experience or think they experience something but what we experience in our brains are not evidence for the existence of anything affecting us from beyond ourselves.
Ever hear of the "god helmet"? Some scientist guy can blast a part of your brain with magnetic pulses turning off the neurons and creating a sensation in the brain of the volunteer that they feel like there is a "presence" in the room with them. Can their experience be used as evidence that there is a person in the room with them? Or does the fact that this result is predictable show that the brain can be mistaken and fooled quite easily by itself?

It doesn't matter whether there is a person in the room. It's not a real person. But it is an agent representation of something that is real, like red is a metaphor for a wavelength of light. Everything in our experience is a representation in one way or another, because it is created by our brain. It's not what's really out there. I think Freud was the first to opine that God is an agent representation for some of our innate drives. The self-caused agent is a time honored metaphor of the brain. There are self-caused agents all over the place in your experience, but most of them are correlated to a physical body. That doesn't make them real. Nothing out there in scientific what really is is self-caused. Agency is a brain-created metaphor for caused biological processes where intentionality and free will is imputed where none exists. The biological process of groupishness and mutual cooperation can be represented in the same way. Go to church. What are they talking about? "God wants us to love each other". What's not obvious about that. What is being experienced as God has a real physically corollary. It represents some thing and can be experienced transparently as some thing.

I've lost you somewhere along the way. Are you making an argument for god actually existing or a curious quirk of our experience which people call "God" existing?
I have no problem with the latter but if you try to use an experience of something existing to say that it exists outside and beyond the experience I don't agree. I can experience "love" but does that mean that "love" is something which permeates the universe as an entity?

I we use the inductively arrived at best explanation provisional theory called science as the arbiter of what really exists, then...
I am saying that God is a representation in our experience which, like everything we experience as transparently real, stands for something that really exists. "God wants us to love each other" is a story in our experience that stands for something that really exists. "God actually physically created human beings 10,000 years ago" is a story in our experience which does not stand for something that really exists. The first statement is not delusional. The second one is.

How is it not delusional? You need to first say what "God" is and then tell how you know he wants us to love each other (why "love" and not "hate" or "indifference"?) before you can substantiate saying such a thing. Anything else is complete fantasy.

It's what I have been saying consistently for many posts. Do you really want me to explain it again? It's an inductively arrived at theory of what God stands for. People don't go to church and say "God wants us to hate each other" or "God wants us to be indifferent to each other". You would have to search far and wide to find such a religion. Every religion has this aspiration for "love thy neighbor as thyself". Why? Because we are social animals with a strong cooperative drive. Religion is a shared expression of that message from our limbic driver. There is more to who you are than your conscious rational thoughts. You live the moral choice and experience your limbic driver deciding between God and your own selfish interest. Well you don't. But many people experience it that way.

[Animavore]

It's what I have been saying consistently for many posts. Do you really want me to explain it again? It's an inductively arrived at theory of what God stands for. People don't go to church and say "God wants us to hate each other" or "God wants us to be indifferent to each other". You would have to search far and wide to find such a religion. Every religion has this aspiration for "love thy neighbor as thyself". Why? Because we are social animals with a strong cooperative drive. Religion is a shared expression of that message from our limbic driver. There is more to who you are than your conscious rational thoughts. You live the moral choice and experience your limbic driver deciding between God and your own selfish interest. Well you don't. But many people experience it that way.

Many religious groups hate other groups whether from another religion or political or sexual preference group. Their god happens to share the same prejudices and stances on issues as they do so using inductive reasoning for your god means that god can be anything you want it to be,

[hiyymer]

It's what I have been saying consistently for many posts. Do you really want me to explain it again? It's an inductively arrived at theory of what God stands for. People don't go to church and say "God wants us to hate each other" or "God wants us to be indifferent to each other". You would have to search far and wide to find such a religion. Every religion has this aspiration for "love thy neighbor as thyself". Why? Because we are social animals with a strong cooperative drive. Religion is a shared expression of that message from our limbic driver. There is more to who you are than your conscious rational thoughts. You live the moral choice and experience your limbic driver deciding between God and your own selfish interest. Well you don't. But many people experience it that way.

Many religious groups hate other groups whether from another religion or political or sexual preference group. Their god happens to share the same prejudices and stances on issues as they do so using inductive reasoning for your god means that god can be anything you want it to be,

No I think it's generally an expression of our social drives. Look at it this way. We have many implicit drive and motivations, and they are not harmonious. The social drives are often at odds with the drives for individual survival. Think of a rationalist as one who sees those moral conflicts as being resolved by conscious rational decisions of the 'I' agent. Think of a theist as having a brain that's organized in a little different way. It has two agents in it. The God agent is the champion of the social drive, and the I agent is the lowly sinner out for himself. The conflict is more appropriately recognized as irrational and not resolvable without the emotional cues flowing from the respective agents. What does God want me to do? You can make a lot of generalizations about what kind of behavior each is likely to produce and whether it is good or bad, but those are just considerations from within our experience. Look at the history of rationalist communism before you jump on the theists. Life is not rational.

[Animavore]

It's what I have been saying consistently for many posts. Do you really want me to explain it again? It's an inductively arrived at theory of what God stands for. People don't go to church and say "God wants us to hate each other" or "God wants us to be indifferent to each other". You would have to search far and wide to find such a religion. Every religion has this aspiration for "love thy neighbor as thyself". Why? Because we are social animals with a strong cooperative drive. Religion is a shared expression of that message from our limbic driver. There is more to who you are than your conscious rational thoughts. You live the moral choice and experience your limbic driver deciding between God and your own selfish interest. Well you don't. But many people experience it that way.

Many religious groups hate other groups whether from another religion or political or sexual preference group. Their god happens to share the same prejudices and stances on issues as they do so using inductive reasoning for your god means that god can be anything you want it to be,

No I think it's generally an expression of our social drives. Look at it this way. We have many implicit drive and motivations, and they are not harmonious. The social drives are often at odds with the drives for individual survival. Think of a rationalist as one who sees those moral conflicts as being resolved by conscious rational decisions of the 'I' agent. Think of a theist as having a brain that's organized in a little different way. It has two agents in it. The God agent is the champion of the social drive, and the I agent is the lowly sinner out for himself. The conflict is more appropriately recognized as irrational and not resolvable without the emotional cues flowing from the respective agents. What does God want me to do? You can make a lot of generalizations about what kind of behavior each is likely to produce and whether it is good or bad, but those are just considerations from within our experience. Look at the history of rationalist communism before you jump on the theists. Life is not rational.

Who said I'm jumping on theists? I'm explaining that God can be whatever you want it to be if you use inductive reasoning.

Consider this.
Most men find homosexuality repugnant.
Therefore it is wrong.
Therefore God finds it wrong.
God does not want us to like homosexuality.

Put this to what you claimed about "love".

Most people find love appealing.
Therefore it is right.
Therefore God thinks it right.
God wants us to love.

The same fallacy is made in both cases. And the two statements contradict each other because the second one could be used to justify love of homosexuals. Inductive reasoning may be all well and good for a statement like "Apples will always fall to earth" but is complete crap when deciding what a god of some sort wants for us because that god will always share the same mores as the society it springs from

[hiyymer]

Who said I'm jumping on theists? I'm explaining that God can be whatever you want it to be if you use inductive reasoning.

Consider this.
Most men find homosexuality repugnant.
Therefore it is wrong.
Therefore God finds it wrong.
God does not want us to like homosexuality.

Put this to what you claimed about "love".

Most people find love appealing.
Therefore it is right.
Therefore God thinks it right.
God wants us to love.

The same fallacy is made in both cases. And the two statements contradict each other because the second one could be used to justify love of homosexuals. Inductive reasoning may be all well and good for a statement like "Apples will always fall to earth" but is complete crap when deciding what a god of some sort wants for us because that god will always share the same mores as the society it springs from

What I am saying is that I am using inductive reasoning to theorize about what God represents. It has nothing to do with what God tells anyone. That is entirely irrational. No moral choice is ever resolved by reason, although we will usually have our rationalizations after the fact.

[Animavore]

Who said I'm jumping on theists? I'm explaining that God can be whatever you want it to be if you use inductive reasoning.

Consider this.
Most men find homosexuality repugnant.
Therefore it is wrong.
Therefore God finds it wrong.
God does not want us to like homosexuality.

Put this to what you claimed about "love".

Most people find love appealing.
Therefore it is right.
Therefore God thinks it right.
God wants us to love.

The same fallacy is made in both cases. And the two statements contradict each other because the second one could be used to justify love of homosexuals. Inductive reasoning may be all well and good for a statement like "Apples will always fall to earth" but is complete crap when deciding what a god of some sort wants for us because that god will always share the same mores as the society it springs from

What I am saying is that I am using inductive reasoning to theorize about what God represents. It has nothing to do with what God tells anyone. That is entirely irrational. No moral choice is ever resolved by reason, although we will usually have our rationalizations after the fact.

How can anything to do with what any type of god represents be called inductive? You have nothing to go on.
This is not like saying, "All observed crows are black. Therefore: All crows are black." You have no sample to go on. Nothing to begin with. No data. Nothing.
Give an example of what God represents using inductive reason of the type given here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

[devogue]

This thread has become the stuff of legend. There's nothing I've seen on RDF or Ratskep that comes close. Thanks guys. Ratz should be proud to have such great members.

[Animavore]

Sarcasm?

[devogue]

Sarcasm?

Absolutely not. I genuinely mean it. The debate has been wonderful. Keep it up!

[hiyymer]

This is not like saying, "All observed crows are black. Therefore: All crows are black." You have no sample to go on. Nothing to begin with. No data. Nothing.
Give an example of what God represents using inductive reason of the type given here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

I only meant inductive in the sense of proposing a possible explanation for the god experience. There is actually some scientific evidence for what I am saying, but it is normally presented to demonstrate that the brain has a propensity to "make up" things like Gods and souls because of how it functions (the God helmet being a case in point). To me that is a rationalist misinterpretation of their significance. I see our experience as something that has evolved through natural selection, because it is part of a caused biological mechanism which helps us replicate. If there is a propensity for some experience to occur with regularity, we must assume that it serves a purpose in the mechanism. If we can show what the neurological conditions are that tend to make it happen, to me that is not evidence of why we are being fooled, but rather evidence that it does in fact serve a real function, is created by the subconscious brain for a reason, and is not some cognitive "meme" that 's getting passed around on the cultural surface.

[Animavore]

This is not like saying, "All observed crows are black. Therefore: All crows are black." You have no sample to go on. Nothing to begin with. No data. Nothing.
Give an example of what God represents using inductive reason of the type given here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

I only meant inductive in the sense of proposing a possible explanation for the god experience. There is actually some scientific evidence for what I am saying, but it is normally presented to demonstrate that the brain has a propensity to "make up" things like Gods and souls because of how it functions (the God helmet being a case in point). To me that is a rationalist misinterpretation of their significance. I see our experience as something that has evolved through natural selection, because it is part of a caused biological mechanism which helps us replicate. If there is a propensity for some experience to occur with regularity, we must assume that it serves a purpose in the mechanism. If we can show what the neurological conditions are that tend to make it happen, to me that is not evidence of why we are being fooled, but rather evidence that it does in fact serve a real function, is created by the subconscious brain for a reason, and is not some cognitive "meme" that 's getting passed around on the cultural surface.

So "no" then?
If the "god" experience can be induced or faked there is no reason to believe it is real any more then we have to believe that seeing a shadow out of the corner of our eye that disappears when we look at it means that something actually was there. In fact, it's more prudent to assume the phenomena are related.
You also have to ask why some people, like myself, don't experience anything like that. I've actually heard some theists try to say there is actually something "wrong" with the brain of the atheist but even if there was, and something was lacking meaning we don't have those misfirings that cause such experience, it just goes to show even more that the whole thing is in the brain and no where beyond it in the same way not being able to see "red" shows that the colour exists only in the brain and is not something tangible and existing "out there" somewhere.
All you have demonstrated so far is that people do have a shared experience that they call "god", which is no different to the shared experience some people call The Old Hag or seeing a "tunnel of light", which they know what each other means when they talk about it (or like the way I can never fully share my LSD experiences with someone who has never taken it) not that God actually exists objectively.
You may find it easy to convince yourself that the evidence points at what you already believe simply as a condition of already believing it but your going to have to do a lot better if you are to convince me that objective evidence for god exists because so far you don't even have a case let alone evidence.

[hiyymer]

You may find it easy to convince yourself that the evidence points at what you already believe simply as a condition of already believing it but your going to have to do a lot better if you are to convince me that objective evidence for god exists because so far you don't even have a case let alone evidence.

I am not trying to convince you that god objectively exists. I am trying to convince you that the experience of god represents something that really exists. Everything in our experience is created by our brain, and none of it is evidence of existing in the scientific sense. As I said let science be the arbiter of what really exists in physical reality. There are two questions. 1. Can god be real in the sense that it is experienced transparently as real, like red is experienced as being an attribute of the traffic light out there, even though red doesn't exist out there. 2. Is there something that exists, like the wavelength of light, which god represents. As I say, I have no reason to doubt people when they say they experience their god as real. I have no reason to doubt you when you say you don't experience god at all. As for 2 let me take a slightly different tack.

"We want to love each other".
"We want to attack Iraq".

These are statements about things that just are. They have no reasons. We want to love each other because we want to love each other, and we want to attack iraq because we want to attack iraq. The statements are expressed as agency. There is a collective "we" with an intention. That is a representation in our experience and not what really exists. When we study chimps in the wild and we see that they groom each other and show affection for each other, and go on raids against the neighbors, we don't believe that those chimps are sitting around thinking "why should 'we' love each other" and "why should 'we' go on this raid". We understand that the biological regulation of that species produces these behaviors and they are there because through eons of evolution that's what works. Life is irrational. We do not rationally consciously control our motivations. We can say we should. but we can't prove that it's happening. As far as we know we are chimps and there is no moral progress even though moral progress is a represented as a desirable outcome in the mind of every human being. You can say that we have risen above nature, but the possibility of proving it seems remote after the most violent bloody century in the history of the species.

What I am saying is that this is the thing that exists that god represents (as transparently real) for the theist.

"God wants us to love each other."
"God wants us to attack Iraq."

You can criticize what this represents, and say that that's giving up and resigning ourselves to being chimps forever when we should be using our noggins to make things better. But that is not an argument against the fact that God is a representation of something real (nor is it a scientific argument in any sense of the word). "God wants us to" is just a recognition that the agent "we" is not in control and something else is.

[Animavore]

I am not trying to convince you that god objectively exists. I am trying to convince you that the experience of god represents something that really exists. Everything in our experience is created by our brain, and none of it is evidence of existing in the scientific sense. As I said let science be the arbiter of what really exists in physical reality. There are two questions. 1. Can god be real in the sense that it is experienced transparently as real, like red is experienced as being an attribute of the traffic light out there, even though red doesn't exist out there.

On the face of it this first part doesn't seem like a problem. I could admit that there is a something that people experience that they call "god", that they all recognise and know what they mean to each other when they talk about it except for one slight problem, I used to be a "seeker" myself. Here's a few things I mistook for "god".

The feeling of awe when I look at stars.
Seeing a spider web and thinking "Isn't that amazing, their must be something behind that".
Thinking, "We and rocks are made from the same stuff and yet we live and they don't. Therefore 'god'."
Doing LSD and feeling like I was floating in a bubble with the autumn leaves blowing by me in a sideways vortex and thinking "Wow. God".

Of course, this was before I had rationality and scientific explanation for the above. Now I can only attribute "god" to where it actually is, which is nowhere as far as I can see. Whatever people feel that they label "god" they're maybe, like I was, mistaken? I mean I saw a guy look at a beautiful, sunset sky one day and say, "I see a lot of "god" in this sky." I tend to call a spade a spade. If you're going to say there is a thing people experience that they call "god" you need to be a bit more specific so that we can agree on what that thing is before we can proceed.

2. Is there something that exists, like the wavelength of light, which god represents. As I say, I have no reason to doubt people when they say they experience their god as real. I have no reason to doubt you when you say you don't experience god at all. As for 2 let me take a slightly different tack.

Except, as I mentioned above, that what they experience and label "god" can be any number of things from a tingle down the spine to feeling light-headed. So we still don't have anything we can pin down and say, "This is what people experience when they experience 'god'".
At least what "red" is is something agreed upon, we all bleed the stuff.

"We want to love each other".
"We want to attack Iraq".

These are statements about things that just are. They have no reasons. We want to love each other because we want to love each other, and we want to attack iraq because we want to attack iraq. The statements are expressed as agency. There is a collective "we" with an intention. That is a representation in our experience and not what really exists. When we study chimps in the wild and we see that they groom each other and show affection for each other, and go on raids against the neighbors, we don't believe that those chimps are sitting around thinking "why should 'we' love each other" and "why should 'we' go on this raid". We understand that the biological regulation of that species produces these behaviors and they are there because through eons of evolution that's what works. Life is irrational. We do not rationally consciously control our motivations. We can say we should. but we can't prove that it's happening. As far as we know we are chimps and there is no moral progress even though moral progress is a represented as a desirable outcome in the mind of every human being. You can say that we have risen above nature, but the possibility of proving it seems remote after the most violent bloody century in the history of the species.

What I am saying is that this is the thing that exists that god represents (as transparently real) for the theist.

"God wants us to love each other."
"God wants us to attack Iraq."

You can criticize what this represents, and say that that's giving up and resigning ourselves to being chimps forever when we should be using our noggins to make things better. But that is not an argument against the fact that God is a representation of something real. "God wants us to" is just a recognition that the agent "we" is not in control and something else is.

Well what do you mean by "in control"? What's in "control" of the wind or the tide or the rotation of the solar system? Like when the theist over steps causality when they say that something more than tectonic plates cause earthquakes, as if some other "agent" was at play, they over step humanity when they say that the circumstances we find ourselves in go further than our own nature and the nature which surrounds us.

[devogue]

There are two questions. 1. Can god be real in the sense that it is experienced transparently as real, like red is experienced as being an attribute of the traffic light out there, even though red doesn't exist out there. 2. Is there something that exists, like the wavelength of light, which god represents.

The answer to that is a resounding no.

"Red" is the brain's response to and interpretation of a real stimulus that does exist in the external universe. To say that "God" is the brain's response to and interpretation of a real, analagous stimulus is completely wrong. If I imagine a unicorn, a demon, a celestial teapot or a monster, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they are the reaction to an external stimulus - they are all of the mind. To go even further and say that these constructs of the mind can actually exist within external reality and in one case create external reality is nuts.

[hiyymer]

Well what do you mean by "in control"? What's in "control" of the wind or the tide or the rotation of the solar system? Like when the theist over steps causality when they say that something more than tectonic plates cause earthquakes, as if some other "agent" was at play, they over step humanity when they say that the circumstances we find ourselves in go further than our own nature and the nature which surrounds us.

I never claimed that every statement about god is a representation of something that exists. I am claiming that some statements about god are representations of something that exists. There are millions of believers out there who never "overstep causality". Why don't you address what I did say?