Linus Van Pelt wrote:Call it what you want - my boiled-down point is this: If it (being/entity/consciousness/intelligence/whatever) transcends physical laws/natural laws/scientific observation/etc., then it's not within science. If it doesn't, then I don't think it makes sense to name it "God."
I am in general agreement with this. But I’d say the idea of God is more complex. It certainly has a ‘transcendent’ element to it but the idea comes from somewhere solid enough.
It comes from us. It just seems to come from a part of us not open to scientific enquiry.
Linus Van Pelt wrote:Earwicker wrote:If you are to follow your logic through - regarding the absence of evidence - then you must be atheistic about the existence of other people's dreams.
I think the key difference is this: when people have experiences they call dreams, those are dreams.
It's a definitional thing: when shit goes on in your head while you sleep, that's a dream. When people have experiences they attribute to God, they're making a leap. Or, that sounds judgmental. Let's say, they're taking a step.
I think people who have the experience would not separate the experience from the ‘God’. The experience is part of it.
To then take the experience and add horned helmets or cloud shrouded mountain temples is taking a step – yes – but those steps still have significance. These ‘steps’ become symbolic maps for their experience and these things have real world effects. Often for bad but sometimes for good (see other thread for another example of Gramsci kicking off about how that’s not possible – religion only makes good people bad).
Linus Van Pelt wrote:Earwicker wrote:My point is - if enough people experience something it makes the experience significant even in the absence of hard evidence.
I don't know what you mean by "hard." People's reports of their dream-experiences
are evidence of the existence of dreams. The obvious response is that people's reports of their god-experiences are evidence for the existence of god. This doesn't work, because god is not the experience; god is the purported cause of the experience.
Well, it works if the experience is fundamentally part of the definition.
And if peoples reports of their dreams are allowed to be included as evidence (it’s not ‘hard’ evidence because it can’t be reproduced and shown to someone else in laboratory conditions) then ‘god experiences’ – while not evidence for specific gods – are evidence of some experience worthy of study. The implication by many – I think – is that the people who have these experiences are liars.
However, to clarify, I don’t think I’ve said that the accumulation of god experiences is proof of God (as a being) but it is significant. That those who have experienced it choose to ascribe the experience to ‘God’, ‘Higher consciousness’ (etc) shouldn’t be dismissed though.
And that is what is happening.
Linus Van Pelt wrote:That's fine - the process that is now named "science" does not include gods - even if that process loses the name "science" in the future to some other process, it still won't encompass gods, even if the process newly called "science" does.
I agree. I think I’ve either not made myself clear enough or you’ve misunderstood what I’m saying.
Or both.
I am saying that many have an experience that they ascribe to a god or godhead higher intelligence or higher consciousness. Unless all such people are liars they are experiencing something but this experience can’t be scientifically investigated without ignoring the person experiencing it.
And the person experiencing it is fundamental to the experience.
I raise the subject of modern science because modern science has discovered, similarly, that observation of ‘reality’ fundamentally involves the person observing also.
That being the case an inability to look into the mind of the observer is a shortcoming of the scientific method.
It means science can’t explain a quite fundamental aspect of reality.
Linus Van Pelt wrote:Newton and Bacon (so far as I'm aware, and I don't claim to be an expert) were not working to prove the existence of God or the influence of God on the world - they were taking that for granted, and trying to work out what the laws were.
Yes. This is my point. They were taking things for granted. One big thing they were taking for granted was that the universe is (like) a big machine that runs on laws made by god.
This big machine is made up of parts ticking away separately in the ether.
They were wrong. That is not what science has since discovered.
Linus Van Pelt wrote:I don't know what you mean by "absolute" here. I don't think you can do science without believing that some things are real - that there exists such a thing as reality .
I wouldn’t say there is no such thing as reality. Just that we can’t ever say what reality is without taking ourselves (including our consciousness and intelligence) into consideration.
Science can make approximations of certain areas, and those approximations can be useful. But they don’t - and cannot - give us the full picture.
Linus Van Pelt wrote:I think it was Dick who defined reality as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Who’s this Dick?
This is vague enough to cover an awful lot.
Which suits me actually.
Bear in mind a lot have people have stopped believing in god – but the idea still hasn’t gone away.