Jonathan, if you continue to experience a "Holy Thou" even though you're an atheist, I suggest that it is time to open your heart to the possibility that both God and your heart are trying to tell you something.

68: Posted By: Blake | September 03, 2007 09:32 PM

Dagnabit, Clark, can you fix it? I must have left a closing italics open somewhere.

69: Posted By: Blake | September 03, 2007 09:44 PM

Jonathan said: We may even feel a connection to a Sacred Thou, but fail to interpret it the way you do

Jonathan, this makes no sense at all. How could you feel a connection to a Sacred Thou (God) and yet fail to interpret it that way? If you don't interpret it that way then you don't feel that connection at all. I admit that the more you speak of your experience the less coherent and the more non-sensical it becomes to me.

70: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 04, 2007 01:16 PM

Let me call into question your claims here. Really, a burning in the bosom? A feeling of knowing beyond justification? What could possibly underwrite these experiences? They can't be mere interpretations as you claim because the atheistic world-view cannot give any basis for a knowing beyond justification or a feeling of a burning in the bosom. You claims are both phenomenologically and epistemologically inconsistent with your claim that we merely have emotional experiences that we interpret. There is nothing in the atheistic world-view that could lead to such an interpretation. Short of just saying that your claim isn't true, I will call it non-sense.

What I described as a burning in the bosom, a feeling of knowing beyond justification, etc. isn't an interpretation. It is a description of an experience, nothing more. You may choose to believe that there is no naturalistic explanation for such feelings, but there is mounting evidence to the contrary. As an atheist, my world-view can easily accommodate the existence of these experiences.

A feeling of great peace and joy? Let me see, you just found out that rather than being the product of a loving and wholly just being that seeks our best interest in eternal growth together with loved ones for all eternity, you learned that life is utterly meaningless except whatever illusion we engage in within a universe that literally couldn't care less. How is that cause for peace and joy? I suggest that you just haven't realized what you gave up and what you adopted. It's like giving up everything worth caring about to get nothing of worth in return. That's cause for peace and joy? Let me just say that either you're out of touch with reality or you just don't grasp the situation adequately. Since you seem like a fairly bright guy, I'm just going with the "it really never happened as you describe it" view rather than imputing to you utter ability to grasp reality.

I think I'm pretty well aware of how bleak our long-term situation is without a loving God to make everything better. For example, I don't expect to exist in a few decades. That's no fun, but that's all that I expect. Some days, the temptation to nihilism is pretty strong.

But what most theists don't understand (I didn't as a believer) is that love and compassion come from within, not from God. Letting go of God allowed my natural compassion to flourish in ways that it never did as a theist. I only experienced the joy of deconversion to atheism after I fully accepted the darkness of my situation and struggled through to the other side. This is what I wrote about the afterglow of my deconversion experience:

"I felt as though I had awakened from a dream. My mind had been a jumble of confusing images of my own creation. I now awoke to clarity. I no longer saw the world through the same, farsighted eyes.

"I had become more alive. Each moment had become precious. Yellow flowers made me happy. Simple nourishment made me grateful to be alive. I savored the sensation of cool water flowing into my mouth and down my throat. Children's laughter brightened my world. Time with my daughters went too quickly. Sometimes it broke my heart to be away from them. The comfort of my wife's arms was reflected in a feeling of inner peace. Compassion for the world filled my heart. Life had become precious beyond words' power to convey.

"I leave behind my old, empty skin to walk in newness of life and freedom. I celebrate the inquisitiveness, irreverence, and honesty I had as a child and have begun to regain. I wonder at the miracle of existence which surrounds me. I feel a greater connection to the human family and the world which gave us all birth, a greater urgency to do what is right, more responsibility for my actions, more strength to live according to the dictates of my own conscience, more passion for life, now that I've toppled my false idol."

Life hasn't been all sunshine and roses since then, but I'm happier as an atheist, despite ultimate existential hopelessness.

The problem is threefold. First, referring to the power of the unconscious mind that we just don't realize is begging the question in the worst possible way. It is a big black box without any explanation at all that poses as an explanation. "The unconscious prompting of our mind" amounts to what?

I don't see how this so different than your interpretation. I have faith in the powers of our mind to do amazing things. My faith is based largely on some experimental data. You have faith that God was prompting you. Your faith is based on your religious teaching. We could just as easily conclude that there was a little angel sitting on our shoulder, or we have powers of telepathy. Those explanations are just as likely as your theistic explanation. The experience that I had does not prima facie suggest that God was talking to me.

Second, there literally is no naturalistic explanation for such non-sense. If you think that this explanation is in good faith then you don't know what good faith is. It explains exactly nothing and posits powers for the mind that literally it cannot have on your world-view.

Just because you don't want to see a naturalistic justification doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I obviously have reinterpreted my experience in a naturalistic way. I can't speak to your experience, but subtle clues were available to me that I didn't take in consciously.

Third, your own experience, as you really experienced it, was that God was communicating with you -- now you doubt your own experience and re-interpret it without any rational explanation or basis at all. Your explanation of your own experience seems contrived and really non-sensical to me.

In the moment, our interpretation of an experience is the product of our conditioning. Have you never interpreted something incorrectly in the moment only to find out later that you were wrong? First impressions are not infallible.

This is simply double-talk. What you have cannot be "spiritual" experiences given your world-view and to call them such doesn't make it so.

If you insist, I will start calling them experiences of feelings of transcendence. I just wanted to ease conversation (and save some keystrokes) by using common jargon. I explicitly warned against putting too much significance on my use of that terminology. I can see now that my warning wasn't enough.

You don't have an experiences that conform to what I have described. You don't experience of a Holy Thou that recalls deep knowledge always already known. You continue to overlook that. Nor can you give a rational basis for how you could have such spiritual experiences.

I haven't (yet?) experienced that as an atheist, but I am aware of others who have. I linked to one in my last comment.

I believe those experiences are products of our biology. Aside from laboratory evidence that such experiences are organic, I have had a dream that included this experience of the Holy Thou. The feeling was profound and moving. The problem is that the context was completely nonsensical, a typical dream full of randomness. The experience of the Holy Thou came in a context that discounted its significance. Perhaps that was one step for me down the road to discounting spiritual experiences (ahem, experiences of the feeling of transcendence) as meaningless.

Within my world-view it is dishonest double-talk but a rational explanation. So yep, I chalk it up to your hard heart and an unwillingness to dialogue honestly either with me or with yourself. Your view and assertions are literally impossible within your world-view.

None of my assertions are impossible within atheism. You have not provided a demonstration of that. I hope that you have so gravely misunderstood my words that you question my honesty.

Jonathan: One critical point that I'd like to make is that while we are the sole authority over our experience, we are quite blind to the workings of our own minds. Our conscious models of our minds is severely lacking. While you know the quality of your experience better than anyone else, you can still be mistaken about what caused that experience.

This recognition cuts against your view more than mine.

Perhaps. Except my viewpoint is supported by a growing body of experimental data that shows our common understanding of ourselves is a simplistic, flawed model.

If I experience God revealing truth to me, then I have a good reason to believe that God is revealing truth to me; just as tasting the food as sweet is good reason to believe that the food is sweet.

You are comparing a simple sense perception (i.e. this food tastes sweet to me) with an compound experience-interpretation (i.e. I am having an experience that I interpret to be God revealing truth to me). That's not a fair comparison.

Can humans be mistaken about what causes our experience? We may be; but there must be some reason to believe we are mistaken and you haven't offered any that I can see.

Ghost in the Machine is aimed at demonstrating the implausibility of an immaterial soul, but the middle part is a good collection of experiments and case studies related indirectly to the issue we're discussing. We all have a conscious model of ourselves. Those models are deeply flawed, as experiments show. We really don't know what's going on in our own minds. This should give us pause when we think that our experiences faithfully reflect something outside of our own mind.

Your double-speak about "spiritual" experiences is disingenuous because it is phenomenologically and logically impossible to have such experience on your view. You have nothing adequate to explain such experiences in your view. What you have are mere experiences that have no more meaning than any other experiences.

Exactly. Experiences without inherent meaning. (Also, please note my caveat about "spiritual" experiences.)

How do you know I haven't tried out atheism for a day? It is precisely because I have that I know what it entails and how it feels to live in an utterly uncaring and mindless universe.

Fair enough. It may help to try it on for longer. ;) This is a good reminder, however, that not everyone experiences the same thing in atheism. I somehow got beyond the nihilism and found purpose and joy in a godless world.

Sheer panic is a more proper reaction. I suggest that you don't get how hopeless our situation is if atheism is true. Daniel Dennett is right about that much. You may be compassionate and even think thoughts, but I don't believe that your naturalistic world-view has the resources to explain either compassion or the properties of the human mind. In fact, we cannot have faculties of reasoning and knowing the truth about such theoretical matter if you are correct because natural selection explains only the development of what leads to survival --and knowledge of theoretical matters like quantum physics, mind-body issues, spiritual experiences and general relativity are not the kinds of things natural selection could fit us for. I conclude on rational grounds that your atheistic world-view is self-defeating.

This would be an interesting discussion, but rather than getting distracted, I want to come to an understanding on the issue of spiritual experiences first.

Your explanation of "religious experience" is also self defeating. Can't you see that if you are right that we have merely emotional experiences that we interpret as "spiritual" that it is impossible for an atheist to have a "spiritual" experience because it is self-defeating to interpret it as a spiritual experience? What I believe is that the Spirit still strives to speak to you and you simply refuse to acknowledge it.

That is one possibility. It's odd, though, how I find great joy in my atheism and I have a stupor of thought whenever I try to think religiously. Wouldn't God want the opposite to happen? Or am I conveniently in Satan's grasp now, beyond all hope?

Jonathan: Joseph Smith seems to dispute that the prophetic experience is effable

Joathan, it is obvious to me that you just don't grasp the distinction between the classical mystical experience and prophetic experience. Joseph could not go on and on for hundreds of verses about what he saw and heard in vision if it were ineffable. 'Nuf said about that!

:) Have you ever read the Zohar? Plenty of reading material there. Those mystics just can't stop talking about the ineffable. One may be unable to communicate the essence of a spiritual experience in words, but that doesn't stop you from attempting to talk about it, and maybe even saying something useful.

If I have failed to grasp the distinction that you wish to draw between the prophetic visionary experience and the mystical experience, you have failed to provide evidence that there is a distinction. The mystics are looking for an experience of unity, that is true, but they also experience what you described as the prophetic experience along the way.

By the way, are you equating the prophetic experience, as you call it, with the feelings described in Alma 32? Is no spiritual experience complete until someone feels a prophetic vocation?

Jonathan, this makes no sense at all. How could you feel a connection to a Sacred Thou (God) and yet fail to interpret it that way? If you don't interpret it that way then you don't feel that connection at all. I admit that the more you speak of your experience the less coherent and the more non-sensical it becomes to me.

By saying "Sacred Thou (God)" you show that you've made an interpretation of your experience which is so ingrained in your outlook that you can't imagine feeling that connection without interpreting the experience as a connection with God. An atheist can feel everything that we usually interpret as "sacred" and a feeling of Otherness without then coming to the same conclusion about the experience. I, as an atheist, would approach those experiences seeking a naturalistic explanation. You, as a Mormon, seek a Mormon explanation. The interpretation is based largely on the individual, not on any actual content of the experience. The sweetness of the experience doesn't speak for itself.

Let me see if I have the general shape of things.

I say: spiritual experiences (experiences of the feeling of transcendence) happen to many people in contexts outside Mormonism. These experiences lead to a diversity of interpretations largely based on the background of the individual. These experiences can be induced using techniques known for millennia. Many parts of the experiences have been induced in the laboratory or have been shown to have an organic basis. I see no reason outside the disparate teachings of various religions to interpret them as anything other than a product of biology. I claim that I found joy as an atheist. Based on this, I conclude that these experiences are probably not the communication of a God who wants me to be Mormon.

You say: the experiences that I have either differ in some significant quality therefore they aren't authentic, or I must be willfully ignoring their import because there is no interpretation that I could make as an atheist to explain them. You deny the possibility that there is a naturalistic explanation for the phenomenon, that the experience speaks inherently and unmistakably about God. You insist that the classical mystic experience is not an authentic spiritual experience, at least not as authentic as the prophetic experience which you claim is different. You claim that there is no joy in atheism. You claim that any interpretation of an authentic experience which contradicts Mormonism either doesn't happen or is a misinterpretation. You have had these experiences while deliberating and studying on some gospel topic as you were told to expect, so you believe that they probably come from a Mormon God.

Or to boil it down even further, I say that such feelings - however profound, convincing, or grave - are not a sound foundation for knowledge without further investigation, and you say that such feelings should be trusted at a prima facie level as long as they don't contradict Mormonism.

Have I misunderstood? Am I being unfair? Or is this a fair reflection of what you've said?

71: Posted By: Blake | September 04, 2007 07:09 PM

Jonathan. Not quite so fast. I have issued a major challenge to your world-view and you have blown it off as if you could ignore it. I have suggested that your world-view is not merely inadequate for your own experience, but is self-defeating and inconsistent with the very rational endeavor in which you now engage. Your participation in this dialogue -- indeed, any dialogue -- is self-defeating because it assumes that you have capacities for rationality that your world-view cannot explain and strains credulity to accept. Here is the challenge:

You may be compassionate and even think thoughts, but I don't believe that your naturalistic world-view has the resources to explain either compassion or the properties of the human mind. In fact, we cannot have faculties of reasoning and knowing the truth about such theoretical matter if you are correct because natural selection explains only the development of what leads to survival --and knowledge of theoretical matters like quantum physics, mind-body issues, spiritual experiences and general relativity are not the kinds of things natural selection could fit us for. I conclude on rational grounds that your atheistic world-view is self-defeating.

Not only must you systematically doubt all of your experience because it is merely an illusion, you must reject properties of human mind at all. Let me explain. You rightly insist as an atheist that everything we experience must be fully explainable by the natural of our our bodily or physical make-up. The problem is that it isn't.

Let's take the very ability to think rationally. This ability assumes that your thoughts can be guided by rational considerations. However, given that everything is analyzable into bodily causes, there is no room logically for mental properties like rationality and being guided by thought. Consider that your thoughts and reasons are fully explained, as you insist, by your bodily states, and these bodily states are analyzable into the states of neurons, and states of neurons are explained in terms of action potentials that are fully explained by chemistry which is further analyzable into the behavior of atoms and further quarks. However, quarks and atoms don't act according to rules of rationality and reason; rather, they merely have a deterministic causal result of their prior states. The actions of neurons are not guided by thought; rather, though is an epiphenomenal result of the activity of neurons on such a view.

There is no basis for human reason, human morality (merely social mores developed for survival on such a view), human dignity or rights or even the experience of beauty (which is really the experience of neurons which don't give a woof about beauty). You see, once started down this naturalistic path you don't get to stop and enjoy the beauty of roses and the awe of existence since everything is a mindless, purposeless epiphenomena of mindless rules of survival of the fittest. That is Dawrin's Dangerous Idea and so all of your talk about joy and so forth must be chalked up to organismic illusion on your view. Your appreciation of your experience as an atheist takes a great deal more faith and leaping than the Mormon world-view as I see it.

This argument is a very serious challenge to your atheistic world-view and it fundamentally calls into question its adequacy precisely because it is unable to explain human experience, human rationality or mental properties such as thought and human moral dignity. Your distrust of your own experience is well stated in your prior post # 70. However, it cuts a lot deeper than you realize. Even your participation in a rational discussion is undermined by your self-defeating world-view as I see it.

72: Posted By: Blake | September 04, 2007 07:27 PM

Jonathan said: "spiritual experiences (experiences of the feeling of transcendence) happen to many people in contexts outside Mormonism. These experiences lead to a diversity of interpretations largely based on the background of the individual. These experiences can be induced using techniques known for millennia. Many parts of the experiences have been induced in the laboratory or have been shown to have an organic basis. I see no reason outside the disparate teachings of various religions to interpret them as anything other than a product of biology. I claim that I found joy as an atheist. Based on this, I conclude that these experiences are probably not the communication of a God who wants me to be Mormon."

Here is the problem. What is it that is transcendent on such a view? How could evolution fit the human mind for experiencing such transcendence (of what?) and what purpose could it possibly serve in survival? Again, you miss my point. Your naturalistic world-view is incapable both of taking such experiences of transcendence seriously (because nothing transcendent is or could be experienced) and because such experiences cannot be explained on the naturalistic world-view.

Your assertion that "parts of the experience have been induced in the laboratory" or that there are techniques for inducing the experience is once again confusing a classical mystical experience (which entails the disappearance of the self) with the Mormon experience of the presence of knowledge in the head/heart together with immense joy and recollection. They are not the same. Whereas the classical mystical experience has been induced and there are techniques to replicate it, that is not so with the Mormon experience. You keep saying that you can produce evidence of your assertions. Now is the time to do it. I submit you cannot do it because you have a fundamentally different experiences in mind. (The fact that you have anything "in mind" is darn near impossible to explain or fathom given your world-view).

I grant that if you in fact feel awe and some of the things that theists feel, you do so because we are all human and we all have spiritual experiences (just as you claim). But you're missing my point. Your claim that all experience is merely interpreted emotions is inconsistent with your atheistic world-view because your world-view could not give rise to an interpretation of your experiences as a "spiritual experience" even though you consistently insist on doing so. Your atheistic world-view cannot take such experiences seriously, cannot explain them (in fact must discount them altogether as you do) and the phenomenology of these experiences is fundamentally contrary to the atheistic world-view you espouse. But because you are a son of God, your heart still speaks to you and I am convinced that God will never give up on your -- and neither will I.

So I don't accept that we just have different ways of interpreting our experiences. I submit that your world-view is totally inadequate in light of the fact that we have such experiences.

73: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 05, 2007 12:47 PM

Jonathan. Not quite so fast. I have issued a major challenge to your world-view and you have blown it off as if you could ignore it.

Bring it on. :) I didn't plan to ignore it. It just seemed tangential to the current discussion. Now that you've elaborated, I see how it fits in.

You may be compassionate and even think thoughts, but I don't believe that your naturalistic world-view has the resources to explain either compassion or the properties of the human mind. In fact, we cannot have faculties of reasoning and knowing the truth about such theoretical matter if you are correct because natural selection explains only the development of what leads to survival --and knowledge of theoretical matters like quantum physics, mind-body issues, spiritual experiences and general relativity are not the kinds of things natural selection could fit us for. I conclude on rational grounds that your atheistic world-view is self-defeating.

Your argument here rests on the assertion that natural selection will only allow traits that positively contribute to survival to persist. There are obvious traits (e.g. blue eyes, a preference for mint-chocolate-chip ice cream over cookie dough ice cream, belly buttons, etc.) that may not contribute in an obvious way to survival, as you note. Yet they exist.

First, natural selection is not a perfect machine which has the foresight to eliminate traits which don't actively help a being to survive. The artifacts of evolution that I named are largely inconsequential so may persist with no contradiction of natural selection.

Survival traits also have attending properties which don't contribute to survival. Our eyes must have some appearance, so evolution can't help but avoid making eyes blue or brown or transparent.

Your argument is against a version of natural selection which no credible scientist advocates. It basically reduces to intelligent design because it requires natural selection to act with foresight. It also requires evolution to strip all properties which don't contribute to survival, an impossible task.

Second, I would not immediately classify the raw intelligence and properties of mind which allow us to understand quantum mechanics and have experiences of transcendence into the category of inconsequential traits. They probably have a strong influence on survival. Intelligence and empathy have allowed us to build vast civilizations which have improved our survival rate. That they also allow us to reason about the laws of the universe might be just an artifact of evolution, like belly buttons.

In order to advance this argument, you need to show that these properties of mind are a net survival liability.

Not only must you systematically doubt all of your experience because it is merely an illusion, you must reject properties of human mind at all. Let me explain. You rightly insist as an atheist that everything we experience must be fully explainable by the natural of our our bodily or physical make-up. The problem is that it isn't.

Let's take the very ability to think rationally. This ability assumes that your thoughts can be guided by rational considerations. However, given that everything is analyzable into bodily causes, there is no room logically for mental properties like rationality and being guided by thought.

Your assumption here is that thought is an uncaused entity that exists separate from the brain or similar structures. You also assume that rationality cannot be embodied in a physical entity. You've begged the question by assuming the conclusion.

I'm a computer engineer by training (explains a lot, right?). I'm perfectly comfortable seeing thought as an emergent property of the physical activity of neurons. I am trained to embody logic and rational rules in physical forms. I use physical laws to create computing machines which can perform thought-tasks which were previously believed to be the sole province of humanity.

Consciousness is a very interesting topic. We don't have a lot of answers, but that isn't a valid reason to assume without evidence that consciousness is not a naturalistic epiphenomenon of the workings of the brain-body system.

This argument won't get traction with me.

However, quarks and atoms don't act according to rules of rationality and reason; rather, they merely have a deterministic causal result of their prior states. The actions of neurons are not guided by thought; rather, though is an epiphenomenal result of the activity of neurons on such a view.

Quarks and atoms apparently follow mathematical laws (no, I'm not a pure materialist). It is not difficult to work from this substrate to build rational systems which reflect the rationality of mathematics.

There is no basis for human reason, human morality (merely social mores developed for survival on such a view), human dignity or rights or even the experience of beauty (which is really the experience of neurons which don't give a woof about beauty).

No absolute basis sure, but I'm OK with that. Where you want to make those things abstract, almost Platonic entities with absolute existence, I see them mostly as you say: human conventions. That doesn't prevent me from exercising reason, acting morally, respecting human dignity, or enjoying beauty. I do those things precisely because I am human. You assert that I cannot if I fully realize the full import of the aimless, mindless nature of the universe, yet I do. :)

I don't feel self-defeated.

Here is the problem. What is it that is transcendent on such a view? How could evolution fit the human mind for experiencing such transcendence (of what?) and what purpose could it possibly serve in survival?

I'll ignore that this is still laboring under the false notion of how evolution works.

We have a sense of our own boundaries which allows us to relate spatially to our environment and to protect the parts of the world most vital to our survival. If this sense is suppressed, we can experience a feeling of having lost boundaries and a great connection with everything. Obviously, this feeling of boundarylessness cannot be the natural state of affairs if we are to survive. But brain damage or other physical means can suppress this sense.

Our arms are pretty handy (couldn't resist) for survival. That's why they've evolved. But they can be removed artificially. The fact that they can be removed doesn't indicate that this is an evolved feature.

Your assertion that "parts of the experience have been induced in the laboratory" or that there are techniques for inducing the experience is once again confusing a classical mystical experience (which entails the disappearance of the self) with the Mormon experience of the presence of knowledge in the head/heart together with immense joy and recollection. They are not the same.

You consistently ignore my statements that mystics also feel exactly what you describe as far as I can tell from your description. Don't make me do research. ;)

Whereas the classical mystical experience has been induced and there are techniques to replicate it, that is not so with the Mormon experience. You keep saying that you can produce evidence of your assertions. Now is the time to do it. I submit you cannot do it because you have a fundamentally different experiences in mind. (The fact that you have anything "in mind" is darn near impossible to explain or fathom given your world-view).

You're going to make me do research, aren't you? Before I do that, I need a clear statement of the problem. Exactly what are the phenomenal differences that you assert don't exist in the mystical experience (and in the lab) which do exist solely in the "Mormon experience"?

While I'm at my research, think about finding evidence that demonstrates that your interpretation is correct. We'll compare notes.

I grant that if you in fact feel awe and some of the things that theists feel, you do so because we are all human and we all have spiritual experiences (just as you claim). But you're missing my point. Your claim that all experience is merely interpreted emotions is inconsistent with your atheistic world-view because your world-view could not give rise to an interpretation of your experiences as a "spiritual experience" even though you consistently insist on doing so.

I get the feeling that you're not reading my comments closely. I have already addressed this "spiritual" business. I don't truly interpret these experiences as spiritual. Please reread #70 if that will help.

Your atheistic world-view cannot take such experiences seriously, cannot explain them (in fact must discount them altogether as you do) and the phenomenology of these experiences is fundamentally contrary to the atheistic world-view you espouse. But because you are a son of God, your heart still speaks to you and I am convinced that God will never give up on your -- and neither will I.

I thank you for your concern. I don't discount these experiences. I just have alternate explanations which delve below the surface appearances. I obviously hope that the naturalistic explanation is valid. The evidence is coming in to support this. You hope that the Mormon explanation is valid. I haven't seen any evidence to support this outside the beliefs of Mormons.

So I don't accept that we just have different ways of interpreting our experiences. I submit that your world-view is totally inadequate in light of the fact that we have such experiences.

It only appears inadequate when you assume prior to investigation that it is inadequate. If you try, you can find reasonable naturalistic explanations. Where explanations aren't yet available, it is reasonable to expect their arrival based on science's past performance.

By the way, should I interpret your silence as an acceptance of my description of your position on these difficult-to-name experiences?

74: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 05, 2007 12:59 PM

I meant to say "evolution can't help but make eyes blue" not "evolution can't help but avoid making eyes blue".

*cough*

75: Posted By: Rich Knapton | September 05, 2007 03:25 PM

Reference #52

Rich: Are you sure? I would say God cannot lie. God cannot be Satan. Is God therefore limited? No. He cannot do or be these things because it is not in the nature of God to do or be these things. So it seems to me that before we begin declaring limitations on God we should first understand the nature of God. I don’t think we can do that as terrestrial beings.

Jonathan: This conflicts with "I did not assert God is unknowable."

Rich: No it doesn’t. It addresses your assertion that terrestrial beings can place limits on God, a Celestial being. We know a number of things about God but they have all been revealed to us. I realize that you are an atheist, however, why not just state that. Your attempts to prove God doesn’t exist is as futile as my attempts would be if I tried to prove He does exist.

Jonathan: I'm still curious: do you believe that God was unable to exalt everyone, or do you believe that God chose not to?

Rich: I believe that God chose not to. Remember after Adam and Eve had partaken of the fruit of good and evil, God placed Cherubim and a flaming sword before the tree of life. He did this so Adam and Even would not partake of this and live forever in their sins. God could exalt us but we then would then live forever in our sins. God chose not to do so for our benefit.

Rich: Let me say a few words about the issue you and Blake are discussing: feelings. From my own experience there are three ways in which God communicates with us. Two are through the implementation of emotions/feelings and the other is not. God can place thoughts directly into our mind/brain. The instances of this, for me, were when I had information to pass onto others. It was not information relevant to my personal being. It was something they needed to know.

The other two methods were used for information relevant to myself. I was at the funeral of friend and was listening to her mother speak. She said that God had told her why her daughter had died. The interesting part is that she said she felt the words of God. She did not hear them. I’ve had this exact same experience. I felt what was conveyed to me. I did not hear it. In both of these instances new information was imparted. The other method is what Blake is discussing: the use of emotions/feelings to justify existing information. This is probably the most common form of communication between God and man. It is the root of my testimony.

This method of justifying information through the use of emotions/feelings (affectation) is an interesting phenomena. It urns out the brain, as a teleological subsystem of the body as a whole, imprints on personally relevant experiences an affective marker (positive or negative) as assist in long-term memory establishment and recall. It is a method by which relevant experiences can quickly be recalled. It works on the sub-symbolic level so is not cognitively available to us. All information personally relevant to us seems to be affectively weighted. Thus in making decisions for ourselves, which have personal relevance, it is these affective markers which are compared and weighed in the reasoning process and which lead to a decision. Of course I’m referencing the work of Dr. Antonio Damasio which has become mainstream thought among neuro-researchers working with affection. Without the ability to sub-symbolically reference these markers, decisions on personally relevant questions cannot be made. This has shown to be the case by Damasio and others. It is this sub-symbolic affective justification system, I believe, that God uses to justify the correctness of the Gospel. He seems to be using a naturalistic system as a means of imparting eternal truth. How He does it, I have no idea.

So how do we know if it is God who is using the system or whether it is simply the result of the normal operation? I would say it is intensity for one thing. For the most part this sub-symbolic system of affection weighting operates below the level cognition. We are simply not aware of its operation. But it affects all our personally relevant decisions. So Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Sam Harris are wrong. We are not rational beings. We are affective beings with the capacity to do high level reasoning. As such, we have a high degree of affinity, if not need, for religion. I think that God, through evolution, has created us (human kind) with that need.

Rich

76: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 05, 2007 05:33 PM

Rich: So it seems to me that before we begin declaring limitations on God we should first understand the nature of God. I don’t think we can do that as terrestrial beings.

Rich: No it doesn’t.

So when you say "I don't think we can do that", did you mean that we can't understand the nature of God or did you mean that we can't place limitations on God?

It addresses your assertion that terrestrial beings can place limits on God, a Celestial being. We know a number of things about God but they have all been revealed to us.

Things like "...the works of justice would be destroyed, and God would cease to be God." (Alma 42:22) and "[God] changeth not; if so he would cease to be God;" (Mormon 9:19). The Book of Mormon says that God cannot change or be unjust otherwise he would cease to be God. This implies that there are laws higher than God which he must live within. I suppose you could also say that he must be true to his own limited nature (i.e. he has no choice but to be just and unchanging).

I realize that you are an atheist, however, why not just state that. Your attempts to prove God doesn’t exist is as futile as my attempts would be if I tried to prove He does exist.

I didn't hide my godlessness. You never asked. :) I assumed my statements would speak for themselves with no need for an introduction.

I have never attempted to prove that God doesn't exist. It's a fool's errand to prove an universal existential negative. I won't be tempted to try, just as I advise you against attempting to disprove the existence of Russel's teapot or Carl's fire-breathing dragon.

Jonathan: I'm still curious: do you believe that God was unable to exalt everyone, or do you believe that God chose not to?

Rich: I believe that God chose not to. Remember after Adam and Eve had partaken of the fruit of good and evil, God placed Cherubim and a flaming sword before the tree of life. He did this so Adam and Even would not partake of this and live forever in their sins. God could exalt us but we then would then live forever in our sins. God chose not to do so for our benefit.

Your answer is a bit evasive. I don't blame you. I probably asked the question in a way that didn't help you see outside the Mormon framework. Let me try again.

Do you believe that God was unable to create everyone in an exalted state (or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices), or do you believe that God chose not to?

Rich: So how do we know if it is God who is using the system or whether it is simply the result of the normal operation? I would say it is intensity for one thing.

I don't follow how intensity justifies your believe that your feelings come from God. Methamphetamines, I am told, produce a pretty intense experience, more intense than love or sex. It seems like you're grasping at straws to justify believing God is plucking your emotional heartstrings.

For the most part this sub-symbolic system of affection weighting operates below the level cognition. We are simply not aware of its operation. But it affects all our personally relevant decisions. So Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Sam Harris are wrong. We are not rational beings. We are affective beings with the capacity to do high level reasoning.

I've said as much here. Thanks for the support. ;)

As such, we have a high degree of affinity, if not need, for religion. I think that God, through evolution, has created us (human kind) with that need.

Using your inborn desire for something to justify your belief in that something could justify anything. "I want God to exist, so he must. I want to believe that I'll live forever, so that must be true. I want everyone to love me, so they must. I want beautiful women to throw themselves at me, so... where are they?" Wishful thinking isn't a good justification for a belief.

77: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 05, 2007 05:37 PM

This is becoming a bad habit: "exalt everyone who ever lived as if they had never sinned", not "exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned".

78: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 06:09 PM

Jonathan: You accept that your view entails epiphenomenalism. I'm sure that you know that epiphenomenalism entails that our thoughts and mental predicates are merely a by-product and never a cause of our actions. That means that our thoughts and mental properties play no role in our lives. However, you don't seem to appreciate that epiphenomenalism entails just what I argued, i.e., that our thoughts and mental properties play no role in what do. Our actions aren't rationally guided. That isn't to say we might not accidentally do rational things - just like natural selection, it is just random. So what role do you believe rationality guides our discussion and dialogue if thoughts and rational considerations cannot influence what we talk about rather than blind cause and effect? I submit that such a view is self-defeating for a person who actually has thoughts or engages in any discussion of any sort.

With respect to evolution and natural selection as an explanation for our minds and other human properties, I suggest that it is just randomly possible that we just randomly occurred as you believe. However, the probability that our epistemic faculties are reliable is extremely low. Of course if God guided evolution, we have a good reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have been produced in such a way as to make them reliable. If blind natural selection is relied upon, however, we have a very probable reason to believe that our faculties are unreliable. Since we must rely on these cognitive faculties as the very basis of this kind of assessment of reliability of our faculties, we have a defeater for our very trust of our reason at all.

Darwin himself stated it well: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Including an Autobiographical Chapter, Francis Darwin (ed.) London: 1987, John Murray, Albermarle Street, Vol. 1, pp. 315–316).

Let R be the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable, N the proposition that naturalism is true and E the proposition that we and our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of the processes to which contemporary evolutionary theory points us: what is the conditional probability of R on N&E? I.e., what is P(R | N&E)? It is low indeed. We can state the argument schematically as follows:

1. P(R | N&E) is low.

2. Anyone who accepts N&E and sees that (1) is true has a defeater for R.

3. Anyone who has a defeater for R has a defeater for any other belief she holds, including N&E itself.

4. Therefore, anyone who accepts N&E and sees that (1) is true has a defeater for N&E hence N&E can't be rationally accepted.

So it may have happened just as you say that we came to have a massively parallel processor of information (the brain) that has scads and scads of unnecessary information processing power far beyond what is necessary for survival just so we can have an epiphenomenal illusion that are thoughts are somehow related to our choices and what we do, but it is an incredible waste of resources that strain credulity.

As for the difference the classic and Mormon spiritual experiences, we can begin with William James Varieties of Religious Experience or William Stace's classical work on mysticism (which I document and discuss on p. 362 of the Vol. 1 of Exploring Mormon Thought). The classical experience has the following characteristics:

1. It is ineffable, no concepts or words can express the experience.

2. There is a loss of self-identity such that the distinction between the experincer and what is experienced dissolves.

3. The experience is achieved through asceticism, self-denial and techniques of breathing and meditation.

4. The experience results in the disparagement or denial of the reality of the natural world and acceptance of human experience as a vast illusion.

In contrast, the Mormon and prophetic experiences invert these characteristics. Prophetic experiences are effable and can be described for literally hundreds of verses as to what was seen, heard and learned. Language may be difficult and not fully adequate, but it is not entirely impossible to express in human language. The prophet becomes self-aware and worthiness is called into question in the encounter with the holy God. The prophets are caught off guard by their experiences and they don't attempt to cause them through breathing and meditation techniques. The natural world is not disparaged and human experience is deemed trustworthy and merely a mirage.

79: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 06:18 PM

Jonathan: I wanted to focus on an experience that you claim that we both have in common. You had an experience where a person had a problem and you were able to hone in on it without being told what the problem was. I had an experience where I knew that God wanted me to tell a young lady that I hardly knew that God wanted her to stop thinking about suicide when she responded in utter surprise by asking, "how did you know?" I knew that I didn't know how I knew, but I knew that I knew. I had no natural way of knowing however.

First, I want to point out that your experience is not one that shows that as an atheist you have similar experiences to theists or Mormons as you claimed. You admitted that you had this experience as a theist and you experienced it as coming from God. So it isn't a basis for arguing that as an atheist you have similar experiences.

Second, you say that you now just give this experience a different interpretation. The problem is that you have no possible explanation for how you could have come to have such knowledge from a merely naturalistic world-view. Unless you propose that we have naturalistic extra-sensory perception and the ability to know when a person is in dire need of being warned away from suicide, your world-view is at a total loss to explain your own experience. I submit that had you been an atheist at the time you felt the promptings that described, you would not have trusted them to be accurate because the most reasonable interpretation form an atheistic world-view is that you were just having a weird experience that couldn't possibly be veridical. If I had doubted and not trusted, the young lady I warned would now almost certainly be dead rather than alive and enjoying life. So the difference is a difference between life and death. That is how the argument in the prior post becomes real and its where the rubber hits the road in terms of real lived experience.

80: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 05, 2007 08:38 PM

Blake, what do you mean by "naturalism"?

81: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 09:30 PM

Lincoln -- great question. By naturalism I mean the belief that everything happens by laws of nature without any purpose or mind and by which all events, which constitute the whole of reality, are fully explained by the actions of the most basic constituents. Physics explains everything.

82: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 09:42 PM

Jonathan said to Rich: "Do you believe that God was unable to create everyone in an exalted state (or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices), or do you believe that God chose not to?"

Nonsensical question from the Mormon perspective since God didn't create anyone ex nihilo. The answer is the Japanese "mu".

82: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 05, 2007 10:01 PM

Blake, does non-human life (ranging from chimpanzees to bacteria) have mind? If so, is that mind supernatural?

83: Posted By: Eric Robeck | September 05, 2007 10:07 PM

Jonathan hardly needs support for his arguments, and I don't want to derail this fascinating debate. I just want to weigh in as another ex-Mormon atheist who routinely has very powerful spiritual (er, transcendental) feelings. Qualitatively, they are no different than the experiences I had as a youth which convinced me the church was true and to serve a mission. The only difference is the way I interpret them.

I would argue, Blake, that if these experiences are inconsistent with our worldview and we "shouldn't" be having them according to yours, perhaps it is your worldview that needs examining. Your claims are clearly inconsistent with the empirical evidence of our experiences.

83: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 05, 2007 10:57 PM

Clark, here are some thoughts on the problem of evil. For context, I'll add that these thoughts are, in part, a reaction to the Simulation Hypothesis of the Simulation Argument (http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html).

Perhaps God has organized our world in an effort to save his world from existential risks. If large numbers of these worlds are modeled after his world (or worlds that might affect his world) then data collected from monitoring them would be pertinent toward making better decisions in his world. Intervention generally would detract from the usefulness of collected data. Tolerating evil in our world, then, would be expected ultimately to contribute toward our mutual salvation.

What do you think?

84: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 11:04 PM

Eric, it is hardly the case that I, as an active Mormon, believe that the spirit and light of Christ has utterly departed from you. You still experience God acting within you. I haven't said that atheists cannot have spiritual experiences; they just cannot have spiritual experiences that make sense within an atheistic world-view. Remember what I assert is that your experience is contrary to your world-view and that your world-view is incapable of explaining your experiences -- not that you don't have such experiences. Your interpretation of your experiences is just a way of talking yourself out of them.

Lincoln: Yes, non-human life has the beginnings of properties of mind (I'm an emergentist) but not rationality and moral consciousness. I don't accept the dichotomy of natural/supernatural. Rather, the divide is between those who believe that naturalistic physics can explain everything and that properties of mind are inherent in reality. Pantheism, panentheism and theism are all consistent with my world-view to that extent. A universe without sentience and a God is not.

85: Posted By: Blake | September 05, 2007 11:08 PM

Eric claimed: "Jonathan hardly needs support for his arguments."

Why is that so? Because his assertion are obviously true? Logically necessary? A priori? Or just because you share his same view? Since his view clearly isn't self-evident, logically necessary or a priori, I think I'll go with the conclusion that you merely happen to agree with him and want to exempt both your and his view from the requirement of rational support. Sharing a view hardly shows that it doesn't need argument to support it.

86: Posted By: Clark | September 05, 2007 11:35 PM

Just a note: sorry I haven't had time to comment. Hopefully soon.

87: Posted By: Kyle R | September 06, 2007 02:03 AM

Blake, you say: "I haven't said that atheists cannot have spiritual experiences; they just cannot have spiritual experiences that make sense within an atheistic world-view".

I understand what you mean, I think, by this, but it assumes that an atheistic world-view is the same thing as a purely materialist world-view. This isn't always or even necessarily often the case. What Eric calls 'transcendental' experience does not automatically imply the divine, but merely the transcendental, a sense of transcending the physical to something else. But this 'something else' doesn't require a theistic explanation. Joseph Smith's teachings themselves avoided extreme duality between spirit and matter. It's possible for an atheist's worldview to do the same without in any way contradicting its basic premises regarding God.

87: Posted By: Eric Robeck | September 06, 2007 02:15 AM

Blake,

Obviously, no argument should be except from critical examination. My last comment was badly worded.

What I meant to say is that there is nothing I can add to Jonathan's arguments from an atheistic perspective, except for common experience. The conclusion of this debate (i.e., where the evidence is perceived to fall) is still open. (May I suggest it will end in a stalemate?) Since I have nothing original to contribute, I won't continue to participate in this discussion.

88: Posted By: Kyle R | September 06, 2007 02:17 AM

#83 Lincoln. Fascinating idea. It would be (would it be?) roughly analagous to our observation of and experimentation on animals in laboratories for pharamaceutical R&D. It's unpleasant for them but allows collection of data and the development of medicines that lower 'existential risk' for us.

The obvious difference is there's no mutual salavation for us and the animals, just for us.

89: Posted By: Blake | September 06, 2007 07:34 AM

Kyle said: "What Eric calls 'transcendental' experience does not automatically imply the divine, but merely the transcendental, a sense of transcending the physical to something else."

The problem is, Kyle, that there is nothing that could be experienced that is transcendental if atheism is true, and that for at least two reasons. First, how do we transcend our bodily limitations on such a view? Remember that Jonathan has consistently insisted that all of our experience is merely bodily experience -- experiences delivered to us through bodily senses. How could one take seriously the experience of transcendence when we cannot transcend? Second, what in the notion of blind (without being guided teleologically by a mind of some sort) evolution could possibly explain trusting any experience that is of "the transcendent"? If they have such experiences, from their atheistic perspective it must be interpreted as merely a weird experience and not an experience "of" something that is actually transcendent.

Notice the vague reference to "something transcendent"? Well, just what "the transcendent"? What is it they are referring to? I wonder what kind of arrogance leads to atheism rather than a more modest agnosticism. It is one thing to claim not to know that God exists and to remain open to the possibility that what one experiences is in fact God trying to get through; it is quite another to have a testimony, so to speak, that God doesn't exist as Jonathan claims. If there is no God, then there is nothing that could possibly justify the conclusion that what was experienced was somehow really reliable or trustworthy as a way of knowing or believing that God in fact does not exist.

90: Posted By: Blake | September 06, 2007 07:39 AM

Lincoln -- interesting idea about God as experimenter gathering data. However, doesn't such a view rather make God like those students in the shock experiments who were willing to deliver a lethal dosage of voltage in the name of science? Most of us wouldn't count such a Nazi inspired program as worthy of any being we call God.

91: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 06, 2007 10:09 AM

Jonathan: You accept that your view entails epiphenomenalism. I'm sure that you know that epiphenomenalism entails that our thoughts and mental predicates are merely a by-product and never a cause of our actions. That means that our thoughts and mental properties play no role in our lives.

This isn't an accurate characterization of my view. Thoughts are brain states, in my view, and therefore have a direct causal relationship to future thoughts and actions.

However, you don't seem to appreciate that epiphenomenalism entails just what I argued, i.e., that our thoughts and mental properties play no role in what do. Our actions aren't rationally guided.

This assumes that rationality cannot be embodied in the action of physical forms. It tries to preserve the monopoly on rationality for your abstracted idea of thought. Because thoughts are brain states in my view, rational thoughts are brain states operating in rational ways. No problems.

That isn't to say we might not accidentally do rational things - just like natural selection, it is just random....

With respect to evolution and natural selection as an explanation for our minds and other human properties, I suggest that it is just randomly possible that we just randomly occurred as you believe.

Natural selection isn't just random. This demonstrates a superficial understanding of natural selection. Your later argument about the probability of the reliability of our rational faculties suffers from this misunderstanding.

However, the probability that our epistemic faculties are reliable is extremely low. Of course if God guided evolution, we have a good reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have been produced in such a way as to make them reliable. If blind natural selection is relied upon, however, we have a very probable reason to believe that our faculties are unreliable. Since we must rely on these cognitive faculties as the very basis of this kind of assessment of reliability of our faculties, we have a defeater for our very trust of our reason at all.

I don't have absolute trust in human reason, especially unaided by peer review. I have some faith in it, however.

You realize that your argument here shows that your trust in your epistemic faculties is founded on the assumption that God guided your creation. Based on this assumption, you accept the evidence of feelings of transcendence to believe that God exists. Your initial assumption begs the question.

So it may have happened just as you say that we came to have a massively parallel processor of information (the brain) that has scads and scads of unnecessary information processing power far beyond what is necessary for survival just so we can have an epiphenomenal illusion that are thoughts are somehow related to our choices and what we do, but it is an incredible waste of resources that strain credulity.

I did not suggest that we have excessive brain power beyond what benefits our survival. I suggested that the brain power that natural selection has endowed us with because it benefits our survival also happens to allow us to do other interesting things, as a side effect.

I'll work on that contrasting list of phenomenon between mysticism and the Mormon experience, but I'll warn you that your list is a mischaracterization of the mystic experience.

I wanted to focus on an experience that you claim that we both have in common. You had an experience where a person had a problem and you were able to hone in on it without being told what the problem was. I had an experience where I knew that God wanted me to tell a young lady that I hardly knew that God wanted her to stop thinking about suicide when she responded in utter surprise by asking, "how did you know?" I knew that I didn't know how I knew, but I knew that I knew. I had no natural way of knowing however.

First, I want to point out that your experience is not one that shows that as an atheist you have similar experiences to theists or Mormons as you claimed. You admitted that you had this experience as a theist and you experienced it as coming from God.

I interpreted it as coming from God based on what I had been taught to believe. This reminds me of a story. :)

When my family got our first television when I was very young, I loved to watch The Lone Ranger. I watched people get shot and die and wondered how they could possibly get someone to voluntarily die on television. I concluded that these actors must be prisoners convicted to die who were given the option to die on television rather than in the death chamber.

Given my assumption that those deaths were real, this was a perfectly valid interpretation of what I saw on television. When I learned that those actors didn't really die, I changed my conclusion.

Conclusions under false assumptions shouldn't be given priority over later conclusions based on a better understanding.

So it isn't a basis for arguing that as an atheist you have similar experiences.

In the year that I've been an atheist, I haven't had that particular experience which I had once during the decades that I was a Mormon. If I live to be twice as old, perhaps I'll have it once or twice again, and I'll have a different explanation.

Second, you say that you now just give this experience a different interpretation. The problem is that you have no possible explanation for how you could have come to have such knowledge from a merely naturalistic world-view.

No, you simply don't accept the explanation that I've offered (which didn't involve extra-sensory perception). I think you're laboring under the assumption that absolutely no information was available to me. Why don't you accept the explanation I offered? What makes it impossible?

I submit that had you been an atheist at the time you felt the promptings that described, you would not have trusted them to be accurate because the most reasonable interpretation form an atheistic world-view is that you were just having a weird experience that couldn't possibly be veridical.

This obviously misunderstands my explanation of the incident. Did you read my explanation?

91: Posted By: Kyle R | September 06, 2007 10:10 AM

Blake, I realise I shouldn't have tied 'transcendental experience' to the specific case of 'what Eric calls'. And as I say, I myself mean by 'atheism' something broader than mere rigid materialism, which even science disgarded last century. I personally don't have a strong opinion one way or the other on God so probably fall into the agnostic category. But I do tend instinctively towards a differing view than yourself of 'God'. Basically, something less constrained by anthropomorphism and more akin to supra-conscious nature: a supra-conscious nature encompassing everything, within which the physical and spiritual are not essentially different things but merely different levels or aspects of one thing, the one stuff - full of intelligence - that everything is made out of.

From a viewpoint where spirit and matter are not different things but merely different co-ordinates in the big cosmic quantum flux of it all, our 'bodily experiences' are already 'spiritual' to certain degree. By the same token, 'spiritual' experiences have to register bodily to be comprehended. This makes sense in the language generally used of the experience of the spirit: a 'heart filling' or a 'mind suddenly calm and at ease' or an 'uplifting' sensation.

So when I asked about your statement I meant to say that spiritual or transcendental experiences are not at odds with atheism - a disbelief in God - per se, except where the atheism is completely materialist. You've pointed out that Jonathan seems to define it this way, in which case your point would make sense.

For me transcendence would be - in this case - simply being attuned to the spiritual aspect of matter, with the powerful sense of wonder that would provide.

92: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 06, 2007 10:14 AM

Jonathan said to Rich: "Do you believe that God was unable to create everyone in an exalted state (or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices), or do you believe that God chose not to?"

Nonsensical question from the Mormon perspective since God didn't create anyone ex nihilo. The answer is the Japanese "mu".

That's why I added the extra phrase "or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices". This doesn't depend on creation ex nihilo.

In other words, why doesn't God wave a magic wand to cleanse all of our sins and exalt everyone without exception? That should be within the power of an unlimited God.

The idea that God didn't create us ex nihilo also shows that God is limited, by the way.

93: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 06, 2007 10:25 AM

The problem is, Kyle, that there is nothing that could be experienced that is transcendental if atheism is true, and that for at least two reasons. First, how do we transcend our bodily limitations on such a view? Remember that Jonathan has consistently insisted that all of our experience is merely bodily experience -- experiences delivered to us through bodily senses. How could one take seriously the experience of transcendence when we cannot transcend?

The transcendence that I speak of is the transcendence of our sense of self. It is a change in perspective or perception. It is a feeling or experience well within the bounds of naturalism.

Notice the vague reference to "something transcendent"? Well, just what "the transcendent"? What is it they are referring to? I wonder what kind of arrogance leads to atheism rather than a more modest agnosticism.

It's a matter of probabilities. I don't know that there is no God. In fact I believe it is impossible to know such a thing. Therefore I am a strong agnostic: I can't know and neither can you. However, the evidence available to me suggests that the likelihood of a Biblical or Mormon God is exceedingly small, on par with the likelihood of Thor, Zeus, or a living Santa Claus. Hence, I am also an atheist. I'm an agnostic atheist who is willing to believe in YHWH if evidence is presented, but I'm not holding my breath.

94: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 06, 2007 10:32 AM

I'd just like to point out that I'm not a strict materialist. To muddy the water, I'll throw out that I'm open to the idea of an impersonal, pantheist/panentheist concept of God like Brahman or Ein Sof.

95: Posted By: Kyle R | September 06, 2007 02:14 PM

Blake says, I wonder what kind of arrogance leads to atheism rather than a more modest agnosticism. It is one thing to claim not to know that God exists and to remain open to the possibility that what one experiences is in fact God trying to get through; it is quite another to have a testimony, so to speak, that God doesn't exist as Jonathan claims.

Jonathan says,I don't know that there is no God. In fact I believe it is impossible to know such a thing. Therefore I am a strong agnostic: I can't know and neither can you. However, the evidence available to me suggests that the likelihood of a Biblical or Mormon God is exceedingly small...

Blake, it's difficult for me to understand the logical difference between a testimony that God exists and a testimony that God doesn't exist. They are both absolute assertions that come down in the end to belief and the personality of one's spiritual/physical senses. They both also depend entirely on what we mean by the world 'God' in the first place. If we propose, side by side, the Mormon God and what Jonathan calls "an impersonal, pantheist/panenteist concept of God like Brahman or Ein Sof" then these are two different definitions of the word 'God'. The absolute assertion that one knows for sure of the existence of the Mormon God to the exclusion of others is, in effect, a form of atheism in relation to the other 'God' just as belief in only the latter entails a kind of 'atheism' towards the Mormon God.

I personally feel this apparently unbridgeable gap is only a gap of concept, imagination and language, not necessarily one of two irreconcilable realities.

Jonathan you say "the likelihood of a Biblical or Mormon God is exceedingly small". Compared to the Brahmin-supra-nature God it is the LDS concept - not as it actually is in Joseph Smith's thought but as it is almost always expressed by LDS commentators - that itself that might be described as small. I'm not saying it is small-mindedness to hold to it or that it might not turn out to be true, but merely that in comparison with some concepts of God and even with the full implications of Joseph Smith's theology, the 'common' Mormon concept of God is quite limited and does not even do the LDS God himself full justice.

The powers and type of being-in-the-cosmos that the Mormon God must have to behave as he is believed to behave must somehow embrace the characteristics of what we more usually discuss in relation to a Brahmin kind of God. The Mormon God, though a Glorified Man, must have some means of interacting with nature on a scale and depth that is comparable to more Hindu or Animistic concepts of God.

To know all things and be aware of every seed that falls to the ground; to be personally aware of the thoughts, feelings and spiritual states of billions upon billions of spirit children in the spirit world and on earths like ours...this requires some diffusion through space and time of his being that is not, as far as I know, discussed in Mormon theology, but is logically - and 'spiritually' - entailed by it. And such being-throughout-the-cosmos also means that the anthropomorphic LDS God is so unconstrained by his anthropomorphic form - in his actions in the universe - that the day-to-day concept of this anthropomorphism in LDS culture is almost of necessity a metaphor in some ways, because of the limitations of our minds.

My point in all this is that to greatly enlarge upon the Mormon concept of God and perhaps dispense with the world 'God' itself - which is after all only a word - is not necessarily to disbelieve in him. It can also be to face what such a being or force of nature (since matter and spirit are co-eternal) must actually be like. An active Mormon could themselves do this. They might find themselves describing the LDS God in language that Mormon dialogue does not usually do, and they might even be accused of heresy, but this enlargement of the language itself is not atheism, nor - I want to emphasize - contrary to the substance of Joseph Smith's teachings. It may - or equally may not be - a rejection of the LDS God. But it is not automatically so. It's merely expressing the feeling of 'God' - supra-being - in one's own language and reaching out to him with one's [God-given] imagination.

This may involved dispensing with the word 'God' itself. It may mean redefining what we mean by 'physical' and 'spiritual'. But belief and disbelief are very intimately connected, and the gaps are more illusory than real, in my view.

95: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 06, 2007 02:22 PM

Kyle R, I do think, as you suggest, that there is a loose analogy to be made between the experimental world idea and our laboratories; however, as you point out, the analogy does not work as an example of mutual salvation. A stronger analogy, although still not a good example of mutual salvation, can be made with the world simulations that we are already beginning to run for security purposes. Check this out:

http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/

Blake, thank you for clarifying your understanding of naturalism. Regarding the experimental world idea, the science student analogy (like the laboratory analogy mentioned by Kyle R) does not work as an example of mutual salvation. In the experimental world, the long-term existence of the inhabitants of the experimental world depends on the long-term existence of the creators of the experimental world because the experimental world is embedded in the creator world.

96: Posted By: Rich Knapton | September 06, 2007 06:13 PM

Man I never knew Evil was so popular.

Reference # 76.

Jonathan: “So when you say "I don't think we can do that", did you mean that we can't understand the nature of God or did you mean that we can't place limitations on God?”

We can only understand the nature of God in part, the part he reveals. And because of this, we cannot place limitations on God.

Jonathan: “The Book of Mormon says that God cannot change or be unjust otherwise he would cease to be God. This implies that there are laws higher than God which he must live within.”

I don’t read it that way. What it says is that this what it means to be a God. This is an example of revelation providing us information as to some aspect of the nature of God.

Jonathan: “I didn't hide my godlessness.”

That’s not what I meant. Rather than trying to show God has limitations and therefore is of little use, why not just say I don’t believe in God. Why are you so determined to try show that God has limitation and therefore cannot be God?

Jonathan: "Do you believe that God was unable to create everyone in an exalted state (or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices), or do you believe that God chose not to?

I think what you are asking me is could God have created us as exalted beings with no unacceptable consequences. The answer is …… hell if I know. I don’t know what God is capable of. Nobody knows. And that’s the point. We simply do not have the information by which to reasonably answer the question. Why God chose this system is known only to God. What I think we do know is this was the method by which God became exalted and it is the method by which we may become exalted.

Jonathan: "I don't follow how intensity justifies your believe that your feelings come from God. Methamphetamines, I am told, produce a pretty intense experience, more intense than love or sex. It seems like you're grasping at straws to justify believing God is plucking your emotional heartstrings.”

Justifying my beliefs is not what I was talking about. I simply brought up a naturalistic line of research that MAY explain how God uses feelings in communicating with. Look, Jonathan, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You have asked what I believe and I’m trying to explain that belief.

Jonathan, “Using your inborn desire for something to justify your belief in that something could justify anything. "I want God to exist, so he must. I want to believe that I'll live forever, so that must be true. I want everyone to love me, so they must. I want beautiful women to throw themselves at me, so... where are they?" Wishful thinking isn't a good justification for a belief.”

It is quite clear that you have little knowledge of the concept of affective markers or somatic markers, as Dr. Damasio likes to call them. This is not your fault. You have simply not followed that line of neurological research. Get his book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, And the Human Brain. I think you will find it interesting. It has nothing to do with God or religion but does challenge the idea that man is a rational being.

Rich

97: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 06, 2007 07:50 PM

Jonathan: “I didn't hide my godlessness.”

That’s not what I meant. Rather than trying to show God has limitations and therefore is of little use, why not just say I don’t believe in God. Why are you so determined to try show that God has limitation and therefore cannot be God?

This post was about the problem of evil which demonstrates (convincingly in my opinion) that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is an impossibility given the fact of evil. If your God is limited, then the fact of evil poses no threat to the existence of God.

Luckily for most Mormons, their God is limited so they have an out against the problem of evil.

Part of my determination to show you that you believe in a limited God comes from the irony that by insisting on his limitless nature, you make him vulnerable to the problem of evil. I'm trying to help you out in a perverse way. :)

Oh, and if I'd just said "I don't believe in God", would we be having this interesting conversation?

Jonathan: "Do you believe that God was unable to create everyone in an exalted state (or unable to exalt everyone who ever lived perfectly as if they had never sinned and without regard to their choices), or do you believe that God chose not to?

I think what you are asking me is could God have created us as exalted beings with no unacceptable consequences. The answer is …… hell if I know.

So you plead ignorance. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's contrary to the spirit of inquiry. It's still a pretty convenient method to avoid examining your beliefs.

Justifying my beliefs is not what I was talking about.... Jonathan, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You have asked what I believe and I’m trying to explain that belief.

I asked what you believe because your beliefs seemed inconsistent and unjustified. The spirit of philosophical inquiry means that we examine beliefs, not just present them like completed works of art ready to be put on a pedestal.

Jonathan, “Using your inborn desire for something to justify your belief in that something could justify anything. "I want God to exist, so he must. I want to believe that I'll live forever, so that must be true. I want everyone to love me, so they must. I want beautiful women to throw themselves at me, so... where are they?" Wishful thinking isn't a good justification for a belief.”

It is quite clear that you have little knowledge of the concept of affective markers or somatic markers, as Dr. Damasio likes to call them.

That's true enough. I don't know much about it, but it sounds interesting. But I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to this:

As such, we have a high degree of affinity, if not need, for religion. I think that God, through evolution, has created us (human kind) with that need.

What you seem to be doing here is presenting humanity's affinity for religion as evidence of God's handiwork. Perhaps that wasn't your intent?

98: Posted By: Kyle R | September 07, 2007 12:56 AM

Lincoln. I was sent some things on the DoD simulations a couple months back but thanks for reminding me of it as I'd let it slip from my mind. Yes, it's a better matching analogy. Though as you point out the mutual salvation element is still missing.

But then I wonder if it needs to be. If God is already presumably 'saved' then mutual salvation isn't necessary, unless the programme of looking after our salvation is necessary to somehow maintain his own. This throws a wrench into 'unconditional love' on some levels.

I've often wondered how God - in the LDS concept - 'progresses'. After all, eternal progression applies to Him as well.

With respect to the problem of Evil how about this foggy idea.

We sin. God is sinless. There's evil in the world and the cosmos. Yet God eternally progresses. So how is it possible for him to be perfect? Eternal progression implies that sin and perfection are always relative. God is perfect and sinless compared to us. He's at a qualitatively different level where his love, knowledge and power are immense, yet he can still 'progress'.

There is the logical implication in some of Joseph Smith's teachings that there are Gods out there at quantum leaps of love, knowledge and power beyond our God. He says those Gods are not our business but he brings them into the equation none the less.

There's variety in creation. All Gods won't have the same 'management style'. For our God to progress he must be learning. He must make 'mistakes'. Not human mistakes. He's already far beyond that. But divine learning processes where configuring the best possible arrangement for his spirit children is something he's still figuring out. He himself is still learning, eternally 'becoming'. At the same time, the whole plan includes mechanisms whereby we don't have to pay the long term price for any of his 'learning processes'.

Yet we may still have to feel the effect of them. God is described - metaphorically and literally - as our father. Perhaps part of our learning process is to understand and get beyond his 'mistakes' as well as our own.

Perhaps the mutual salvation lies in this. He's collecting data from us for his own existential project and makes a contract where he helps us along a higher path in return. He does this out of love and existential necessity much as any mortal parent does. We agree to go through it, with all the blips, because this protectorship - although it's very controlling and frustrating and downright nasty sometimes - offers us a minimalisation of our own existential risk on an extremely desirable level. So desirable that a lot of suffering and confusion along the way is worth it.

Krikey, I realise I've just made our relationship with God sound like a deal with the devil.

99: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 07, 2007 11:54 AM

Blake,

Research completed (at least as far as time will allow). Doing a bit of asking around and some Google searches turned up a discussion on the Sunstone blog (which Clark commented on, by the way) and New Light on Mormon Mysticism by Kerry Shirts. The latter should be particularly interesting because he addresses Nibley's criticism of mysticism, from which you seem to take your cue.

It's also interesting to note that Kerry Shirts claims that Nibley's son said that Nibley had changed his mind about mysticism later in life. Double hearsay, I know, but interesting.

1. It is ineffable, no concepts or words can express the experience.

The mystics that I asked confirmed that this is an oversimplification. If you read Kerry Shirts and Joe Swick (who commented on the blog) you will see that mystics indeed use many words to talk about the experience. Volume upon volume have been written by mystics about mysticism. If words are useless to the mystic, then these books are unexplainable.

What cannot be communicated in words is the essence of the experience which must be experienced for oneself. Words are useful to the mystic, especially in communicating with those who have shared the experience, but they have limits.

This is in no way different than Mormonism. I'll reiterate the passage that I quoted earlier:

"Reading the experience of others, or the revelations given to them, can never give us a comprehensive view of our condition and true relation to God. Knowledge of these things can only be obtained by experience through the ordinances of God set forth for that purpose. Could you gaze into heaven five minutes, you would know more than you would by reading all that ever was written on the subject." (Teachings, p. 324.)

Joseph Smith says exactly what the mystics have said: that "reading the experience of others" does not confer the same knowledge as experiencing it for oneself.

Several times on my mission I used the analogy of salt to explain the ineffability of the experience of the Holy Spirit. I'd say that I could not explain the experience of the Holy Spirit exactly like I couldn't explain how salt tastes to someone who had never tasted salt for themselves. And this must be true otherwise reading the scriptures alone would be sufficient for a Mormon testimony. The Holy Spirit would be unnecessary because all knowledge could be conferred by the scriptures.

But this isn't what Mormons believe. They teach that each believer must communicate with the Holy Spirit in order to know for themselves.

The ineffability of the essence of the mystic experience is the exact same obstacle that prophets experience in trying to express their vision in words.

2. There is a loss of self-identity such that the distinction between the experincer and what is experienced dissolves.

As one friend pointed out, this is quite a nice use of words to describe the ineffable. :)

While this description is accurate to a point, it suffers from two weaknesses. This is not the only type of experience that mystics encounter. Focusing in on one experience and calling it the "classical" mystical experience oversimplifies a complex phenomenon. This comes from private correspondence, so you'll have to trust me on this. :)

The second weakness is that it seems to portray this experience as destructive and nihilistic. Rather it is the experience of absorption of the self into a True Self, or becoming one with Christ as some would say. In that sense, it is edifying and not destructive at all.

3. The experience is achieved through asceticism, self-denial and techniques of breathing and meditation.

In this regard, this is exactly like the Mormon experience. Mysticism is primarily the practice of meditation, of directing the attention appropriately which often involves deep study. Keeping that in mind, note the words of Joseph F. Smith on the circumstances of receiving D&C 138:

"I sat in my room pondering over the scriptures; And reflecting upon the great atoning sacrifice that was made by the Son of God,... While I was thus engaged, my mind reverted to the writings of the apostle Peter,... as I read I was greatly impressed,... As I pondered over these things which are written, the eyes of my understanding were opened, and the Spirit of the Lord rested upon me,..."

This sounds like Joseph F. Smith was focusing his attention exactly as a mystic would. You said as much yourself: "Most often if comes in conjunction with intense and sincere study, searching and thoughtful pondering." A mystic would recognize this their formula.

Prayer is also a meditative practice. Mormons close their eyes and fold their arms to shut out external distractions. They focus their attention on their God and await answers that come through impressions and experiences of peace and elevation. Again, "search, ponder, and pray" is a mystical formula.

As far as asceticism goes, all I need to say is "fast and testimony meeting". ;)

4. The experience results in the disparagement or denial of the reality of the natural world and acceptance of human experience as a vast illusion.

Some mystics would characterize this instead as a realization that reality isn't as we thought it was. The mystic experiences reality from a different perspective, one which they would describe as transcendent. While some schools of mysticism may emphasize self-abnegation, this is not generally true. Some see our experience as real, just not the whole story. I don't see a difference between this and Mormon doctrine.

In the end, Mormonism is deeply mystical and shares many of mysticism's practices.

I understand why you feel it necessary to see a distinction where there is no difference. As Kerry Shirts pointed out, Mormonism plays up the idea of uniqueness - the Only True Church. Connections with other religious traditions seem to weaken that claim to uniqueness. You want prophets to be different to maintain the distinction. Unfortunately, I can't see a distinction from your description.

I hasten to add that while I don't think these transcendent experiences point the experiencer toward one dogma or another, I don't think they are useless. I value their motivating and transformative effects while maintaining a naturalistic point of view.

100: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 07, 2007 02:55 PM

Kyle R, the ideas you expressed are similar to thoughts I've entertained, although I wouldn't say it's so bad as making a deal with the devil. Paul mentions a couple kinds of Gods in the New Testament: one that would raise itself above all that is called God, declaring itself God; another that would raise us together as joint-heirs in God, "if so be that we suffer with him" -- Christ in you. I am inspired by communal participatory atonement leading to mutual salvation.

101: Posted By: Kyle R | September 08, 2007 05:36 AM

Sounds like a good thing to me, Lincoln.

102: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 08, 2007 10:09 AM

Here is a presentation I gave that, in part, combines Mormon ideas (like communal atonement) and Transhumanist ideas (like world simulations) to address the problem of evil:

http://transfigurism.org/community/files/11/second_life_20070429/default.aspx

103: Posted By: Kyle R | September 08, 2007 10:55 AM

Lincoln I've saved the material to look at, which I fully intend to do because your angle interests me. I'm off on a canal boat trip this weekend but will respond next week.

104: Posted By: Blake | September 08, 2007 12:00 PM

Jonathan:

In # 99 you admit that the annihilation of the self and the ineffability of the experience (wherein the experience of the individual dissolves into the the experience of the All) is "one type of mystical experience" and that there are other types. Bingo! That is precisely what I have been saying. However, you want to say that all Mormon experiences are just like this type of "classical experience" that is different from the other types you recognize (yes I stated it that way to emphasize the inherent absurdity of your position as I understand it). When Joseph Smith says that there is a difference between reading about the experiences of others and having one's own experiences, that hardly demonstrates that his experience is "mystical." It merely shows that there is a difference between experiential and discursive knowledge which, quite frankly, everyone recognizes. Further, study and reading are very different from breathing and meditative techniques practiced by ascetics. The mystical ascetis would never consider thinking something through or reading as techniques to prepare for a mystical experience!

Here is what I suggest. Tell me what you mean by a "mystical experience." I'm beginning to get the feeling that you simply mean an experience interpreted as being from a "spiritual source," otherworldly or non-naturalistically explained. If that is what you mean, then every spiritual experience of any stripe will fit this broad definition -- and so would near-death experiences, inspiration and mere insight.

I would also suggest that you read the experiences of mystics like Meister Eckhardt, Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi to see what I am talking about. You might want to look at what Evelyn Underhill, Walter Stace, and William James have to say about how they distinguish prophetic or "mundane" spiritual experiences from "mystical" experiences. Maybe the best source on this type of discussion is Abraham Heschel on The Prophets.

105: Posted By: Blake | September 08, 2007 12:14 PM

Kyle said: "Blake, it's difficult for me to understand the logical difference between a testimony that God exists and a testimony that God doesn't exist. They are both absolute assertions that come down in the end to belief and the personality of one's spiritual/physical senses. They both also depend entirely on what we mean by the world 'God' in the first."

Kyle, your bafflement over testimonies of God's existence is precisely the nub of the problem. Put simply, if I experience God enlightening me, speaking to me, appearing to me and so forth then I have good reason to believe that God exists. If the experience includes surety of its on veridicality as I believe LDS spiritual experiences do, then they also entail their gift of trustworthiness.

However, an atheist has absolutely no reason to believe any "experience of enlightenment" or other experience of insight that God doesn't exist. Why? Because if God doesn't exist there is nothing that could cause such an experience or provide any basis to believe that it is an experience of reality. What could cause an experience of "God not existing"? As Jonathan I think recognizes, either proving or experiencing an existential negative is logically impossible. Moreover, as I have argued, given that the process of survival of the fittest could not explain how we could be fitted with trustworthy cognitive faculties for theoretic matters, there is no reason to trust any experience or any rational conclusion. We have no reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have the resources to pierce through to reality.

Jonathan: At first you admitted that your physicalism entails epiphenomenalism and then you backed off of that. Good -- except I am at a loss to see how your demand for proof could lead to anything but physicalism and attendant inability to explain properties of mind. You state:

"This assumes that rationality cannot be embodied in the action of physical forms. It tries to preserve the monopoly on rationality for your abstracted idea of thought. Because thoughts are brain states in my view, rational thoughts are brain states operating in rational ways." No, I believe that rationality can be embodied by an already rational mind; what I don't believe is that rationality is somehow already present in the actions of mere neurons or matter. There is no software without a computer programmer with a mind acting on the matter.

You also assert that my argument against the reliability of our cognitive faculties misunderstand evolutionary theory. First, merely asserting it doesn't make it so and you haven't even so much as suggested how it misunderstand evolutionary theory. You bare assertion without reason or evidence leave me at a loss. I would add that the argument has been widely discussed in the philosophical literature and the notion of random mutation and merely selecting due to accidents or random features that happen to obtain in the environment of an ecosystem are precisely the bottom line of explanation in evolutionary theory. So I'll ask for at least some explanation of your claim. As it is, you've merely dodged and ignored the argument -- or assumed that your statement that it somehow misunderstands evolutionary theory is self-evident. I may be obtuse, but it ain't self-evident to me!

105: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 08, 2007 12:43 PM

However, you want to say that all Mormon experiences are just like this type of "classical experience" that is different from the other types you recognize (yes I stated it that way to emphasize the inherent absurdity of your position as I understand it).

I'm glad that I don't believe what you think I believe. :) Rather, I believe that all Mormon experiences are shared by many people, mystics included.

It merely shows that there is a difference between experiential and discursive knowledge which, quite frankly, everyone recognizes.

In my experience, that is exactly what mystics mean when they say that their experiences are ineffable, nothing beyond what you've just said.

Further, study and reading are very different from breathing and meditative techniques practiced by ascetics. The mystical ascetis would never consider thinking something through or reading as techniques to prepare for a mystical experience!

I have heard quite the opposite. Some mystics of particular traditions seek to reach a level of absorption in their study which leads to the concentration that I mentioned and which seems to have led to the experience you mentioned earlier and to Joseph F. Smith receiving D&C 138. I admit that Mormonism doesn't have an overtly meditative tradition (which might include breathing techniques), but meditation is present in Mormon scripture and practice if you're willing to see it.

Tell me what you mean by a "mystical experience."

My working definition seems to be any experience typically encountered in the practice of the mystic traditions which is not usually experienced as a part of common, everyday experience. By this definition, Mormonism has practices and consequent experiences that are essentially mystical. Mystics have the same experiences which you have characterized as uniquely Mormon. Also, my definition is orthogonal to the spiritualism/naturalism divide.

106: Posted By: Blake | September 08, 2007 01:58 PM

Jonathan: With all due respect (and perhaps a bit more than is due) it seems to me that you just don't grasp fundamentally different phenomenology. If mystical experiences are "practices of mystic tradition" than you beg the question because I don't know what mystic tradition is unless it refers to the ascetic breathing and meditative practices which clearly are not part of the Mormon spiritual experience. If "it is that "which is not usually experienced as part of common, everyday experience" then any private experience at all (like all of our mental states) counts as mystical experiences. Further, watching Weber State win a football game is also a mystical experience on this view.

No mystics don't have the "same experiences" which I characterize as Mormon. Having a vision of God on his throne, hearing a voice, feeling a deep sense of knowing in the heart, are not what was described even remotely by Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila, and their experiences are taken as paradigmatic of "mystical experiences" in a well-established mystical tradition of the Pseudo Dionysius and the out-workings of neo-Platonism. Tell me truly, have you even read any of these?

I'm afraid we're going to have to just agree at this point that no further head-way can be made in dialogue on the issue. At least I'm in good company of the top scholars who have studied varieties of spiritual experiences.

107: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 08, 2007 04:43 PM

Jonathan: With all due respect (and perhaps a bit more than is due) it seems to me that you just don't grasp fundamentally different phenomenology.

:)

From where I stand, it seems that you refuse to grasp fundamentally identical phenomenology or acknowledge evidence that Mormonism isn't unique in this regard.

No mystics don't have the "same experiences" which I characterize as Mormon.

That's a bold statement demanding a large burden of proof.

Having a vision of God on his throne, hearing a voice, feeling a deep sense of knowing in the heart, are not what was described even remotely by Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila, and their experiences are taken as paradigmatic of "mystical experiences" in a well-established mystical tradition of the Pseudo Dionysius and the out-workings of neo-Platonism. Tell me truly, have you even read any of these?

Holding up a handful of examples of mystics who didn't have those experiences doesn't amount to evidence that no mystic experiences such things in the course of their practice, no matter how paradigmatic your examples are held to be by a few selected traditions. Your description here reminds me of Merkabah mysticism. Mysticism is a big world that you seem to want to either ignore or narrowly define.

I'm afraid we're going to have to just agree at this point that no further head-way can be made in dialogue on the issue. At least I'm in good company of the top scholars who have studied varieties of spiritual experiences.

I'll see your scholars of spiritual experiences and raise you the practicing mystics in my acquaintance. :)

Frankly, I'm mostly disappointed. I had hoped to perhaps really examine my assumptions with your help. I got to do some of that - thank you - but I also had to wade through a lot of biased apologetics which only hindered good discourse. I was consistently withheld the courtesy of a close reading (or is my writing is difficult to read?). Much of my evidence was never addressed directly but conveniently ignored instead. I spent a lot of time wrestling against stereotypes of my position and of mysticism.

I was never given a justification that private emotional experiences are trustworthy in justifying Mormon belief, given a robust reason to believe that they are indeed spiritual experiences, or shown convincingly that Mormon experiences are unique to Mormonism. Any lack of headway, unless I am mistaken, is because these reasons and evidences don't exist. The religious may say that this is where faith steps in. If so, this is where I bow out.

I leave with the impression that mainstream Mormonism requires carefully selective awareness and stereotypes of opposing viewpoints. That's part of why I left in the first place.

Thank you again. I learned something. :)

108: Posted By: Blake | September 08, 2007 05:01 PM

Jonathan: "Holding up a handful of examples of mystics who didn't have those experiences doesn't amount to evidence that no mystic experiences such things in the course of their practice, no matter how paradigmatic your examples are held to be by a few selected traditions. Your description here reminds me of Merkabah mysticism. Mysticism is a big world that you seem to want to either ignore or narrowly define."

Here's why it is frustrating to dialogue on this issue with you. All I have to show to rebut your claim that all of these experiences are essentially identical is to show that there are many that are not! You have claimed that they are all identical -- a categorical claim. Now you admit that they are not. Showing that there are some that don't match up with Mormon experience is all that I need to demonstrate that your position is simply uninformed (indeed, I simply referred to the best known and most studied experiences at that that you now admit are a few examples that don't meet your caricature of a Mormon spiritual experience). All of this suggests to me that you haven't read about these experiences, haven't really considered them, and that you simply refuse to learn.

I'm not impressed by the "practicing mystics of your acquaintance" because such private communications hold not water at all. I'll take your discourteous tone here and your slur that somehow I haven't read what you have to say as simply unfounded ad hominem. Frankly, I expected better from you.

Even now you categorize and reduce spiritual experiences to "private emotional experiences" when you have admitted in this very thread that we cannot escape the connative or emotional influence on any human experience -- including spiritual experiences. I have given you more than enough reason to accept justification of spiritual experiences. Your own experience was that you experienced it as God revealing to you what you could not know and you say that you re-interpret it without giving anything approaching a reasonable interpretation of your own experience. With such a refusal to grant your own experience what it entails, I don't wonder why you refuse to hear the spirit. I asked for some explanation of how I could know that a young lady that I didn't even know was contemplating suicide and what I get from you in return is deafening silence. And you have the gall to suggest that I don't read carefully?

You leave me with the impression that you want to appear to score points without even considering the implications of what you say.

109: Posted By: Blake | September 08, 2007 05:04 PM

Jonathan: BTW I'm still waiting for a shred of reasoning or evidence that I have somehow mischaracterised or misunderstood non-theistic evolution. I gave that challenge twice now and still we have nothing more than silence and your bare and unsupported statement of your view. Well?

110: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 09, 2007 02:44 AM

Here's why it is frustrating to dialogue on this issue with you. All I have to show to rebut your claim that all of these experiences are essentially identical is to show that there are many that are not! You have claimed that they are all identical -- a categorical claim. Now you admit that they are not.

It appears that we've been working on two different problems. My claim is that mystic practice leads to a wide range of generally reproducible experiences. Further I claim that Mormon experience is a proper subset thereof. I never intended to claim that all "spiritual" experiences were identical, just that Mormon experiences are not unique to Mormonism and in many aspects currently producible in the lab.

I'm not impressed by the "practicing mystics of your acquaintance" because such private communications hold not water at all.

That is completely fair and understandable. I didn't expect you to give credence to my statements based on private correspondence. I have, however, provided various public sources of information about mysticism which contradicts the simple characterization you (and Nibley) offered.

I'll take your discourteous tone here and your slur that somehow I haven't read what you have to say as simply unfounded ad hominem.

Perhaps your continued misunderstanding of why I would choose to use the phrase "spiritual experience" requiring me to explain twice made me suspicious.

Even now you categorize and reduce spiritual experiences to "private emotional experiences" when you have admitted in this very thread that we cannot escape the connative or emotional influence on any human experience -- including spiritual experiences.

Before I can respond properly to this, I need an explanation of precisely what it would mean to escape that influence? Taking a first guess at the risk of responding to something you didn't say, I agree that we can't escape the experience of those influences, but we can obtain greater objectivity by consulting others and examining human behavior and bias through the scientific method. Personal experiences are rife with personal biases. I hope to transcend that subjectivity rather than enshrine it in my epistemology.

I asked for some explanation of how I could know that a young lady that I didn't even know was contemplating suicide and what I get from you in return is deafening silence. And you have the gall to suggest that I don't read carefully?

I offered my explanation which has at least as much to back it up as the idea that God (or demons, or aliens, or fairies, etc.) communicated that knowledge: "I believe the unconscious workings of the mind are more powerful than we are aware of consciously. Insight happens when we trust the unconscious promptings of our mind." I left it to you to demonstrate why my explanation requires more faith than your own.

You leave me with the impression that you want to appear to score points without even considering the implications of what you say.

I had already pondered most (but not all) of the implications that you've asked me to consider. They were not as dangerous to my belief system as you seem to assume. I think this was primarily because many of the implications I was asked to consider were for beliefs that I didn't hold. As one example, the argument that thought and rationality cannot have a causal role if materialism is valid would be more convincing if I believed that thoughts must be first-class, acausal entities. That argument doesn't show the implications of what I said (at least what I meant to say) because I don't share that particular belief.

So I considered what you said but did not respond as expected. I appropriately responded with a clarification of my beliefs. If there are implications that I didn't consider properly, I'm still open to hearing them.

BTW I'm still waiting for a shred of reasoning or evidence that I have somehow mischaracterised or misunderstood non-theistic evolution. I gave that challenge twice now and still we have nothing more than silence and your bare and unsupported statement of your view. Well?

My primary objection to your characterization of evolution derives from these statements:

That isn't to say we might not accidentally do rational things - just like natural selection, it is just random....

With respect to evolution and natural selection as an explanation for our minds and other human properties, I suggest that it is just randomly possible that we just randomly occurred as you believe.

To which I responded "Natural selection isn't just random. This demonstrates a superficial understanding of natural selection." To characterize natural selection as a purely random process is a common but incorrect view. Consider this explanation by Douglas Futuyma:

... natural selection itself is the single process in evolution that is the antithesis of chance. It is predictable. It says that, within a specific environmental context, one genotype will be better than another genotype in survival or reproduction for certain reasons having to do with the way its particular features relate to the environment or relate to other organisms within the population. That provides predictability and consistency. So, if you have different populations with the same opportunity for evolution, you would get the same outcome.

Evolution depends on random genetic mutation but derives a less-than-random result. The reason that I didn't engage your arguments about evolution (twice) is because they suffer from the false premise that evolution produces a random result that could be treated as a random variable. This is the very same reason that I gave (twice).

111: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 09, 2007 08:52 AM

Blake, if I have understood correctly, you believe some kinds of spiritual experience are entirely unique to Mormons. Assuming I have not misunderstood, what kinds are those?

112: Posted By: Blake | September 09, 2007 12:34 PM

Jonathan: A part of our problem is that you apparently had an unspoken expectation or agenda to examine your assumptions that were not a part of the post (and frankly we're both guilty of a major thread jack). However, it is hard to respond to an unspoken agenda and particularly to assist you to examine assumptions which as far as I can see you've never elucidated.

For both Lincoln and Jonathan: No, I don't claim that there are spiritual experiences unique to Mormonism. I do claim that there are genuine spiritual experiences that provide a sufficient basis for commitment to Mormonism. In fact, it is simply a part of LDS belief that all persons have the light of Christ, the Holy Ghost can inspire and give revelation to all and that any honest seeker can know because the spirit abides. In fact, numerous converts have spiritual experiences that are accepted as genuine in LDS tradition like Wilford Woodruff's experience before becoming Mormon.

Jonathan: Here is what you offered by way of explained spiritual experiences: "I believe the unconscious workings of the mind are more powerful than we are aware of consciously. Insight happens when we trust the unconscious promptings of our mind. I left it to you to demonstrate why my explanation requires more faith than your own."

I suggest that you have offered no explanation whatsoever other than a big black box and faith in something so vague I admit I have no idea what you're talking about. Further, the unconscious mind is not a scientific idea. You say that the "unconscious mind" can explain knowing what we don't have access to as knowledge. How? What is the mechanism? Where is your scientific explanation? I felt pure intelligence flowing into me and I knew that I had a message for a young woman that I didn't know well, hadn't looked at really even before simply turning and telling her that God wanted her to stop contemplating suicide. Referring to the big black box of the unconscious is absolutely no explanation of that kind of experience as far as I'm concerned and I'm surprised that you think that it is.

Finally, my characterization of evolution as chance mutations in an ecosystem having accidental features isn't a mischaracterization -- just why you ignore that definition to focus on a snippet of sentence leads me to suspect that you are more interested in scoring points than dialoguing. That said, it is certainly true that mutations are random and whether the mutation will lead to survival is not guided by teleological purpose. In light of that, nothing you suggest comes close at all to explaining how the vastly over-determinative properties of mind could arise.

You state: "Evolution depends on random genetic mutation but derives a less-than-random result. The reason that I didn't engage your arguments about evolution (twice) is because they suffer from the false premise that evolution produces a random result that could be treated as a random variable. This is the very same reason that I gave (twice)."

Your assertion that a random mutation doesn't lead to a random result suffers from ignorance about chaos theory and the mathematics of randomness. As I said, this argument has been widely discussed in philosophy of religion and science and I am stunned that you just blow it off as you do. If mutations are random, then it follows taht what is selected for survival is ultimately random and unguided by purpose of producing a beneficial result that leads to greater survival. Further, the features of the ecosystem that will obtain are also variable and often random in the sense that they are unpredictable. For instance, we cannot predict the number, kinds or instances of mutations nor can we predict, without such knowledge, which features will appear to be chosen for survival. You need to read Dennett on Dawrin's Dangerous Idea. So let me be precise so that you can't use this canard again: By random I mean "not teleologically purposeful." I certainly don't mean that there isn't some basis for suggesting that one trait leads to survival rather than another. So the outcome isn't something that obtains for a purpose of accomplishing a result, but merely occurs without foresight and purpose. With that, the argument goes through. Frankly, I suspect that you're ducking it so that you can simply avoid having to address the argument in post # 78.

Jonathan: Your view of spiritual or transcendental experiences is so broad that it is merely a subset of human experiences with Mormon spiritual experiences being a subset of human experiences. So?

You say: "I hope to transcend that subjectivity rather than enshrine it in my epistemology." I suggest that you are seeking to escape your own skin. Do you doubt your own thoughts or that you in fact have them? Your thoughts are not open to public inspection or the scientific method. By this criteria you must doubt the existence of other minds since a machine would have exactly the same behavior.

113: Posted By: Blake | September 09, 2007 12:38 PM

Lincoln: In answer to your question, I elucidated in post # 56 the phenomenal elements of common Mormon spiritual experience. I don't believe that they are, in totality, widely shared by other religious traditions nor do I believe that what Jonathan and others have stated about their "atheistic transcendental" experiences has all of these features from what I have read here. However, I doubt that such experiences are unique and Mormon tradition holds that they are not unique because the Spirit is universally available to all persons.

114: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 09, 2007 02:26 PM

Blake,

I didn't expect you to dialog for my self-serving purposes. Rather I expected my purposes to be served naturally by good dialog.

No, I don't claim that there are spiritual experiences unique to Mormonism. I do claim that there are genuine spiritual experiences that provide a sufficient basis for commitment to Mormonism.

This position I can better respect even if I disagree. I regret if we wasted time based on my misunderstanding of your claims. My disagreements with this position are that 1) I see no evidence that we should take the experience at face value as contrasted with the hallucinations of mental illness or drugs (I'm not implying that "spiritual" experiences are a sign of mental illness) and 2) I see no reason that, if you have such an experience, Mormonism is a better choice of religion than any other. It seems that the context of the experience and the person's prior beliefs determine what they believe after the experience more than the content of the experience itself.

This is why when I have "spiritual" experiences now it should come as no surprise that I interpret them from a naturalistic point of view. A Hindu interprets them from within Hinduism coming to Hindu conclusions; a Mormon interprets them from within Mormonism coming to Mormon conclusions, and so on. This variety of conclusions hints to me that the content of these experiences are not strong enough in themselves to justify a particular religion or lack thereof. I conclude that an interpretation that relies on these experiences alone to determine which religion to select is unjustified. Further, I conclude that it is important when dealing with these experiences to account for our own biases and work to negate them. This leads me to conclude finally that such experiences are largely irrelevant in making a well informed choice.

Regarding the black box of the unconscious mind (non-conscious if you prefer), I can see no difference between this and the black box of an invisible God. I really didn't want to have to go down this path (a distraction in my opinion), but I think this viewpoint is supported by scientific studies. The common perception is that the conscious mind makes decisions. Studies are showing the opposite: the non-conscious mind makes decisions which the conscious mind rationalizes after the fact.

There is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened, rather than driving it. For example, experiments in 1985 by Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco suggested that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger. The idea that we have conscious free will may be an illusion, at least some of the time.

Even when we think we are making rational choices and decisions, this may be illusory too. The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalise them, says Kringelbach. (Why your brain tells tall tales)

My personal experience fits into this model that the unconscious mind did a lot of fancy footwork which my conscious mind interpreted after the fact as a communication from God. I suspect your experience would too, but of course I wasn't there.

Regarding evolution, I still see your argument in #78 is based on the assumption that natural selection produces a mathematically random result, which it doesn't. As such the premise "P(R | N&E) is low" is unjustified. Even if the premise were justified, a low probability is significantly different than a zero probability. The step from 1) to 2) requires the probability to be zero. Even the realization that evolution is not teleologically purposeful doesn't prevent evolution from producing a highly unlikely adaptation, especially if the adaptation can be a matter of degrees like intelligence. I see the argument as a non-starter.

I suggest that you are seeking to escape your own skin. Do you doubt your own thoughts or that you in fact have them? Your thoughts are not open to public inspection or the scientific method. By this criteria you must doubt the existence of other minds since a machine would have exactly the same behavior.

I am seeking to escape my own skin as much as possible. I doubt my own thoughts. Of course I have to accept a level of uncertainty as to the reliability of my own thoughts in order to function, but peer review ameliorates my concerns about my own subjectivity. I don't doubt that I experience my thoughts any more than I doubt that I experience the sensation of sweetness or heat.

My thoughts are becoming increasingly subject to public inspection through various technologies which can watch the brain work in realtime. Neuroscience has made leaps and bounds in understanding the mechanisms behind how we work.

Solipsism would be the most rigorous, intellectually honest position, but it isn't terribly practical. It's more useful to assume that it is false.

115: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 09, 2007 03:19 PM

Jonathan, my understanding is that you classify spiritual experience as a subset of emotional experience and that you consider spiritual experience irrelevant to rationality. Do you consider all emotional experience irrelevant to rationality? If so, why? If not, why is spiritual-emotional experience irrelevant while other emotional experience is relevant?

116: Posted By: Rich Knapton | September 10, 2007 09:25 PM

Reference : #97

Examining Beliefs

Jonathan: ”So you plead ignorance. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's contrary to the spirit of inquiry. It's still a pretty convenient method to avoid examining your beliefs. … I asked what you believe because your beliefs seemed inconsistent and unjustified. The spirit of philosophical inquiry means that we examine beliefs, not just present them like completed works of art ready to be put on a pedestal.”

When you get up in the morning do you examine your belief that the world is round? No of course not. What beliefs do we question? We only question those beliefs which come into question. That is to say those beliefs that we have reason to question. Therefore there is a limit to the beliefs we question. The idea behind questioning beliefs is to transform our beliefs into knowledge. I take a teleological approach to knowledge. That is to say that knowledge becomes knowledge when questions can be asked of it that could not be asked previously. Or, one can do things based on that knowledge that one could not do before.

Once beliefs have become knowledge and are an integral part of our world view there is little reason to go back and question them. So it is with religious beliefs. Once my religious beliefs have been converted to knowledge (testimony) there is little need to go back and question them again. They are not put on a pedestal but, rather, become a functioning part of my world view.

Problem of Evil

Jonathan: ”This post was about the problem of evil which demonstrates (convincingly in my opinion) that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God is an impossibility given the fact of evil. If your God is limited, then the fact of evil poses no threat to the existence of God. … Luckily for most Mormons, their God is limited so they have an out against the problem of evil. … Part of my determination to show you that you believe in a limited God comes from the irony that by insisting on his limitless nature, you make him vulnerable to the problem of evil. I'm trying to help you out in a perverse way. :)

Oh, and if I'd just said "I don't believe in God", would we be having this interesting conversation?

So, your nefarious plot is exposed! Let me explain that my response was not a copout but rather a refection of what I have been saying all along. All powerful, all knowing, and all loving God are, according to you, incompatible with the existence of evil. We know that evil is as necessary to the plan of salvation as good is. Without evil there would be no trial by which we can prove to ourselves worthy of becoming celestialized. The question is ‘from whence came evil’? If we say God created evil we wind up with all sorts of theological problems. If we say God did not create evil, we are left with an unanswered question. Now I could use the copout that it is unexplainable, as you suggested I would use, but I won’t. I will speculate, and that’s all it is, that evil is an emergent property of universe creation. Now we are gaining more and more insight into the creation of our physical universe. But Genesis tells us that all things were created spiritually before they were created physically. What is the nature of this spiritual creation. We haven’t a clue. We do know that in the process of the spiritual creation evil appears because it was coexistent with us as spirits. In fact, a third of the hosts of heaven fell under its force.

We understand there have been other Gods and other universes. If our universe is typical, evil existed in these worlds also. Now either each God created evil for their universes or evil is an emergent property of spiritual universe creation. I think the most likely answer is that evil is an emergent property of spiritual creation. It is also an important property of spiritual creation. But it is not a property God creates himself. Thus our all powerful God puts into action the creation of our spiritual universe. And our all knowing God knows that evil will emerge through this process even though He has not created it and our all loving God knows that evils appearance is necessary because without it there would be no way for us to become celestialized. Thus God did not create evil but allowed evil to appear because of its importance to the eternal progress of man.

One could ask, “couldn’t God have prevented the emergence of evil?” The retort to that is “why would He.” It is necessary for evil to exist in order for the plan of salvation to work. So to show that God has limits placed on him from an external source, it seems to me that you must distinguish what is the nature of Godhood, what is self-imposed limitations and what are external limitations. For God to exists it seems logical that He must have aspects. Without aspects there is no existence. God has, indeed, revealed to us that He does have aspects. He has also revealed to us that He has placed Himself under certain limitation with regard to the plan of salvation. None of this implies external limitations on God

We know that God has a particular nature because he has revealed to us certain aspects of that nature. We do not know the full extent of the nature of God because to do that we must be celestialized as he is. Terrestrial beings simply cannot understand the full nature of celestial beings. If they could, they would then be celestial beings and not terrestrial beings. This brings full circle as to why I do not know if God could create us as celestial beings from the beginning of creation. To know that I would have to know the full nature of God. And, I would also have to know what it is to create a spiritual and physical universe, which, of course, I also don’t know.

Affective Nature of Man

Jonathan: “But I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to this:

What you seem to be doing here is presenting humanity's affinity for religion as evidence of God's handiwork. Perhaps that wasn't your intent?

The speculative point I was trying to make is since we are affective beings and religion speaks to us in affective manners, what is the nature of religion to man. Why does man seem to need religion? I am sick to death of the discussion of the proofs of God. That discussion has been going on for over a thousand years. Enough already. If God exists and wants us to approach him in faith then He is darned sure going to create things so that is the only way to reach him. Science is not going to be able to prove the non-existence of God because religion operates on us at the affective level not the rational level. Do you know the definition of crazy? Doing the same thing over and over again, for a thousand years, and expecting a different answer.

I think a much more interesting question is why does man seem to need religion. What is the relationship there?

Rich

117: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 10, 2007 10:54 PM

Lincoln,

I consider "spiritual" experiences useless and irrelevant in picking a religion. Their nature doesn't seem suited to that purpose. Other than that, I can think of a few good things to come out of them.

Rich,

For God to exists it seems logical that He must have aspects.

Right. For God to be a part of the universe you have to be able to say he is X. However to say that God is truthful, for example, is the same as saying he is not deceitful. There is a boundary where God is defined and limited. Whether that boundary exists because of some external constraint or his nature is irrelevant. It is a limit. If all his limits are however self-limitations, then this opens up God to vulnerability to the problem of evil again.

One could ask, “couldn’t God have prevented the emergence of evil?” The retort to that is “why would He.” It is necessary for evil to exist in order for the plan of salvation to work.

Why would he? To prevent our unnecessary suffering. An omnipotent God could have exalted all of us without the need to test us. If we needed to learn something, then he could have created us with that knowledge inbuilt. He wouldn't need to resort to a plan of salvation. An omniscient God would have foreseen the need. An omnibenevolent God would have been moved by compassion to spare us our suffering.

Since we are here, suffering, I conclude that either God couldn't prevent it, he didn't know that it would be necessary, or he didn't care. The fact of evil and suffering shows me that God, if he exists, is limited.

I am sick to death of the discussion of the proofs of God. That discussion has been going on for over a thousand years. Enough already.... Science is not going to be able to prove the non-existence of God because religion operates on us at the affective level not the rational level. Do you know the definition of crazy? Doing the same thing over and over again, for a thousand years, and expecting a different answer.

In my opinion, the arguments against particular Gods have done their job. It's just that some of us resist the conclusions. :)

Science's job isn't to disprove God. For some of us, it makes him unnecessary.

118: Posted By: Blake | September 10, 2007 11:07 PM

Jonathan: "Why would he? To prevent our unnecessary suffering. An omnipotent God could have exalted all of us without the need to test us. If we needed to learn something, then he could have created us with that knowledge inbuilt. He wouldn't need to resort to a plan of salvation. An omniscient God would have foreseen the need. An omnibenevolent God would have been moved by compassion to spare us our suffering."

No not even an omnipotent God cannot exalt folks at will if exaltation requires a loving response that cannot be coerced. He could not exalt us save on conditions of our freely learning and choosing to return his love with our own freely chosen love. He didn't create us from nothing but takes us from whereever we are in our progression because he didn't create us ex nihilo. His plan of salvation is precisely his plan to place us in conditions where we can freely choose to love and learn from our experiences. Not even a loving parent spares their children all of the pain they suffer because they must learn from their own experiences.

I challenge you to give us some kind of logically structured argument for these claims rather than merely asserting them. I really would like to see what you claim is a logically valid argument from evil to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. You can even include standard omnipotence if you want. So far you're long on assertion and assumption and short on anything to support what you say. You say we resist the conclusion of some argument against the particular gods. What arguments? Show us. I keep asking for you to demonstrate some point you claim and to quit dodging argument that are formally presented -- and yet you continue to make these claims as if they were established and any rational or intelligent person would already know it. Show us the argument.

119: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 11, 2007 12:04 PM

Blake:No not even an omnipotent God cannot exalt folks at will if exaltation requires a loving response that cannot be coerced. He could not exalt us save on conditions of our freely learning and choosing to return his love with our own freely chosen love. He didn't create us from nothing but takes us from whereever we are in our progression because he didn't create us ex nihilo.

Sorry to jump in here, Blake, but for most non-Mormon folks, "omnipotence" would conflict with the "didn't create us from nothing" part. A truly omnipotent God could create us any way he damned pleased, and wouldn't need to take us from "wherever we are."

Blake:I really would like to see what you claim is a logically valid argument from evil to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. You can even include standard omnipotence if you want.

How about the following:

1) An omnipotent god could create any kind of world he wanted to

2) A perfectly benevolent god would want to create a world without suffering

3) the world as we know it contains suffering

ergo,

4) the world as we know it was not created by a perfectly benevolent, omnipotent god

Feel free to substitute "evil" for "suffering", if that floats your boat.

120: Posted By: Blake | September 11, 2007 03:03 PM

Mike: I grant that for many omnipotence is somehow inconsistent with not being able to create out of nothing. However, I have given an argument (a pretty darn good one too!) that such reasoning doesn't follow if what we mean by omnipotence is the maximally consistent power a single individual could possess. Because even an omnipotent being need not be able to change the past, if it so happens that the universe or multiverse has always existed in some state, then an omnipotent being need not be able to bring about what has always existed to count as omnipotent (or more accurately maximally powerful). Not even God can create the uncreated.

To show that you argument isn't sound, all I have to show is that there is a premise consistent with both 1) and 3) and that entails that 2) is false. It is:

A God has a good reason for allowing some evils to occur.

Premise A is consistent with 1) and 3) and is inconsistent with 2), and for all we know, A is true. So your logical argument fails. In fact, virtually every writer in the philosophy of religion in the past 15 years agrees that such a logical argument is a failure!

121: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 11, 2007 08:39 PM

Blake, do you believe God progresses in power?

122: Posted By: Blake | September 11, 2007 09:38 PM

Absolutely -- both intrinsically and extrinsically or relationally.

123: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 12, 2007 01:46 AM

Blake: if, given the suffering in the world, we have a choice between two explanations:

1) there is no omnipotent, benevolent god, or

2) there is an omnipotent, benevolent god who is constrained by mysterious forces so as to not be completely omnipotent, and who, for unknown reasons, acts in a manner that appears to be in direct violation of his alleged benevolence,

I'll go with the more parsimonious explanation.

124: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 06:56 AM

Mike: First you'd have to show that the features of the world as we know it, including the presence of actually self-aware beings like ourselves, is more parsimonious. I gave an argument in # 78 above that Jonathan has just blown off with unsound assertions that somehow, in a way virtually unexplained, it gets evolution wrong. However, I'm still waiting for some explanation of how it does that from Jonathan. It shows that your naturalistic view is self-defeating. Do you have some response?

Second, I guess that this means that in the face of a logically invalid argument that you gave, you've decided that you don't need to present a valid argument but you can just assume that atheism is somehow more explanatory? I don't buy it for a second. I present the challenge again to both you and Jonathan who has repeatedly asserted that there are arguments that show that theism is just not worthy of belief in the face of evil -- let's see the argument. I'm still waiting for a valid argument.

125: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 12, 2007 09:20 AM

Blake, are you omnipotent, by your definition?

126: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 09:57 AM

Lincoln: Certainly not. My view is that God is maximally powerful or has the maximal power that is possible for an individual to have. What prompted your question? I'm just curious.

127: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 12, 2007 12:00 PM

If you insist that I restate the argument from evil, then I'll take the lazy route and draw it from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article has a couple of other formulations. As the author points out, this formulation of the argument hinges on whether you accept the inductive step from (8) to (9). I believe that is a reasonable induction. At the very least, for me it puts the likelihood of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God very low. :)

1) Both the property of intentionally allowing an animal to die an agonizing death in a forest fire, and the property of allowing a child to undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, are wrongmaking characteristics of an action, and very serious ones.

2) Our world contains animals that die agonizing deaths in forest fires, and children who undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer.

3) An omnipotent being could prevent such events, if he knew that those events were about to occur.

4) An omniscient being would know that such events were about to occur.

5) If a being allows something to take place that he knows is about to happen, and which he knows he could prevent, then that being intentionally allows the event in question to occur.

Therefore:

6) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there are cases where he intentionally allows animals to die agonizing deaths in forest fires, and children to undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer.

7) In many such cases, no rightmaking characteristics that we are aware of both apply to the case in question, and also are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking characteristic.

Therefore:

8) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there are specific cases of such a being's intentionally allowing animals to die agonizing deaths in forest fires, and children to undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, that have wrongmaking properties such that there are no rightmaking characteristics that we are aware of that both apply to the cases in question, and that are also sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking characteristics.

Therefore it is likely that:

9) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there are specific cases of such a being's intentionally allowing animals to die agonizing deaths in forest fires, and children to undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, that have wrongmaking properties such that there are no rightmaking characteristics - including ones that we are not aware of - that both apply to the cases in question, and that are also sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking characteristics.

10) An action is morally wrong, all things considered, if it has a wrongmaking characteristic that is not counterbalanced by any rightmaking characteristics.

Therefore:

11) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then there are specific cases of such a being's intentionally allowing animals to die agonizing deaths in forest fires, and children to undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, that are morally wrong, all things considered.

Therefore:

12) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then that being both intentionally refrains from performing certain actions in situations where it is morally wrong to do so, all things considered, and knows that he is doing so.

13) A being who intentionally refrains from performing certain actions in situations where it is morally wrong to do so, all things considered, and knows that he is doing so, is not morally perfect.

Therefore:

14) If there is an omnipotent and omniscient being, then that being is not morally perfect.

Therefore:

15) There is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being.

16) If God exists, then he is, by definition, an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being.

Therefore:

17) God does not exist.

128: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 12:04 PM

Jonathan, isn't Blakes claim the epistemological one? The fact one can't see any good reason to refrain doesn't entail there is no good reason. All you've done is moved from the logical problem of evil to the more subtle version which I like to term the evidentiary problem of evil. However by their very nature things like illnesses, fires and so forth tend to engender a different sort of discussion.

Anyway, it was this form of the problem of evil, which you put in a formal form, that the original post that started this discussion was addressing.

128: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 12:13 PM

Jonathan: Like you said: lazy. The problem is that we have absolutely no reason to accept (3) or (6) on a Mormon view. The argument is not sound on the Mormon view. So how could it affect your views? It doesn't even touch mine.

Further, even if we granted something like classical omnipotence, we have no reason to adopt the inference from (8) to (9) or from (10) to (11) assuming either the evolutionary or naturalistic world-view or the classical world-view of theists. If naturalism is true, our ability to even engage such theoretical issues as what would be best given all of the variables in the natural world is something we should have every reason to believe evolution would not and could not fit us for cognitively. So the inference especially won't go through on your own assumptions. If we assume a theistic world-view we beg the question. However, if we are arguing to the best explanation, then on either view the assessment of our cognitive capacities to make such global and all-things considered judgments is simply beyond our ken. The argument assumes premises that we have the best reasons to doubt are true or reliable and for that reason the argument has no ability to persuade anyone except the already convinced like you. And my guess is that you were convinced by something else that atheism is for you, like the emotional experiences that, as far as I can see, can have no grounding in anything to suggest it as a reason for believing anything about atheism.

129: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 12:15 PM

Jonathan: Let me add that if we adopt a naturalistic world-view, I don't see that you have standing to complain. What is evil on your view? What kind of moral theory could one have that indicts God, if he exists, on such a naturalistic view of ethics?

128: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 12, 2007 12:17 PM

However, I have given an argument (a pretty darn good one too!) that such reasoning doesn't follow if what we mean by omnipotence is the maximally consistent power a single individual could possess.

With this redefinition, this becomes a new problem. "Omnipotence" becomes something other than the common conception of omnipotence. You're talking about a limited kind of omnipotence. The very idea of a maximum implies this. Of course this kind of redefinition is in line with Joseph Smith's practices. (D&C 19:6-12)

A God has a good reason for allowing some evils to occur.

I have a problem with any theodicy which appeals to an unknown good which God has in mind to justify our suffering. The fact that we are not privy to what that good is undermines our ability to judge God's goodness. This kind of reasoning certainly wouldn't hold for any other moral agent.

We would not accept it if a man brutally tortures and kills a family and then seeks to excuse himself by saying "I have a higher purpose for killing that family". Granted, God is not just any moral agent. He may be able to deliver on his promise, but how are we to know that he will? For all we know, God is lying to us because he enjoys our suffering and false hopes.

I gave an argument in # 78 above that Jonathan has just blown off with unsound assertions that somehow, in a way virtually unexplained, it gets evolution wrong.

So now you're blowing off my counter-argument? :) Kindly respond to #114 showing where my counter-argument is insufficient.

129: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 12, 2007 12:52 PM

Blake:First you'd have to show that the features of the world as we know it, including the presence of actually self-aware beings like ourselves, is more parsimonious

I'd suggest that it explains the situation while requiring one fewer entity.

Blake:Second, I guess that this means that in the face of a logically invalid argument that you gave, you've decided that you don't need to present a valid argument but you can just assume that atheism is somehow more explanatory

On the contrary. You consider my argument to be logically invalid by redefining two of the terms (omnipotence, and benevolence). Certainly, we can explain the problem of evil if we redefine omnipotence to mean "as powerful as possible within the constraints of the problem", and benevolence to mean "as nice as possible, with any violations chalked up to unknown reasons".

As Jonathan implied, by your definition, I am omnipotent, as I am "maximally powerful" within the constraints I find myself in. I'm also maximally benevolent, as everything I do has a super-secret reason justifying it.

129: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 01:26 PM

Jonathan: the definition I gave is the maximum power that is logically consistent to believe in. No one believes that omnipotence must be an incoherent notion of power. So the question is: what is the maximal power. On that, there is actually pretty wide agreement and my definition doesn't differ significantly from those of the primary writers in philosophy of religion.

With respect to whether God could have reasons that we don't understand, I believe you simply fail to grasp the situation. Consider an analogy. If I give a shot to my dog, I inflict pain on him. He can only look at me in wonder as to why his trusted master would do such a thing because I cannot explain germ theory to him. The difference between our knowledge and God's is much vaster than the difference between me and my dog. You give no reason to believe that we should expect to be able to grasp what God's reasons might be for permitting what He does.

I don't see a counterargument that addresses the self-defeating nature of the evolution argument in your # 114.

You still haven't given a sound argument from evil.

130: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 01:31 PM

Mine: I didn't redefine your terms at all! I took omnipotence in whatever sense you wish and demonstrated that your argument is unsound by a logical response. Look, if my A. is consistent with your 1) and your 3), and not consistent with your 2), it follows logically that your argument is logically invalid. It is a simple matter of logic. Either your conclusion follows logically or it doesn't. It doesn't follow because there is the logical possibility that God has good reasons for allowing evil. That is all that is needed to refute your logical argument QED.

130: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 01:32 PM

I think though, with regards to omnipotence, there is a huge difference between the limits of being what we are and the limits of what is physically possible. Certainly the discourse of omnipotence has tended to allow only logical limitations - primarily due to a certain philosophical tradition of absolutism. However within a set of pre-existent beings one can talk about what is maximally powerful and it really doesn't correspond in the least to how you or Jonathan are using it.

131: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 01:34 PM

Blake, I find your dog analogy more than a little bit of a dodge. We can reason and at least deal with vague reasons. Dogs can't. God doesn't really even give that.

I think the critic is on firm ground to say that it is a problem that many theists can't even give remotely plausible explanations for why there is evil.

132: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 04:26 PM

Mike and Jonathan: Just to make it clear, there is absolutely no way that I or any being but a God could be maximally powerful. I define maximal power as follows: A is maximally powerful at t if A is able unilaterally to bring about any state of affairs SA which: (i) does not entail that "A does not bring about SA at t," and (ii) is compossible with all events which preceded t in time i the actual world; and (iii) A's essential properties are consistent with A's actualizing the maximal range of states of affairs possible for any being. So as you can see, your charge is without merit.

Clark: As any analogy must be less than perfect at some point, the human/dog analogy is imperfect. It does however highlight something essential: what makes you think that our species has the cognitive capacity to assess God's reasons based on an all things considered in the physical universe kind of an assessment? We are no more able to do that kind of assessment than a dog is an assessment of why we give a shot.

Further, I disagree that there are no remotely plausible theodicies. Global theodocies that rely on the natural law defense, free will defense, moral assessment defense and defenses available in the Mormon world-view. I don't think that theodicies work outside of the Mormon world-view. However, until someone produces an argument that is plausibility, there is nothing to defend.

133: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 04:51 PM

I think it depends what one means by "cognitive capacity." I ought turn this into an other blog post so as to not get too tangental. And it's not as if this thread isn't long enough. So if I have time I might do that. (No promises)

I'd say though that the difference between a dog and a person, as I said, is a massive gap. It's fundamentally not one of degree. I'd argue once one can reason then hte limits are primarily ones of storage and degree of vagueness. So I fundamentally don't buy the assumption (common in negative theology) that, for instance God's goodness isn't our goodness. Can God communicate his understanding to us? I think it's primarily only a matter of data. We have limited data. So it's more analogous to a theoretical physicist trying to communicate quantum mechanics to a bunch of kids. They might not get all the details but they get a vague and comprehensible idea of what is going on.

The problem with the problem of evidentiary evil is that we don't even have this vague explanation. Mormonism, as I mentioned in the original post, gives a bit more explanation. Probably the most of any Christian faith for sure. But even with our theology there are some huge gaps.

So I fundamentally reject the idea that the justification for God's acts simply can't be comprehended by us.

134: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 04:55 PM

BTW - the problem with all theodicities is that there is always that huge gaping hole where God's reasons stay. Plantinga does well, as I mentioned, with the free will defense. However as I said this doesn't explain in the least natural evils.

135: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 05:33 PM

Clark: Are you seriously claiming that we should be able to understand what God's actual reasons for allowing evil are? I find that rather preposterous. Perhaps an analogy with your four year old son or daughter would suffice ... though the gap between us and God is much, much greater. We simply don't have access to all things considered kinds of judgments. You believe that we understand far more about the universe than I do.

FYI, Plantinga's defense is merely a logical defeater, it doesn't begin to do any work as a theodicy.

136: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 05:36 PM

Yeah, I'm claiming we should be able to understand in a vague (i.e. incomplete) way what God's actual reasons are. I find the idea that we couldn't preposterous. Must be some odd fundamental intuitions in conflict.

137: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 12, 2007 05:39 PM

Oh, good catch on Platinga. You're right of course. Plantinga doesn't offer a theodicity. Although the idea that free will is something good and that free will has implications for God's actions obviously is tied to a theodicity.

I agree that there are some good theodicities within the LDS viewpoint. Although as I said there are some big gaps even there. But I definitely agree that with the "traditional" view of God they simply don't work. (I should be careful since I can't claim to have read every proposal - but none of the ones I've read in the various books and readers on philosophy of religion I have sound terribly persuasive)

138: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 05:52 PM

Clark: Just what is it to understand something in a vague way? It seems a lot like not understanding to me. As I said, your assessment of our cognitive abilities is different, vastly different, than mine. We cannot even make all things considered judgments about things like whether or how much black matter there is, let along the moral justification for all that occurs. Heck, we have a difficult time even coming up with a moral theory. For instance, one of my beefs about how the problem of evil is addressed is that I am definitely not a consequentialist; but every argument I've seen assumes consequentialism. So for me these kinds of arguments are non-starters. There are theodicies based upon deontological and agape theories, but I've never seen the problem of evil stated in terms of these theories in a logical sense that holds any water. BTW I'm still waiting for a logically valid and at least plausibly persuasive argument.

139: Posted By: Clark | September 12, 2007 08:03 PM

I only vaguely understand quantum mechanics although it is considerably less vague than when I was a freshman. I only vaguely understand string theory. I guess I'm not sure what's vague about vagueness. Most our knowledge is vague.

By "black matter" do you mean dark matter? If so I disagree. I think we can make very considered and justified judgments about such matters. That doesn't guarantee we will be right. But I think there's a lot we can know even if there's a lot we're ignorant of.

Regarding theodicities, I think I'm a variant of a consequentialist, to the degree I dare even weigh in. Although most of the popular approaches of consequentialism seem wrong. I don't like deontoloigcal theories although I'm partial to agape theories with a strong consequentialist thrust added in. But as you know that's definitely an area I don't feel is my strongest.

140: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 08:55 PM

Well Clark there ya have it. You understand QM better than I do; but I suspect that anyone who really claims to understand QM merely demonstrates that they don't really understand it. Ditto relativity theory. Ditto string theory -- especially string theory (if you can begin to grasp 10 dimensions, more power to you). If you are vague on it, the problem is that you have no idea just how vague you are.

And you're right, I meant dark matter. We've been wrong so often about how much of it there is, what gives you any reason to believe we grasp it now?

I can see why people are drawn to consequentialist ethics, but as I have said in the past, I think it is really public policy considerations parading as an ethic. But until we could nail down an ethical theory, how could we even begin to know what counts as evil or against God's goodness? I just think that we don't know much about such matters. Moreover, we don't have a really good way of determining whether I'm right about our cognitive abilities or you are -- but that merely supports my view that we're at sea when it comes to such judgments.

141: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 12, 2007 09:08 PM

Blake, thinking about your definition of omnipotence, I'm not sure how you can know that you are not omnipotent, and I'm not sure how God can know he is.

142: Posted By: Blake | September 12, 2007 09:25 PM

Well Lincoln, I know I'm not omnipotent ("maximally powerful" is the term I use) because I cannot bring about the maximal range of possible states of affairs that are logically consistent with the past that has actually obtained and consistent with the fact that the actions are, by their very nature, such that they can only be brought about by a particular agent (e.g., I cannot bring about your free acts and neither can God because by their very nature your free acts must be brought about you). For instance, I cannot lift a 2,000 lbs. rock and God can. He can also heal the sick at will, and I can't etc..

God knows he has maximal power because he has perfect knowledge and that includes knowing the full range of possibilities and what is within his power to bring about.

143: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 13, 2007 04:45 AM

Blake:He can also heal the sick at will,

You attempt to argue that such a god still is benevolent, because he presumably has a super-secret-justification. I see no evidence for any such hypothesis, except for wishful thinking. In the absence of revelation, why would I possibly hypothesize that?

144: Posted By: Blake | September 13, 2007 07:50 AM

Michael: You might accept it because: (1) you have experiences of God wherein you have experienced his love; (2) you have very good reason to believe that God's knowledge and access to what will lead to your growth is vastly superior to yours; (3) you trust that God will always seek your best interests because of your encounters with God; (4) we can be refined and grow through challenges and opposition; (5) we may have agreed to the very circumstances we confront in a pre-mortal life; (6) there is no growth inside the comfort zone and sickness and other human challenges give us an opportunity to learn from our experiences and to learn compassion; (7) mortal life is a very fractional part of what our existence is about and we would consent to such experiences so that we could progress further in what really matters; etc. etc. Of course, you are free to choose not to open your heart, not to trust and so forth just like in any relationship where love leaves us truly free to choose whether we seek the relationship.

I'm still waiting for a logically valid and sound argument to suggest that human sickness is contrary to God's goodness. Do you have one? Let me ask this: what is your ethical theory that allows you to determine what is good and what is evil?

145: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 13, 2007 03:24 PM

I've had to step away for a bit to attend to other things. This space has helped me to get some perspective.

I'm still waiting for a logically valid and sound argument…

Blake, you end up saying this quite a bit. Arguments have been offered, but you seem to turn up your nose at them as if they didn't exist. Perhaps the arguments that you've seen don't come up to your high standards, but you don't take the time to explain why. This isn't helpful. It fosters the impression that you don't want to address them, not that the arguments are lacking. It also demotivates me from offering arguments that won't be even acknowledged. Why should I waste my time?

146: Posted By: Blake | September 13, 2007 03:59 PM

Jonathan: All that I have to do to refute a deductive argument like that given by Michael is to show that it is logically invalid. That is a total refutation: See post # 120. It is a full refutation because I show that his argument is logically invalid and a logically invalid proves exactly nothing.

Your inductive argument is nullified if it makes inferences about probability that we either can't see are true or the inferences are logically invalid inductive inferences. That is why the argument you presented is not persuasive in the least. See Post # 128 where I point out where the invalid inferences in the argument are. In fact, the very source your quote, Tooley at the Stanford Encyclopedia, admits as much. Why should I spend a lot of time refuting an argument at length when pointing out invalid inferences is all that is needed? That is just how assessment of logical arguments goes. So don't waste your time with invalid arguments Jonathan -- and don't waste ours either. The fact is, I am waiting for someone to come up with an argument that is logically valid and inductively sound in its inferences. You haven't done that. Once again, an invalid argument proves exactly nothing even though you claim over and over that evil shows that God cannot exist. It is just not a good claim as far as I have seen.

147: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 13, 2007 09:56 PM

Blake, do you believe God progresses in knowledge and is maximally knowledgeable, as with power?

148: Posted By: Clark | September 13, 2007 09:58 PM

He does. Maximum power can change with time as it is context dependent.

(Not to speak for Blake, but he discusses this in his first volume - plus it's an important point to make)

149: Posted By: Lincoln Cannon | September 13, 2007 10:29 PM

Are you maximally knowledgeable and powerful in your context?

150: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 14, 2007 09:13 AM

That was more helpful. Thanks. Of course that still leaves unanswered my argument in #114. How do you justify your premise that "P(R | N&E) is low"? I see no reason to accept this at face value, as this seems to have been presented. In fact, I believe that this is actually false given that a relatively faulty rationality (depending on how you define that term) is likely to be selected against.

151: Posted By: Clark | September 14, 2007 09:21 AM

No. Since it would be physically possible in my context for a being to lift 500 lbs and I've gotten out of shape and probably can bench only 250.

I won't speak for how Blake takes maximally powerful, since given some of his views on science it is probably different from mine. For me it is a question of what is physically allowable given the laws of the universe versus what you can bring about. So it is physically allowable for someone to lift more than me but I can't physically bring that about.

I suspect the point you are missing is that you are making the entity itself part of the context in such a way that its context determines that it can only do what it can do. Thus all things are maximally powerful. But this confuses what is physically possible in general with what is physically possible in particular. Which is an odd conflation to make since it avoids the central point at issue. (i.e. the distinction between general power and individual power)

152: Posted By: Blake | September 14, 2007 09:49 AM

Jonathan: I think that you are right that you provided a potential response to the first premise of my argument and I overlooked it. Before moving on, let me note that such a response does not to support an argument from evil for God's non-existence. I don't want to presume, but are you conceding that the inductive argument of evil is not successful?

So let's move to that crucial premise (1) in my argument for the self-defeating nature of naturalistic atheism. This is the other side of the coin. You argue that evil shows that my Mormon theistic world-view won't work. I have demonstrated, I think, that at least the arguments for that presented here aren't logically sound -- neither the deductive nor the inductive arguments from evil work. However, my argument that your naturalistic world-view is self-defeating needs some more support. I warn, however, that this could be long.

Support for (1) could go as follows. First, to avoid assuming that our cognitive capacities are adequate and beg the question against my argument, let's assume hypothetical creatures like us Let's also assume that N and E are true with respect to them. Assume scientific naturalism where everything is explained fully by microphysical reductionism. What would a belief be, from this point of view? Almost all naturalists (and all that I know of) view a belief to really be long-term event or structure in the nervous system—perhaps a structured group of neurons connected and related in certain ways. Such a neural structure will have neurophysiological properties (‘NP properties’): properties specifying the kinds and numbers of neurons involved, the way in which those neurons are connected with each other and with other structures, their actions potentials given the chemicals in the synapses and so forth and their connections to other parts of the body (with muscles, glands, sense organs, other neuronal events, etc.). If this set of microphysical events is really a belief, however, then it will also have content; it will be the belief that p, for some proposition p—perhaps the proposition that God does not exist.

What is the relation between NP properties, on the one hand, and content properties—such properties as having the proposition that God does not exist as content—on the other? There is “nonreductive materialism” (NRM): content properties are distinct from but supervene on NP properties. Supervenience can be either broadly logical or nomic. In the latter case, there would be psychophysical laws relating NP properties to content properties: laws of the sort any structure with such and such NP properties will have such and such content. These laws presumably will be contingent (in the broadly logical or metaphysical sense). In the former case, there will also be such laws, but they will be necessary rather than contingent.

Now to quote Plantinga for his reductio ad absurdum:

"Now take any belief B you like on the part of a member of that hypothetical population: what is the (epistemic) probability that B is true, given N&E and nonreductive materialism—what is P(B | N&E&NRM)? What we know is that B has a certain content (call it ‘C’), and (we may assume or concede) having B is adaptive in the circumstances in which that creature finds itself. What, then, is the probability that C, the content of B, is true? Well, what is the probability that the relevant psychophysical law L connecting NP properties and content properties yields a true proposition as content in this instance? Having B is adaptive, in the circumstances in which the creature finds itself; its displaying the NP properties on which C supervenes causes adaptive behavior. But why think the content connected with those NP properties by L will be true in this creature's circumstances? What counts for adaptivity are the NP properties and the behavior they cause; it doesn't matter whether the supervening content is true. The NP properties are indeed adaptive; but that provides no reason, so far, for thinking the supervening content is true. Having B is adaptive by virtue of its causing adaptive behavior, not by virtue of having true content. Of course if theism is true, then human beings (as opposed to those hypothetical creatures, for whom naturalism is true) are made in the divine image, which includes the capacity for knowledge; so God would presumably have chosen the psychophysical laws in such a way that in the relevant circumstances, the neurophysiology yields true content. But nothing like that is true given naturalism; to suppose that the content properties that are adaptive, for the most part also lead to true content, would be wholly unjustified optimism."

It follows from that fact that our beliefs are reduced to a-rational causal connections that they do not proceed on the basis rational rules because of those rules. And that is what is required for rationality. Rather, what follows is epiphenomenalism in which our thoughts, reasons are beliefs are a by-product of the brain but have no causal relation to anything the brain does and therefore, anything that we do. Thus, there cannot be any rational human activity if your atheistic world-view is accepted. But your view assumes that you arrived at it based on reasons and the capacity for rationality. Thus, it is self defeating. That ought to do it.

153: Posted By: Blake | September 14, 2007 09:58 AM

Jonathan:

Let me complete the argument for premise (1). Take what I've said above. So what is P(B | N&E&NRM)? Because the truth of B doesn't make a difference to the adaptivity of B, It is possible that B could be true, but is equally likely to be false. Thus, we'd have to estimate the probability that it is true as about the same as the probability that it is false. It then follows that it is improbable that the believer in question has reliable cognitive faculties, that is, faculties that produce a sufficient preponderance of true over false beliefs. So, assume that the believer in question has 1000 independent beliefs, each as likely to be false as true. Then the probability that 3/4 of them are true (and this would be a modest requirement for reliability) will be very low—less than 10−58. So P(B | N&E&NRM) specified to these creatures will be low. But of course the same would hold for us, if naturalism is true: P(B | N&E&NRM) specified to us is equally low. Case closed.

154: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 14, 2007 12:46 PM

Blake:I'm still waiting for a logically valid and sound argument to suggest that human sickness is contrary to God's goodness. Do you have one? Let me ask this: what is your ethical theory that allows you to determine what is good and what is evil?

I didn't limit myself to human sickness-- I lump in sickness in all sentient beings, so as not to get hung up on any "free will" arguments.

And, to simplify matters, I'll say that "unnecessary suffering" would count as evil.

Now, I imagine you're going to argue that all of the suffering is necessary, but I don't see any evidence of that (besides the fact that it would be comforting to think so.)

As for your seven reasons to accept the hypothesis of God's alleged super-secret justification, it seems to me that they all boil down to revelation, which is outside of the realm of logical argument.

155: Posted By: Blake | September 14, 2007 03:24 PM

Michael: I'm having a hard figuring out how your post is responsive to what I have said. I'm looking for a logically valid argument. You gave a logically invalid argument. I don't care whether the supposed evil is pain, a hurricane or the existence of mosquitoes, the argument from evil that you gave is still not logically valid.

Further, no one argues that God's hiddeness is reason to believe in God, but neither is it reason to believe that the theistic world-view is somehow logically disproven. Further, my reasons don't boil down to revelation, but to a coherent world-view that shows that a reasonable person can hold belief in God. I don't claim more than that.

156: Posted By: Clark | September 14, 2007 03:34 PM

But Blake, the issue isn't if it is irrational to believe in God. That never was the issue. At least that I could see. The issue is whether it is a problem for ones beliefs. There can, of course be problems for a belief yet still be rational to believe.

Perhaps this is the source of the impasse?

155: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | September 14, 2007 03:44 PM

Blake,

Thank you for your response. I don't have time at the moment to digest your reasoning; I'll have to do that later. And I still need to address #128 and #129. On this:

I don't want to presume, but are you conceding that the inductive argument of evil is not successful?

If by "successful" you mean "proves logically with absolute confidence", then obviously not. If the measure of success is convincing me, then yes it was successful. Many beliefs rely not on proof but on (among other things) what I'll call "reasonableness": more or less an appeal to common sense. I'll hazard to say that most of our beliefs are unjustifiable. But that doesn't stop us from reasonably believing them.

I personally estimate that the step from (8) to (9) is probably justified. I can think of many instances of suffering which appear gratuitous in the worst possible way. This suffering strains my credulity. I find it much more likely that there is no greater purpose for this suffering than that it has some redeeming greater good. Appealing to our ignorance is not sufficient to convince me.

So no, I'm not aware of a perfectly logically valid argument from evil, but that doesn't mean that it isn't successful.

156: Posted By: Blake | September 14, 2007 06:26 PM

Clark: I think you've simply missed the dialectic here. In # 154 Mike stated that the seven factors I listed in # 144 "As for your seven reasons to accept the hypothesis of God's alleged super-secret justification, it seems to me that they all boil down to revelation, which is outside of the realm of logical argument." I responded that they don't, my purpose was merely to give reasons which, taken together, might show that a person is rational in believing in God.

You then respond that "the issue is whether it is a problem for ones beliefs." I assume by "it" you mean the problem of evil -- but that wasn't event subject of what we were discussing.

As for the problem of evil, I agree that there is an existential problem of evil that may not even be rational or based on rational arguments. It is in fact something like your informal argument: there is evil and I don't see how God can allow to happen what happens. That is in fact bothersome. We all confront it often in spades. But it isn't a disproof and the remedy isn't argument or persuasion but loving support and meditation.

157: Posted By: Clark Goble | September 14, 2007 11:03 PM

Blake it is always possible I missed some of the dialectic. But I think there's more going on. I was thinking more broadly in terms of discussions of the problem of evil and why so many see it as a problem. As with any dialectic there are so many lines of power going along that sometimes to look and see one is to be blind to the others.

158: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | September 15, 2007 05:42 AM

Blake:I'm having a hard figuring out how your post is responsive to what I have said. I'm looking for a logically valid argument. You gave a logically invalid argument. I don't care whether the supposed evil is pain, a hurricane or the existence of mosquitoes, the argument from evil that you gave is still not logically valid.

I think we are talking a bit past each other. My original syllogism was an attempt to demonstrate that the suffering in the world is inconsistent with a omni-benevolent, omnipotent God. You attempted to show that it still can be consistent, if we re-define "benevolent" to include "cruel, but for a hidden purpose."

I'm not trying to prove that God cannot (or does not) exist. I don't think that's necessary, or fruitful. I don't claim to have indisputable evidence that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist, either.

What I am saying is that barring direct revelation, I don't see any reason to believe the hypothesis that an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God is responsible for the present world.

You claim that you have "a coherent world-view that shows that a reasonable person can hold belief in God", but I'd argue that the so-called "reasonable person" is relying on more than pure reason here.

159: Posted By: Blake | September 15, 2007 08:17 AM

Mike: I agree that the person who believes in God is relying on more than reason, and I'd add that it has been shown pretty conclusively by Damsio and others that reasoning relies on our affective or emotional capacities to a large extent. We all go beyond reason just because we are human. We value and care about things often because we have a "feel" for it rather than because we have reasoned our way to it. In fact, I'd say that the vast majority of our actions, decisions and even our reasoning depends on affective cognition rather than discursive or logical cognition.

It seems to me that you are suggesting that it is a defect in a world-view to rely on something in addition to reasoning pure and simple. I would suggest that any world-view that did that would be impotent and unreasonable.

160: Posted By: sammiejd | September 22, 2007 10:18 AM

There is great symmetry and clarity in your examination of this dichotomy. I am grateful and impressed that you would have the energy and courage to so thoroughly tackle a subject which apparently is so much of a challenge that it is usually met with a deafening silence or pathetic passification by major religions. The honesty involved in arriving at no contrived conclusion and resisting the gerry-rigging of one sets you apart--It is better to beat your head against the wall than to walk around it, insuring that it will never come down. I believe that we can help restore the faith of a friend simply by demonstrating an empathetic understanding of the cause of his doubt and despair.

161: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | October 02, 2007 02:39 PM

For various reasons, it has taken me a while to get back to this. I apologize.

But why think the content connected with those NP properties by L will be true in this creature's circumstances? What counts for adaptivity are the NP properties and the behavior they cause; it doesn't matter whether the supervening content is true. The NP properties are indeed adaptive; but that provides no reason, so far, for thinking the supervening content is true.

This is where I primarily disagree. Plantinga asserts that the truthfulness of C and the adaptiveness of B are not apparently related. I would agree that they are not necessarily related in specific cases, but it is quite reasonable to assume that the adaptiveness of B and the truthfulness of C are often related, more often than not.

For example, the truthfulness of the belief that "lions want to eat me" is obviously related to the adaptiveness of the neural structure which holds that belief. On the other hand, the truthfulness of "there is a loving God" is not obviously related to the adaptiveness of the neural structure which holds that belief which may cause us to do beneficial things. So the truthfulness of C and the adaptiveness of B are not married to each other in every case, but it would be a mistake to assert that there is no relationship whatsoever.

I imagine we disagree here, where you assert we have to estimate the probability that C is true at even odds (the flawed assumption of randomness that I keep pointing to) given its adaptiveness. It seems that there are valid reasons to believe that the odds are better than 50%, especially in regard to beliefs that directly involve the sensible world. If a person has a 50% chance of believing that any given object is food, then they wouldn't last long in the world. The ability to reason out what is and isn't food is highly adaptive, whereas the ability to reason about metaphysics may not be.

That's exactly what we observe in ourselves. We're able to reason with pretty good success about how to keep ourselves alive (e.g. what is food, should I walk near that hungry tiger, etc.) but we're not, generally speaking, as good at reasoning about other things that don't matter as much to survival (e.g. theology, calculus, quantum mechanics).

162: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | October 02, 2007 04:41 PM

I also want to add that I think the idea of separating each belief into a separate neuronal structure is specious. I doubt beliefs can be mapped onto discrete neurons that way. I realize that you didn't explicitly state that idea, but it seems to underlie your argument. Without it, resorting to 50/50 odds becomes even less justifiable.

Rather, it would be more reasonable to assume that the mind has a general purpose reasoning mechanism which is involved in many different beliefs. Speaking simplistically, memories might be fed through this reasoning machine to produce beliefs. The important point is that most of our beliefs may share a neural structure in common.

In that case, an adaptive advantage conferred by improvements to a general purpose reasoning mechanism that helps us reason about how to survive better could also benefit our power to reason about things not obviously related to survival. It is difficult to imagine a person able to count enemy troops and reason about strategy who couldn't also reason about rudimentary mathematics. Our ability to reason generally may be a spandrel that evolved with our ability to reason about matters of survival.

This is all supposition (a supposition that I find much more likely than the alternative), but it is sufficient to show that it doesn't logically follow from naturalism and evolution that our beliefs have a 50% chance of correlating to truth.

As a half-joking side note, for your argument to be complete, you would also need to demonstrate that 75% of a disproportionate number of human beings' beliefs are correct. Sometimes I have my doubts.

163: Posted By: Clark | October 03, 2007 10:35 PM

There are some rather interesting formal arguments for the majority of our beliefs being correct. (I don't know if we could pin a figure like 75% - but I think the argument points to at least that number) The most famous is of course Davidsons. Unfortunately I don't remember it too well and don't have time to look it up. Hopefully soon. It's part of his radical interpreter arguments.

164: Posted By: Blake | October 03, 2007 10:53 PM

Jonathan: I think that you're missing the fact that adaptiveness for beliefs like "this is food" and "this is an animal that will eat me" and "Ill do better in this society if I feign belief in God" are entirely unrelated to abstract theoretical matters like physics and theories of relativity, quantum mechanics and the kinds of philosophical abstractions like "naturalism." We have not reason to believe at all that evolution would fit us with the kind of systems that could develop such theoretic knowledge. You've haven't grasped the essential structure of the argument. Certainly there are adaptive sorts of beliefs. They just aren't of the relevant sort to justify a belief in naturalism or that such judgments could be sound. That is why philosophical beliefs like atheism and naturalism are self-defeating. They require reliance on the very kinds of epistemic and cognitive abilities that we have reason to believe survival of the fittest could fit us for.

165: Posted By: Jonathan Blake | October 04, 2007 07:15 AM

Clark,

That would be an interesting argument to see. The first problem would be to define the set of all of our beliefs. I'll try to look it up.

Blake,

I think I grasp the argument, but I cannot see the argument's justification for separating out the ability to reason about abstract realities from the ability to deal with everyday realities. You seem to want evolution to only favor concrete, domain specific reasoning. I don't see that as necessarily true or even possible above certain levels of complexity.

I see an adaptive advantage for a general-purpose brain that can reason about things somewhat generally. Any brain that could juggle complex social situations could probably also perform related abstract mental tasks like reasoning about set theory. The first is more instinctual for us. The latter requires more effort. I see reasons to believe that a brain molded solely by the forces of natural selection could evolve an ability to reason about related abstract concepts.

For me to be convinced by this argument, it would need to show that evolution can only produce traits strictly conducive to survival.

166: Posted By: Blake | October 04, 2007 07:21 AM

Jonathan: "For me to be convinced by this argument, it would need to show that evolution can only produce traits strictly conducive to survival."

All that evolution is capable of explaining is what is strictly conducive to survival. Here is where there is disconnect. Once again you have a deductive argument in mind. Is it logically possible that evolution could produce a massively parallel processing system with capacities far beyond what is necessary to what is strictly conducive to survival? Of course it is logically possible. It is logically possible that evolution could produce mermaids and 20,000 foot high skyscraper hopping mopeds without any skyscrapers in the environment. It is only that there is no reason such developments would occur given the mechanistic explanation of survival of the fittest. We are dealing with a probability argument (inductive) about what we have reason to believe would be produced; not what could logically be produced. That is why the argument isn't cogent for you. It is a basic logical fallacy about the kind of argument we are dealing with.

167: Posted By: Clark Goble | October 04, 2007 08:56 AM

All that evolution is capable of explaining is what is strictly conducive to survival.

That's simply not true.

168: Posted By: Blake | October 04, 2007 02:23 PM

Clark: You're going to have explain more than that. Your sheer assertion doesn't go very far. Although in context it is the mechanism of survival of the fittest that explains that what is conducive to survival is what is what is chosen. It can't really go beyond that. Recombinant genetics opens the possibility that anything is possible; but just why this particular possibility it leaves unexplained.

169: Posted By: Clark Goble | October 05, 2007 12:49 PM

Let's say there is some trait B that is conducive to reproductive success and survival. That is the survival of the trait B is quite high. Yet associated with owners of trait B is trait A that offers little that, given the environment, is conducive to survival. It may even be costly. Yet because of the success of B those who inherit B also inherit A.

Thus evolution can explain how something not conducive to survival is chosen.

170: Posted By: Blake | October 05, 2007 05:10 PM

Clark: Perhaps you can give some example of "associated traits" since I don't recall those from my study of biology, zoology and genetics.

171: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | October 06, 2007 05:45 AM

Blake: Perhaps you can give some example of "associated traits" since I don't recall those from my study of biology, zoology and genetics.

They usually go by the nickname "spandrels".

172: Posted By: Blake | October 06, 2007 08:22 AM

Good point Mike. I suppose I follow Dennett and the vast majority of evolutionary theorist. If they occur, spandrels play absolutely no explanatory role. Moreover, it is very doubtful that the notion of massively complex spandrels that require not merely a random association and long term development -- like the human cerebellum -- make any sense at all. There may be an purely coincidental association for one or even two genetic mutations, but the thousands of concurrent associations render it so improbable that the kinds of purely coincidental associations would continue for millions of years makes any such "explanation" literally beyond reason.

173: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | October 06, 2007 01:01 PM

I'm not sure I follow you, Blake. Clearly the human cerebellum offers an adaptive advantage, and thus would not be considered a spandrel. Spandrels aren't supposed to play an "explanatory role", except to explain the existence of traits that offer no adaptive advantage.

I'm still not clear how this relates to the problem of evil, though...

174: Posted By: Rob | December 18, 2007 07:51 AM

We cannot blame God for any evils that happen in the world. Blame the devil for the evils in the World. We also need to blame ourselves and those who allow themselves to give into tempation and follow through with what Satan puts into their hearts. Most of the evils start in are own homes. How do we raise our kids? What movies do we watch, what music do we listen to, what TV show do we allow in our homes? I know that most of my afflications in my life happen do to making my own mistakes, being prideful, offended, unforgiving, etc. If God made us do good things, then would we learn, would be who we are? What if God made us love Him? Would we love Him because we want to, or because we were made to?

Yes, God allows things to happen because of the very agency and will that everyone fights for: freedom of religion, speech, press, etc. God has control over the elements of the earth and everthing situation in life, however, we do not know all that God knows. How can we judge Him with our limited knowledge? He knows all things and lets things happen for our experience. If we are blaming God for all the bad things in the world, then we need to change our mind set. God isn't causing all the bad in the world, sure He may allow it, but remember everything is according to His plan. If we haven't learned anyting from our trials and tribulations, except to complain and blame God, then we are the only ones to blame. We need to change our attitude and look for the good in all things. The Lord can turn anything that is meant for evil into something for His benefit and ours. God loves us and always wants that best for us - these things are for our benefit and learning. God does warn us and provides ways to overcome all evil, if we are really willing to do His will, otherwise we can't blame anyone, but ourselves. The Lord speaks to our hearts everyday to warn, and uplift, but are we listening?

Sure I hate war and abuse and Typhoons, and volcanoes that destroy, but until everyone of are willing to act instead of being acted upon, these things will continue to happen.

Alot of times God allows bad things to happen to humble us. We forget Him and He has warned us time and time again that He will protect us unless we forget Him. He can only protect us when we follow His commandments, which actually protect and help us).

175: Posted By: Rob | December 18, 2007 08:00 AM

Even when we do everything right and do our best to follow God, He is not a respector of persons. A tidal wave will hit the house of a righteous man in the same neighborhood as a wicked man. But both men will be warned ahead of time by the Lord. But who will be the one who listens and hears the Lord? Which man will end up still alive? The righteous man, because he heard the warning form God and took his family somewhere safe. Now all these things are just an example to prove my points. There are always situations and things that happen in people's lives that only God knows. I do not mean to juge anyone of anything, I am simply trying to make a point that it is not God's fault for all the evil in the world. It is our own excuss to disregard our own responsibilities, where we have the power to act.

176: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | December 28, 2007 08:55 AM

Rob: We cannot blame God for any evils that happen in the world. Blame the devil for the evils in the World.

Who do we blame for the devil?

177: Posted By: Rich Knapton | December 28, 2007 11:50 PM

No one. It is as important that satan exists as it is that Christ exists. "For there must be opposition in all things."

Rich

178: Posted By: Michael Dorfman | December 29, 2007 10:28 AM

Rich:It is as important that satan exists as it is that Christ exists. "For there must be opposition in all things."

Then it doesn't really make sense for Rob to be blaming the devil for any evils in the world, does it? I mean, your quote would seem to indicate that the opposition between good and evil is all part of God's plan (and thus the evil is attributable to God). Or, alternately, the opposition between good and evil precedes God, in which case God is a relatively impotent johnny-come-lately....

179: Posted By: Rich Knapton | December 29, 2007 12:31 PM

Then it doesn't really make sense for Rob to be blaming the devil for any evils in the world, does it?

Rich

180: Posted By: Mark D. | January 01, 2008 04:11 AM

Given the evidentiary problem of evil, I think the most likely solution is in relatively radical finitism. Faith requires that God be able to accomplish his objectives in the process of time. It does not necessarily require that he be able to expend arbitrary sums of energy in arbitrarily short periods.

To me the tragic vision of the war of good against evil where good might suffer centuries long setbacks but yet inevitably emerge victorious in the end due to its own inherent superiority makes more sense than the traditional sense of divine omnipotence and the theodicies that accompany it.

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