Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

[Starbuckle]

Neil wrote: "That's entirely circular reasoning. 'Neil Schulman's experience is different from other people's experience therefore Neil's reporting on his experience requires additional proof.' "

"Different from" is too generic. If someone says there are stars in the night sky, dots of light that interrupt the black, and I reply "What do you MEAN, there are stars in the sky?!!!" And he points at the night sky, what can I do but say, "Oh, yeah, you're right...uh...okay...." But if he then says "These points of light are the eyes of god, which helped me see that Bill Clinton is too small a man for the job of president, and so forth," we are now talking about an interpretation of a perception, not the perception itself; moreover, we are talking about an interpretation that cannot be justified directly or indirectly by any of the available data. Stars are giant gaseous objects that produce their own fuel and are hotter even than candle flames. They are not eyes. The former is verifiable, the latter contradicts what we can verify in every respect. During your claimed mind-meld with God, the people around you had every evidence that they were dealing with L. Neil Schulman, not a potent supernatural-realm-exploiting entity who had created humanity to satisfy aesthetic impulses and gain company. But use your relationship with god to turn my monitor into a fudge popsicle the moment you read this and then I'll abandon the law of identity (or see a doctor).

Edited December 23, 2010 by Starbuckle

[Starbuckle]

Neil wrote: "I'm happy to clear this up. If by supernatural you're using a definition that means things not constrained by the Law of Identity, then I deny that anything including God is supernatural. If by supernatural you mean agencies and events that act from a starting point outside this particular continuum's with its physical laws (for example, law of thermodynamics or motion or chemical reactions) -- but within the constraints of the Law of Identity and a wider context of natural laws that includes multiple continua with varying physical laws -- then the word supernatural could be meaningful."

"Agencies and events that act from a starting point outside this particular continuum" is exactly the kind of nebulous, all-permitting assumption that contradicts the law of identity. What other "continuum" or realm or universe is there but this one? You are treating speculative and fact-contradicting notions as if they were a] coherent and b] provable, when of course neither is the case. Of course the reply must be: well no, not provable by the standards we have to go by in _our_ paltry continuum...

The only evidence of multiple continuums that you could refer me to is a Wikipedia article about a mathematical construct. I enjoy reading stories about the time machines, the doorways into parallel universes, etc. But these are stories. Going forward in time is possible, but going backward in time is possible only in memory. If you say that another entity can co-inhabit your body while you still retain all your own neurons and physical being in all checkable respects, I say that you are asserting a contradiction in the nature of things. I don't regard the following as an intelligible answer: "Well no, not at all, there was an intersection with the other continuum, and these things are possible when that other continuum intersects with ours." The other continuums have, at any rate, been very forbearing if they can turn our own into a Heraclitean flux at will but have so far altogether abstained.

Edited December 23, 2010 by Starbuckle

[Starbuckle]

Here's Randi.org on shyster John Edward. Not the plural one who ran for president, the singularly mendacious one who achieves his "connection" with the dead thanks to the limitless credulity of the gullible.

http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-04/042106edward.html#i1

Edited December 23, 2010 by Starbuckle

[J Neil Schulman]

Psychic John Edward reports this as a vocabulary he uses when receiving messages from the "dead."

Are you serious? That guy is an outright fraud. I've seen honest magicians do better cold readings than he does. I suppose you will be citing Uri Geller next.

If you are truly this gullible, we don't have much to talk about.

Ghs

My observation of the high-profile psychic readers is that their abilities are real but like a porn star they can't always get it up, and there's not yet a Viagra for psychics. So you put commercial performance pressures on one of them -- make them perform in front of an audience on a night when the abilities are off-line -- and they'll use stage magic techniques to keep their reputation up among a gullible audience.

But what your response indicates is far more important, George. If I press a button on something or someone you've already dismissed, you look for any excuse to dismiss an entire field of study and kneejerk react to cut off discussion.

That would be like saying "I think Velikovsky's theories of planetary catastrophe are shit so I'm not going to read Carl Sagan either."

Oh, for crying out loud. John Edward does a standard "psychic" trick that magicians have been doing for a long, long time. I suppose if he pulled a rabbit out of a hat and claimed that a dead person put it there, or if he sawed a woman in half and claimed that he restored her with his psychic powers, you would believe that crap as well.

My knee-jerk reaction is called common-fucking-sense.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G18NfN76bAs&feature=related

Ghs

Do you find shutting down a conversation by throwing a tantrum works for you with other people? All it does for me is make me think you're a closed minded asshole.

[J Neil Schulman]

I have overstayed my welcome here. There's nobody here anymore who's interested in engaging in exchange of information.

The Spanish Inquisition was more open-minded.

Oh, and one parting shot, something to leave you with.

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

"Oh, for crying out loud."

If that's what's considered common fucking sense here, I'll stick with my uncommon senses.

Edited December 23, 2010 by J. Neil Schulman

[BaalChatzaf]

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

An application of Ockahm's Razor. Which explanation should I believe? The natural explanation or the magical explanation?

God is one entity we ought not multiply beyond necessity.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[J Neil Schulman]

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

An application of Ockahm's Razor. Which explanation should I believe? The natural explanation or the magical explanation?

God is one entity we ought not multiply beyond necessity.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Any thing that exists is not magical.

[9thdoctor]

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

No, it means that if you see color images of the Titanic, they were probably made with CGI, and are not the result of a time traveler retroactively saving the day back in 1912. Who's showing you these pictures and needs to "borrow" $100 to fix his time machine, which he, suspiciously, calls a TARDIS.

[George H. Smith]

I have overstayed my welcome here. There's nobody here anymore who's interested in engaging in exchange of information.

The Spanish Inquisition was more open-minded.

Oh, and one parting shot, something to leave you with.

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

"Oh, for crying out loud."

If that's what's considered common fucking sense here, I'll stick with my uncommon senses.

Your entire methodology reduces to this: If a person does standard magic tricks while claiming that he really has magical powers, he should be believed.

It is not as if John Edward did things that magicians later duplicated. Rather, he did the same things that magicians had been doing for a long time before he happened along, using exactly the same techniques with no greater accuracy than other magicians, The only difference is that Edward claims that he really talks to dead people. Thus did he make himself rich by preying on gullible, distraught people.

It is quite a coincidence, is it not, that Edward can only talk to dead people by mimicking an old routine of magicians, and that those dead people don't provide him with any more accurate information than magicians can get with trickery.

Do you also believe in Gypsy fortune tellers, tarot card readers, astrologers, mediums who levitate tables, and Christian faith healers?

Btw, your Titanic example makes no sense at all. No one ever claimed that the Titanic sank because of paranormal or supernatural causes. Nor did Cameron replicate the sinking of the Titanic. He merely created an animated version of the sinking -- a highly sophisticated cartoon, in effect.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Do you find shutting down a conversation by throwing a tantrum works for you with other people? All it does for me is make me think you're a closed minded asshole.

Tsk, tsk, Consider that I might be an messenger sent by God as a follow-up to your encounter with him. This is possible in your way of thinking, is it not? The fact that I don't believe this myself doesn't mean it might not be true; after all, I might be doing God's work without knowing that I am. So don't be closed-minded, Neil -- and be careful. You might have just called God's agent an "asshole." Not a smart move.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Any thing that exists is not magical.

Precisely. But this doesn't give you the epistemological right to posit the existence or occurrence of anything you like and then claim that it is not magical.

Moreover, your dictum implies that if something appears "magical," we must look for the most plausible explanation.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic.

"If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist."

James Cameron used CGI trickery to recreate the Titanic which must prove -- by The Amazing Randi's logic -- that there was never a real Titanic.

No, it means that if you see color images of the Titanic, they were probably made with CGI, and are not the result of a time traveler retroactively saving the day back in 1912. Who's showing you these pictures and needs to "borrow" $100 to fix his time machine, which he, suspiciously, calls a TARDIS.

Don't be so closed-minded. If you rule out time travel in advance, then of course you won't believe that Cameron really traveled back in time to film the real deal. And just because it is possible to animate the sinking of the Titanic with CGI doesn't mean that Cameron actually did this.

Will you point to those videos that show the planning for the movie, the computer technicians in action, and Cameron and other production people talking about how the movie was made? Think about it. Time travel technology could be used for evil purposes if it fell into the wrong hands, so if you possessed this technology, wouldn't you want to keep it a secret? And wouldn't you go to great lengths to maintain this secrecy?

"Avatar" is a more complicated case. Since actors were obviously used, it would be absurd to suppose that humans really engaged in a battle with the 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned Na'vi on Pandora. Cameron obviously hired Na'vi to act in the film, and we may never know which planet the movie was made on.

Ghs

[BaalChatzaf]

Any thing that exists is not magical.

The existence of God is not verified by intersubjective agreement or reproducible empirical evidence. God is believed in and not known in the sense that the Eiffel Tower is known. I have never been to Paris and I have never seen the Eiffel tower directly with my own eyes, but I have seen sufficiently evidence of the Eiffel Tower, its appearance and its nature to say I know it exists.

Write us when we can catch a Glimpse of God on Google Maps or by way of a satellite image.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[9thdoctor]

Don't be so closed-minded. If you rule out time travel in advance, then of course you won't believe that Cameron really traveled back in time to film the real deal. And just because it is possible to animate the sinking of the Titanic with CGI doesn't mean that Cameron actually did this.

Ok, I’m convinced. Rather than saving the people from drowning and/or hypothermia, just make sure you got the right camera angle. And never mind that if you could travel back to 1912 you could maybe take a side trip to Vienna (or wherever he was) and arrange for Hitler to drink some poisoned lemonade, or something like that. And how about taking out Gavrilo Princip while you’re at it? Hmm, no wait, ‘cos then Wittgenstein wouldn’t have lost his right arm and we wouldn’t have Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. Not sure about these tradeoffs. And the other Wittgenstein may never have written the Tractatus. That decides it…

[PDS]

I am going to miss Neil's presence on this thread, assuming he stays away. Seems like a good dude when he's not pissed off that we under-appreciate that the Author of the Universe entered his body for 8 hours one day, several years after having threatened to kill him.

[PDS]

Oh, and by the way, why didn't OJ just plead guilty?

[Jonathan]

I am going to miss Neil's presence on this thread, assuming he stays away.

Not to worry. If you miss him too much, I'll gladly act as medium and channel him up for you. Just let me know, and I'll tell you what he's telling me.

J

[George H. Smith]

Any thing that exists is not magical.

The existence of God is not verified by intersubjective agreement or reproducible empirical evidence. God is believed in and not known in the sense that the Eiffel Tower is known. I have never been to Paris and I have never seen the Eiffel tower directly with my own eyes, but I have seen sufficiently evidence of the Eiffel Tower, its appearance and its nature to say I know it exists.

Write us when we can catch a Glimpse of God on Google Maps or by way of a satellite image.

Ba'al Chatzaf

If people believe they live in a magical or supernaturalistic universe, then every causal or pseudo-causal explanation will seem equally "natural" to them. This is more than an abstract philosophical issue; it has had enormous practical consequences. The following passage is from one of my unpublished manuscripts on the history of religious freedom:

When Enlightenment philosophers emphasized the role of reason and science in promoting religious freedom, one thing they hoped to achieve was to overthrow the popular belief that God uses disease, earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters as a means to punish entire communities for the sins of a few. This ancient belief was by no means peculiar to Christians, as we see in the Roman proverb, “There is no rain -- the Christians are the cause.” Many ancient Romans believed that natural disasters were caused by vengeful pagan gods who were angered by those Christians who portrayed them as evil demons. The Christian theologian Tertullian, writing around the year 200, put the problem this way: “If the Tiber ascends to the walls, or if the Nile does not overflow the fields, if the heaven refuses its rain, if the earth quakes, if famine and pestilence desolate the land, immediately the cry is raised, ‘The Christians to the lions!’”

Similarly, many Christian theologians pointed to examples in the Old Testament to support their argument that God will punish an entire community, guilty and innocent alike, if its rulers fail to punish heretics, blasphemers, and others who offend God. When this belief was interwoven into the fabric of public opinion, as it was for centuries, it proved difficult to defend religious freedom.

To illustrate this problem, imagine a world that is governed by a deity named Blictri. Furthermore, suppose that Blictri has decreed in a clear and unmistakable manner that at 8 p.m. every Saturday every person in the country of Ruritania shall light a candle in his honor. Blictri has also ordered the king of Ruritania to enforce this religious observance, declaring that failure to do so will result in the infliction of plagues, earthquakes, famines, or other calamities on the entire community. All subjects of Ruritania will suffer if the government fails to punish any subjects who violate this commandment.

If Ruritania had some libertarian philosophers, how could they make a case for religious freedom? How could they defend the position that no one in Ruritania should be compelled to light a candle once a week in honor of Blictri, if this ritual violates his or her conscience? Although it might be possible to make this case, it would not be easy, given the collective punishment inflicted by Blictri on all Ruritanians for the sins of a few.

Similar points could be made about the belief in witches. If witches were really able to destroy a farmer's crops and livestock with a curse, then they would be guilty of aggression, and libertarian jurists who believed in witches would not hesitate to hold them legally accountable.

In short, the same principle of nonaggression, when applied to different causal beliefs, will lead to radically different outcomes. This is one of the latent dangers is Neil's "anything goes" approach to causal explanations.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I am going to miss Neil's presence on this thread, assuming he stays away. Seems like a good dude when he's not pissed off that we under-appreciate that the Author of the Universe entered his body for 8 hours one day, several years after having threatened to kill him.

If a theistic explanation must be given for Neil's varied experiences, I think a polytheistic explanation would do better than a monotheistic one. Either that, or God is a female who suffers from periodic bouts of PMS.

Ghs

[Starbuckle]

Neil writes: "There's nobody here anymore who's interested in engaging in exchange of information. The Spanish Inquisition was more open-minded.... James Randi's entire methodology of proof is based on a classic error in logic. 'If something can be duplicated by trickery, it doesn't exist.' "

Linaweaver in his interviewing of Neil was interested primarily in eliciting information and exchanging information, not in evaluating or challenging Neil's interpretations of events. That approach is reasonable enough given the purpose of the interviews, i.e., to bring out Neil's story and produce the memoir.

But if one is going to assess rather than merely elict a story and a participant's interpretation of events, it is not enough to let the story sit there like a wet mackeral, accepting the information (and interpretation) one is handed and perhaps proffering some info of one's but benignly neglecting to be analytical and critical.

This discussion thread was inaugurated precisely in order to assess the truth of a claim. Alas, no intelligible, logical arguments to support the claim have been provided by the asserter of that claim, a claim that is not self-evidently true, especially given the fact that it entails the impossible. Is the failure of the claim and allied claims to win the day in this forum the fault of gullible persons or of non-gullible persons? Is the enlisting and then unceremonious dropping of the likes of John Edward as a credible fellow witness to the supernatural the fault of gullible persons or of non-gullible persons?

Randi is not particularly a philosopher. He is an exposer of fraud. Randi may not be proving that accessing and manipulating the supernatural is impossible. He merely exposes every single person who claims to do so that he investigates as a con man, a doer of magic tricks. Randi is confident that he'll never have to hand out the large cash prize he's promised to give the first purported psychic who can demonstrate his powers in appropriately controlled conditions because Randi has confidence in the natural world, that things are what they are and can't act in any way contrary to their nature, whether we call the violation of identity "divine intervention" or "leakage from one of the other continuums." He doesn't have to note or defend this metaphysical fact explicitly in order to rely upon it and positively encourage rationality and self-defense against fraud and one's own tendencies to be gullible.

Of course, given the arbitrary features and magical capacities imputed to the supernatural, it makes as much sense as any other alleged aspect of the alleged realm of the supernatural that it can only be tapped when no acute skeptic is observing and when the possibility of trickery has not been excluded....

Edited December 23, 2010 by Starbuckle

[George H. Smith]

Is the enlisting and then unceremonious dropping of the likes of John Edward as a credible fellow witness to the supernatural the fault of gullible persons or of non-gullible persons?

Randi is not particularly a philosopher. He is an exposer of fraud. Randi may not be proving that accessing and manipulating the supernatural is impossible. He merely exposes every single person he investigates as a con man, a doer of magic tricks. Randi is confident that he'll never have to hand out the large cash prize he's promised to give the first purported psychic who can demonstrate his powers in appropriately controlled conditions because Randi has confidence in the natural world, that things are what they are and can't act in any way contrary to their nature, whether we call the violation of identity "divine intervention" or "leakage from one of the other continuums." He doesn't have to note or defend this metaphysical fact explicitly in order to rely upon it and positively encourage rationality and self-defense against fraud and one's own tendencies to be gullible.

I just took a look at Edward's website. He gets $750 for a "private reading." No amount of time is specified, but sessions probably run 30-60 minutes. Not a bad rate for a magician.

Neil crossed a line with me when he mentioned Edward. I used to watch Edward's television show from time to time, and I would groan as he quickly attempted to transform a string of "misses" into a "hit." Since only his better efforts were televised, I came to the conclusion that his skills were not even up to those of various magicians I have seen. What Edward does have that some honest magicians lack is a charismatic, hangdog, "I wouldn't lie to you" demeanor. Charisma is a grifter's most important attribute. Geller has it in spades.

My charged reaction to Neil's remark about Edward is partly owing to my early days as an amateur magician during the 1960s. I don't know what it is like now, but in those days magicians absolutely despised charlatans who used the venerable art of magic to defraud people. This was a very big deal for them, and Randi is carrying on that tradition.

I don't know anything about Randi's political views, but I met him once at a California libertarian conference in the late 1970s. He was very cordial and even performed a trick for my girlfriend and me. It was a standard disappearing handkerchief trick, but he did it so well that I was completely fooled at first. I had to surf my memories before I could recall how it was done.

Ghs

[Jonathan]

I don't know what it is like now, but in those days magicians absolutely despised charlatans who used the venerable art of magic to defraud people. This was a very big deal for them, and Randi is carrying on that tradition.

Penn & Teller are carrying on that tradition as well.

J

[George H. Smith]

I don't know what it is like now, but in those days magicians absolutely despised charlatans who used the venerable art of magic to defraud people. This was a very big deal for them, and Randi is carrying on that tradition.

Penn & Teller are carrying on that tradition as well.

J

A funny bit by Penn and Teller:

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Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

Could those dogmatic douche bags who are in this thread only to sneer please go fuck off and leave this discussion for the grown ups?

Grown ups don't believe in God, not unless they compartmentalize that belief to some extent, especially from their work, as did Isaac Newton.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Could those dogmatic douche bags who are in this thread only to sneer please go fuck off and leave this discussion for the grown ups?

Grown ups don't believe in God, not unless they compartmentalize that belief to some extent, especially from their work, as did Isaac Newton.

--Brant

Not so. Newton's religious beliefs were an integral part of his physics. See -Never At Rest- by Richard S. Westfall.

The cache of Newton correspondence purchased by J. M. Keynes in the 1930's (yes, that Keynes) indicated the Newton was a full time mystic, an alchemist, a seeker after Ancient Wisdom. One of his fundamental believes is that the spacetime continuum is the sensorum of God. He wrote four times as many words on the Mysteries of the Bible and Ancient wisdom than he did no physics and mathematics.

Newton was a genuine, uncompartentalized God phreak.

Ba'al Chatzaf