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

[PDS]

George: According to the article, Einstein himself called the story bunk: "I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere — childish analogies. We have to admire in humility and beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it. And that is all."

Sorry -- I stopped reading the article to post the passage but got distracted and never returned to it. At least my instincts were correct.

And, re the Ingersoll quote, I still love the phrase that "an atheist is an agnostic with his sleeves rolled up."

One of my favorite Ingersoll lines runs something like this: With a little soap, baptism is a good thing.

I first read this line while a sophomore in high school. I thought it was hilarious, but some people I quoted the line to didn't seem to agree.

Ingersoll, though not generally well-known today, was a very big deal in 19th century America. His speeches attracted thousands of people, and, in the pre-microphone age, the voice of the great orator carried far enough for all to hear.

From the Wiki article on Ingersoll:

His radical views on religion, slavery, woman's suffrage, and other issues of the day effectively prevented him from ever pursuing or holding political offices higher than that of state attorney general. Illinois Republicans tried to pressure him into running for governor on the condition that Ingersoll conceal his agnosticism during the campaign, which he refused on the basis that concealing information from the public was immoral.

A bio of Ingersoll that I read many years ago told the following story: When a reporter visited Ingersoll at his home, Ingersoll asked the reporter if he would like to see the world's most expensive library. Of course, the reporter said Yes, so Ingersoll took him into another room. The library, which contained many freethought volumes, was impressive, but the reporter was skeptical, saying that he had seen larger and more expensive libraries before. "This library cost me the presidency," Ingersoll replied.

Ghs

That's it--my new Christmas present to myself: an Ingersoll biography. George--somebody owes you a commission.

[J Neil Schulman]

Look, I think you're humoring me, being polite to me, when what you really think is that my belief that my experiences reflect a real encounter with God is just nuts. How can you move your biases all the way out of a discussion when you've made your life's work refuting the very premise I'm saying my experience confirmed for me?

how can one distinguish between a Divine Encounter and an hallucination? I have had hallucinations (while very feverish). They seemed very real to me at the time. I have also had "weird" things happen to me for which I have not been able to construct a "reasonable" cause. Even so, I do not attribute such happenings to an encounter with The Almighty. There is an old saying: the more extraordinary the event, the more extraordinary must be the evidence for the event.

I often talk to God, but I would be very worried for my mental health if I got a clear reply.

Ba'al Chatzaf

"How can one distinguish between a Divine Encounter and an hallucination?"

How does one know any experience is real as opposed to an hallucination? By testing it against the rest of one's experience, seeing if one is given new information one didn't previously know that is verifiable, putting it in the context of other of one's life experiences.

[George H. Smith]

That's it--my new Christmas present to myself: an Ingersoll biography. George--somebody owes you a commission.

I haven't kept up with Ingersoll biographies. The one I read was American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll, by Orvin Larson.

This biography was out of print when I first learned of it in high school. I therefore wrote directly to Larson to see if he had any extra copies he would be willing to sell. He replied by sending me a free autographed copy as a gift.

Ghs

[J Neil Schulman]

History is classically defined as trying to figure out the past based on artifacts and documents. Both can be forged but to assume all are forged negates the possibility of a discipline of history at all.

Of course there are things that reasonable people can agree are facts. But when terms like "crank" are tossed around freely, it becomes quickly evident that one man's crank is another man's guru. One can aspire to objectivity -- one can draw inferences only from the non-controversial and on the face of it evident -- but I maintain that the acceptance of any controversial assertion as true or even possibly true is often -- perhaps usually -- mediated by one's assumptions, experience, and biases.

You are exaggerating the problem of forgeries in historiography. Nevertheless, historians don't merely "assume" that all the documents they use are not forged so they can do history. Diplomatics (i.e., the critical study of documents) has become quite sophisticated.

Let me give an example that will address most of your points. In the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery. (The Donation of Constantine is a phony imperial decree in which Constantine supposedly transferred political jurisdiction of the Western Roman Empire to the pope. This was supposed to have been a reward for Constantine having been miraculously cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I -- another bogus story.) Cusa and Valla called attention to anachronistic language used in the Donation, to its later style of Latin, and to its references to events that did not occur until after the purported date of the document.

The exposure of the Donation of Constantine (actually written between the eighth and ninth centuries) had momentous political consequences, for it destroyed one of the main pillars of the "papalist" claim that the pope had not only spiritual powers but sovereign temporal (i.e. secular) powers as well.

So did Cusa and Valla work from presuppositions and biases? Of course they did. One of their presuppositions was that a document supposedly written in the fourth century will not contain words, such as "fief," that were not coined until centuries later. Another presupposition was that the style of Latin found in a fourth-century imperial decree should conform to the style found in contemporaneous documents -- not to a style found in 8th century writings.

My point here is that some presuppositions are rationally grounded, and if they are rationally grounded, then they actually contribute to the objectivity of a historical investigation. It is therefore nonsensical to criticize historians for working with presuppositions until we know what those presuppositions are and have assessed their rationality. Not all presuppositions are equal.

But what about personal bias? Well, both Cusa and Valla had their biases insofar as both were opposed to "papalism." Cusa was a "conciliarist" who believed that final spiritual authority should reside in a council of bishops, not in the pope; and Valla was hired by Alfonso of Aragon, who was involved in a territorial conflict with the Papal States, to discredit the papacy.

Such personal biases, which are the rule rather than the exception in political conflicts, always raise the eyebrows of historians, but in many cases it is not all that difficult to factor them out -- especially when the evidence for one side is overwhelming, as it was with the Donation of Constantine. Cusa and Valla may have been motivated by their biases to expose the Donation, but the facts they adduced stand on their own.

The conclusion that the Donation of Constantine is a forgery, which has been substantiated by many historians and even conceded by the Catholic Church, is an objective historical conclusion. It is not a matter of biases or personal preferences. And -- to repeat -- the rational presuppositions that led to the exposure of this forgery are what made this objectivity possible.

Now, here you will probably reply that, yes, there are some cases like this in history, but there are also cases that are not nearly this simple. And of course you would be right to say this. But my purpose here was to establish the premise that history can be an objective enterprise in at least some instances. And even if not all cases are this straightforward, there is no reason why we cannot apply the same basic principles to more complex cases. True, we may end up, as historians often do, with probable theories rather than with apodictic conclusions, but arriving at probable theories is not a game of deuces-wild; rational standards apply here as well.

Ghs

George, I wasn't the one raising the topic of document forgeries in this discussion; I was responding to another list member who was telling a story of someone who didn't believe in the historical accounts of slavery before the American War Between the States, and asserted that all historical documents were forged by a conspiracy. My comment was that such extreme skepticism annihilated the discipline of history entirely.

I agree that not all presuppositions are equal. That's why I made the distinction between using non-controversial and controversial "facts" -- distinguished by clear evidence -- and suggested that any time a controversial statement is made one's personal assumptions and biases will mediate whether one accepts it.

A hypothetical example would be whether one believes time travel or travel between parallel universes is possible. If time arrows are all forward in one and only one sequence and unalterable by human action, then logically one must accept that every effect has a prior cause within that sequence. That assumption, however, can be negated by an acceptance of physics that offers additional possibilities of cause and effect.

Another hypothetical case where one's assumptions mediate a study of history would be whether one believes extraterrestrial space-farers visited this planet during ancient times. The assumption of human life originating on earth with no action in human history by extraterrestrial agencies leads to one set of conclusions; adding in the additional possibilities of additional agencies raises a new set of possibilities.

Again, one's assumptions mediate what one is willing to bring to the analytical table.

[J Neil Schulman]

Mr. Schulman:

I have read the lion's share of your book on the link you sent earlier in this thread, and forgive me if you answered this question in the book, but here goes: what is the most significant insight you gained in the 8 hour period of the "mind meld" you experienced?

Also, I might add that the mind meld you describe strikes me as somewhat similar to the days after Paul's post-Damascus experience, but the God described in your book seems rather more "puny" than the Voice from the Clouds described by Paul. Just an observation.

Fwiw, the Buddhist mystics posit that the Universe is One Energy, that we are part of that Energy, and that this One Energy is, at bottom, benign, i.e., the Energy more or less operates on the Benevolent Universe premise, to use the vernacular of Objectivism.

The God described in your book seems more consistent with this Buddhist view than the Judeo-Christian Godhead.

I'll list a few of the insights, in no particular order.

First, that God's cognition allows him to look at a human being in four dimensions, seeing into that person's past, and seeing the future time-line based on what I have termed that person's "heartmost" desire -- the bottom line on what central desire in a person acts to select the rest of his or her life choices. Seeing what a person wants more than anything is how God views someone, with the only important question for God being whether that desire is to be good, or whether some other desire has taken its place.

Second, that human free will is so absolute that God feels powerless in the face of it, making him a spectator of human choice. He can coach from the sidelines but can do nothing about what happens on the field.

Third, that God is entirely human in his personality. He thinks of himself as "one of us."

[George H. Smith]

George, I wasn't the one raising the topic of document forgeries in this discussion; I was responding to another list member who was telling a story of someone who didn't believe in the historical accounts of slavery before the American War Between the States, and asserted that all historical documents were forged by a conspiracy. My comment was that such extreme skepticism annihilated the discipline of history entirely.

My discussion of the Donation of Constantine went far beyond the problem of forgery. It also illustrated, with real rather than hypothetical details, the role of presuppositions in history and how biases can be dealt with.

I agree that not all presuppositions are equal. That's why I made the distinction between using non-controversial and controversial "facts" -- distinguished by clear evidence -- and suggested that any time a controversial statement is made one's personal assumptions and biases will mediate whether one accepts it.

The charge that the Donation of Constantine is a forgery was very controversial at the time. Responders fell into two categories: those who let their personal assumptions and biases override the facts, and those who accepted the facts, regardless of their personal assumptions and biases.

You initially brought up Old Testament accounts. Most historiography in this field is relatively uncontroversial. The only people who seriously disagree are biblical literalists who let their assumptions and biases override rational historical judgments. The vast majority of biblical scholars are Christians and other religious believers who know how to put their personal biases aside when doing history.

A hypothetical example would be whether one believes time travel or travel between parallel universes is possible. If time arrows are all forward in one and only one sequence and unalterable by human action, then logically one must accept that every effect has a prior cause within that sequence. That assumption, however, can be negated by an acceptance of physics that offers additional possibilities of cause and effect.

We are speaking of real rather than hypothetical history, so how about dealing with real historical examples for a change? You are talking about cosmological speculation, not history. If you want to write "reverse history," in effect, be my

guest. Virtually no one will take you seriously, nor should they. You would be writing fiction, not history, and there is a vast difference between the two.

Again, one's assumptions mediate what one is willing to bring to the analytical table.

Yes, and such assumptions range from the crackpot to the rational. So what?

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I'll list a few of the insights, in no particular order.

First, that God's cognition allows him to look at a human being in four dimensions, seeing into that person's past, and seeing the future time-line based on what I have termed that person's "heartmost" desire -- the bottom line on what central desire in a person acts to select the rest of his or her life choices. Seeing what a person wants more than anything is how God views someone, with the only important question for God being whether that desire is to be good, or whether some other desire has taken its place.

Second, that human free will is so absolute that God feels powerless in the face of it, making him a spectator of human choice. He can coach from the sidelines but can do nothing about what happens on the field.

Third, that God is entirely human in his personality. He thinks of himself as "one of us."

God told you all of this during your conversation with him? If so, what he told you contradicts what he told many other people. Why do you suppose God would tell such wildly different things to different people? Is he trying to confuse us?

Ghs

[J Neil Schulman]

Look, I think you're humoring me, being polite to me, when what you really think is that my belief that my experiences reflect a real encounter with God is just nuts. How can you move your biases all the way out of a discussion when you've made your life's work refuting the very premise I'm saying my experience confirmed for me?

I have read too many accounts of religious experiences by people I respect to categorize all such people as "nuts."

As I recall, without having reread your previous posts, you initially conceded that your personal experiences carry no epistemological weight with others, i.e., that there is no good reason why others should interpret your experiences in the same manner you have.

Then you started talking about how you view similar stories related in the Bible. At one point you seemed to say that you were not making any historical claims about these reports, and that they merely provided material for a better understanding your own experiences. I said I had no problem with this approach.

But you kept vacillating, as you moved back and forth between the personal significance, for you, of biblical accounts and the cognitive value of such accounts. Did a god actually influence some events reported in the Old Testament, or should we accept a naturalistic explanation? You called this a chicken/egg problem, as if one option is as good as the other, and you went on to justify this statement by invoking the supposed subjectivity of history. We all interpret history according to our subjective experiences and biases, according to you, so you are justified in employing your experiences and biases when interpreting biblical accounts.

But you are not justified in doing this. For one thing, you would need to present reasonable arguments showing why your "presuppositions" are rationally warranted. You would need to present, in other words, good reasons why others should accept your claim that you talked to God. But even this wouldn't be sufficient; you would also need to show that the relevant biblical accounts can meet the minimal standards of historical credibility. You haven't even attempted to do the latter. Instead, you have claimed that your subjective experiences somehow give you the cognitive right to choose any historical account that conforms to those experiences. You have, moreover, defended this approach with the vague claim that everyone else does the same thing.

This is nonsense, pure and simple. And it doesn't become any less nonsensical by invoking truisms about presuppositions and biases in history. The same points could be (and have been) made about philosophy and science, in which case your "objectivism" with a small "o" would go down the drain of subjectivism.

It goes without saying that you are entitled to believe whatever you like. It should also go without saying that when you communicate your beliefs to others in the hope of persuading them that you need to move from the subjective realm of mere belief to the objective realm of justified belief.

Ghs

George, unsurprisingly I think you raise the strongest challenge I face in making my experiences relevant or useful to anyone other than me.

The problem for me is that I'm not an advocate for religion, which I see as human institutions; and my tendency is unchanged from my atheist days to regard much of religion as stupid, dogmatic, often psychotic, and motivating a lot of irrational behavior. I'm afraid my own biases aren't all that far from seeing religion as cargo cults.

So, now regarding God as real, I'm conflicted. How much of religion is actually the result of others before me having made contact with God is an open and unresolved question for me.

Of course for you, not having had my experience, I'm just another claimant, indistinguishable from those found in churches, and written about largely by unknown ancient authors in documents tagged "scripture" -- which if you think about it means nothing more than "writings," in the same way the "bible" means nothing more than "book." Should I regard scriptures as inspired or influenced by God in the same way my own "scriptures" and "bibles" have been? (You can't know my internal creative impulses; I have a go at tracking them.) The idea is grating to me, but I feel I have to be fair, even when my rational skepticism makes me view the unknown authorship -- and the conflation of prior myths with claims of historicity of Hebrew and Christian stories -- as meaning the writings are just as likely more fiction than fact. But I still search for kernels of fact.

What makes it worse is that I'm trained (largely through professional experience, not academically) as a journalist, fiction writer, and dramatist. I'm pretty much an auto-didact, having always preferred reading and debate to classrooms. A lot of my education on history is nothing more that hanging around with libertarians who insisted I read books by historians like Beard, Taylor, and Martin -- and SEK3 and LeFevre probably got me to read more than most others.

I'm not a professional historian.

I had a set of extraordinary experiences that convinced me that my prior atheism didn't reflect reality. I understand that most people have no basis to regard these experiences as real, but I think they're real. And the skepticism is just as great from theists who regard my account of my experiences heretical (and sometimes blasphemous) to their religious dogma as from atheists who regard my asserting them as unjustifiable.

[George H. Smith]

George, unsurprisingly I think you raise the strongest challenge I face in making my experiences relevant or useful to anyone other than me.

The problem for me is that I'm not an advocate for religion, which I see as human institutions; and my tendency is unchanged from my atheist days to regard much of religion as stupid, dogmatic, often psychotic, and motivating a lot of irrational behavior. I'm afraid my own biases aren't all that far from seeing religion as cargo cults.

The problem for you is that many, many people in conventional religions have also claimed to have talked to God, and in many cases there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. The word "prophet" traditionally referred to people who had these conversations, and some prophets have reported revelations that contradict the revelations reported by other prophets.

Early Christians had to grapple with this problem. The New Testament warns against false prophets, but how could false prophets be distinguished from the true? Early Christians proposed a solution of sorts, namely, that true prophets could be identified by their ability to perform miracles. But even this didn't quite work, since miracles were a dime a dozen -- for example, reports of dead people rising from their graves were common during the first few centuries of Christendom. Thus Augustine was forced to admit that even false prophets can perform miracles, but he stipulated that such miracles are the work of demons, not God. Eventually, as this conundrum got out of hand, a more efficient solution was found: If the Church declared you a prophet, then you were a prophet; if not, then no holy fruit cup for you.

Given your acceptance of your own religious experience, you will need to reject like-minded people whose revelations have contradicted yours. And this puts you pretty much in the camp of traditional revealed religions whose proponents have repeatedly declared, "Your revelations are false, whereas mine are true."

It was this kind of appeal to personal revelation that Deists assailed so effectively during the 17th and 18th centuries. As believers in a rational creator-God, they were deeply offended by the notion that God would reveal himself only to a relative handful of prophets and leave everyone else dependent on their conflicting testimonies. Instead, they argued that God has revealed himself, but he has done so through the natural universe discernible by reason, not by "special" revelations to a select few that others must accept on faith.

The deistic conception of God was far more rational and noble than the stuff prophets have been pushing since time immemorial.

Ghs

[william.scherk]

A big month at OL -- an Intelligent Design crank, an I Met God crank, an anti-Muslim crank and now a Dianetics crank.

William,

It could be worse.

In my day, crank was crystal meth.

I am older now, but was a time in my early years of adulthood when I relished disabusing those whom I considered mistaken or deluded of their religious notions. Now in the late summer of my years I am not so enthusiastic. The sun has set on a few of these things. Where in the world of solid notions can I set Intelligent Design, Dianetics, or I Met God?

I was irked by AristotlesAdvance because he was in the wrong location. If he was truly burning with zeal to correct the evul evolutionist Darwinian liars and fools, then he was entering the arena only to hang out on the lower mezzanine, far from the real action. If he had been really challenging himself and others with the acuity of Intelligent Design he would have been in other forums devoted to these issues. Not that we are stupid or uninformed on OL, but ID refutation is not a specialty skill here.

It was funny that Neil popped in here, but funnier still is the gravid civility that attends his appearance.

As for combining Dianetics + Objectivism , I am curious to see how long it may be before we discover how that works out.

There is ever irrationalism in human affairs. What is somewhat discomfiting is that the sun has gone down on certain questions for Objectivists small o and large, and for most rational thinkers, yet here they are again. Whether ID or Dianetics or straight-up "Vulcan Mind Meld with God," I wonder at the reception.

Edited December 16, 2010 by william.scherk

[George H. Smith]

It was funny that Neil popped in here, but funnier still is the gravid civility that attends his appearance.

Unlike AA, Neil has many accomplishments under his belt, and I think these have earned him some measure of civility. Moreover, even debates over conversations with God can generate interesting spinoffs, such as the current debate over the nature and possibility of historical objectivity. Such discussions may prove worthwhile in their own right, and this is why I have been active on this thread. I have known Neil long enough to know that I am not going to change his mind, and he has known me long enough to know that he is not going to change my mind.

Ghs

[Starbuckle]

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "That assumption, however, can be negated by an acceptance of physics that offers additional possibilities of cause and effect." I enunciate an even more sweeping powerful possibility-of-assumption-negating assumption: all assumptions can be negated by opposite assumptions. I call this Starbuckle's Law of How All Assumptions Can Be Negated by Opposite Assumptions. GHS provided a video demonstrating this based on work done by the Argument Clinic.

There are no "additional possibilities of cause and effect." There are only the different natures of things, which act in different ways because of their different natures. Causality depends on identity. Any scientific inquiry might give us new insight into stuff whose nature we thought we already knew, or into stuff of which we were previously altogether ignorant. But if one throws out the law of identity, how can even begin any scientific inquiry? The whole point of investigation is to find out the nature of things, the whats and the whys. There is no other basis on which to proceed. The law of identity is certainly an assumption, but an objective and inescapable one.

I haven't read Neil's whole testament yet, but it seems to me that his interpretation of his experiences are fundamentally informed by his blending of the merely speculative and even fictional with what can be objectively substantiated. The experience did not come first, followed by the re-thinking; the re-thinking preceded and seems to have produced the experience. (Either that, or God wants to confound the rationalists by being extremely coy. Why does he simply not reveal himself to all in a wholly unequivocal and undeniable way? Too easy and perhaps not very interesting and amusing. God is a kind of happy-go-lucky jester, perhaps.)

The following is incomplete but I don't know how long it will take me to finish the book so I thought I would just post some of my reactions so far.

The specific evidence for a God or the supernatural (if it is evidence) doesn't come until after J. Neil has graduated from atheism to agnosticism and begun playing out competing paradigms in his mind. Theory, argument or assertions, from C.S. Lewis and others, and cultural experience has been informing his evolving views before he gets to his "face-to-face" talk with God. We have C.S. Lewis versus Ayn Rand, maybe PhilipKDick Heinlein versus AynRand Heinlein, Judaism versus Catholicism. (Presumably the alleged paranormal experiences of his father are not regarded as firsthand evidence; we know in any case that psychics and other paranormalists can, like any adept magician, set up mind readings and moving objects, rely on a certain willingness to believe, and are suddenly shy when Randi walks into the room.)

A lot of Schulman's musing is about how the reality of under-informed rationalists is but a veil, rather than a realm that we can straightforwardly explore albeit with necesssarily greater sophistication as we become more aware of subtleties and complications. Philip K. Dick is supposed to have said, "The nature of reality is to disguise its true nature." Perhaps God spends a lot of his time hiding under reality's surface froth, or at least hiding from skeptics who have yet to throw the mental switch that would illuminate all? Dick, of course, was another fictioneer persuaded by his own unverifiable speculations, also not conventionally Christian.

In any case, it does seem that the distinction between myth and imagination on the one hand and observable reality on the other becomes blurred in Schulman's interpretation-crafting. Thus, if it is possible to speculate, without any evidence, about "multiple continua" or dimensions, on the basis of a mere mathematical construct positing oodles of dimensions, this becomes a substantiated possibility--a legitimate "hypothesis," although a hypothesis without any body of data that the hypothesis could be useful in explaining--rather than a mere unsubstantiated speculation useful for crafting SF and fantasy stories.

The stories that inspire him and the ideas he develops support each other. Some stories make more sense than others or are more congruent with Schulman's values than others, and it seems that he regards the more-congruent ones as, if not literally true, then at least kind of true (they can be cherry-picked)--at any rate, are more revelatory of the true nature of the secret world unknown to rationalists or not credited by rationalists and others who have only reality to work with.

A few excerpts from the book with my comments in brackets:

"I remember a day in 1970 that I was expecting, all day, a telephone call to come in saying that my grandfather, my father’s father, was dead. That call came around two in the afternoon. I’d been expecting it. This was when we were in the process of moving from Massachusetts to New York." [What is this evidence of?]

"...omething happened to me during the writing of The Rainbow Cadenza. I had some sort of event happen to me, probably in the last month of writing, that puts it somewhere in November to December of 1981, and I would say that my atheism was pretty well done at that point because I was seriously running at least a second or third paradigm, at that point. The materialistic view that Rand had given me was in suspension along with other views at that point so I would say I was agnostic by that point. Obviously, by the time I’m writing that statement 'I believe in God' – it’s dated March 24, 1992 – my agnosticism is pretty much over.

"I also talk about having the experience with God, I don’t think we’ve gotten to it yet in the first part, where I had an experience in 1988 around my birthday in which, I had been praying daily The Lord’s Prayer by 1988 probably for about a year. [schulman had been praying The Lord's Prayer for about a year before his alleged encounter with God. Did he have evidence of a God before undertaking this exercise?] The 1988 experience I have told you about but I’m going to be putting on the record here and this is as good a place to do it....

"So, by the end of 1981 when I’m finishing the writing of Rainbow Cadenza [in which there is a discussion between a C.S.Lewisian and an Ayn-Randian] I’m going through this transition period. It then starts accelerating so that by 1987, I’ve decided to make the experiment. We can call that period from 1982 to 1986 — at least five years — we can call that my for-sure agnostic period.

"In 1987 I decide to make a leap of faith — an experiment — and that is to pray....

"The very exploration of art in The Rainbow Cadenza started giving me new paradigms having to do with existence itself. I started seeing God, in the sense that Hill Bromley was talking about God, as being an artist. And this paradigm, that’s when it started running alongside in my head, these other paradigms, these purely mechanistic science paradigms. And, of course, there were the quantum paradigms, also, which I was getting from reading things like Illuminatus! and the The Schrodinger’s Cat books by Robert Anton Wilson. And of course Sam Konkin was a theoretical chemist and so I was given some, at least a Sunday supplement version of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. Not that I had any mathematical understanding of them, but at least that was one more of the paradigms that was starting to run in my head as I started thinking about quantum uncertainty as possibly having to do something with free will and freeing us from the mechanistic clockwork universe that seemed to be so much a part of the secularists...."

[Me: Which secularists? Rand doesn't deny consciousness and values, nor does she regard these as "mechanistic." She doesn't therefore consider herself a "materialist" (or if she is, in what sense is she a materialist? In the sense that she denies _supernatural_ spirit or consciousness, that is, denies the spirit or consciousness for which there is no evidence or which makes itself manifest only very irregularly and coyly.)]

"So this transition that I was going forward with, again a lot having to do with tension and release and realizing that Creation itself utilized these artistic principles, made me start at least running the paradigm of the created universe alongside the uncreated universe. Again, the contradiction in my mind was how could you have a created universe if existence exists? That existence exists was where Rand was starting out, how could you have a created universe if existence has always existed, how can something come out of nothing? That was one of the main problems that I was trying to resolve in my mind. If there has to be something which is uncreated, how could you have a created universe? Okay, so that was the unresolved problem in my mind.

"BRAD LINAWEAVER: You did not like the idea of Creation ex nihilo.

"J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right, and to this day I reject the concept of creation ex nihilo...."

"J. NEIL SCHULMAN: [Heinlein was] Very prominent [in his mind], but at that particular moment I don’t know, okay? But again, it was this clinging to God, praying so tight that nobody dies, that no harm comes to everybody. You know this panicked clinging, which was what He was breaking. In essence He was telling me, 'Don’t pray so much!' because I’d been praying every day, constantly. Not just the Lord’s Prayer, but also the prayers for everybody to be okay – and not in the Christian sense of praying for their soul – but praying for them physically not to die, not to get hit by a truck.

"So, God ended that at that moment. [The Godvoice had indicated that Neil's praying was annoying and ridiculous.]

"Nonetheless, again, being the rationalist, I’m thinking maybe this is my science-fiction writer’s brain telling me that I’m having a heart attack. So at this point I woke up my roommate and I said, 'Call the paramedics, I think I’m having a heart attack.'...

"There was always that two percent of doubt because _I_ might be crazy. I knew that the human body was capable of doing odd things, and the human brain was capable of doing odd things. I thought that maybe I was suffering from some toxic poisoning from coffee or something like that. Maybe this was some sort of hallucinated experience."

[Me: Why isn't the rationalist interpretation the one that Neil sticks with? "I thought, at that point, I wonder if this is simply some sort of psychological event, some fantasy my body is having to tell me that I’m having a heart attack?" Isn't this a more likely explanation than that some kind of impish supernatural entity had invaded his brain? And how does he know it's "God" rather than some kind of other, perhaps lower-order supernatural trickster?]

###

[Brant Gaede]

deleted by bg

Edited December 17, 2010 by Brant Gaede

[Greybird]

[...] Neil has many accomplishments under his belt, and I think these have earned him some measure of civility.

I'm afraid I have to vigorously demur with George here. Not with the first statement, which is demonstrated by reading even a page of any of Neil's many books.

Yet the second statement is what I, for one, cannot accept in any discussion forum. Everyone deserves a considerable measure of civility, unless and until one conclusively demonstrates an inability to take part in productive discussion. (Or has subverted it, with actions such as plagiarism.)

Relying on outside accomplishments, to justify being admitted to the figurative civil-discussion table in the first place, may be appropriate in a journal-publishing or peer-review context. In a general discussion forum, it's not at all appropriate.

Civility is part of general benevolence, a point that David Kelley limned well in Unrugged Individualism. To say that it must be "earned" in advance (which I suspect George doesn't hold as a general principle) is to effectively limit discussion before it even begins.

[Brant Gaede]

[...] Neil has many accomplishments under his belt, and I think these have earned him some measure of civility.

I'm afraid I have to vigorously demur with George here. Not with the first statement, which is demonstrated by reading even a page of any of Neil's many books.

Yet the second statement is what I, for one, cannot accept in any discussion forum. Everyone deserves a considerable measure of civility, unless and until one conclusively demonstrates an inability to take part in productive discussion. (Or has subverted it, with actions such as plagiarism.)

Relying on outside accomplishments, to justify being admitted to the figurative civil-discussion table in the first place, may be appropriate in a journal-publishing or peer-review context. In a general discussion forum, it's not at all appropriate.

Civility is part of general benevolence, a point that David Kelley limned well in Unrugged Individualism. To say that it must be "earned" in advance (which I suspect George doesn't hold as a general principle) is to effectively limit discussion before it even begins.

Civility has little to do with discussions of substance at the core. We are civil with Neil because he is civil and because you can't argue with faith. Faith, and other irrationalities, is beyond ratiocination. Neil is not arguing for his position so much as telling us what it is, in regard to x and y and z. (Maybe we've yet to get to z..) Now, why is any such, one way or the other, grounds for telling Neil to fuck off?

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

[...] Neil has many accomplishments under his belt, and I think these have earned him some measure of civility.

I'm afraid I have to vigorously demur with George here. Not with the first statement, which is demonstrated by reading even a page of any of Neil's many books.

Yet the second statement is what I, for one, cannot accept in any discussion forum. Everyone deserves a considerable measure of civility, unless and until one conclusively demonstrates an inability to take part in productive discussion. (Or has subverted it, with actions such as plagiarism.)

Relying on outside accomplishments, to justify being admitted to the figurative civil-discussion table in the first place, may be appropriate in a journal-publishing or peer-review context. In a general discussion forum, it's not at all appropriate.

Civility is part of general benevolence, a point that David Kelley limned well in Unrugged Individualism. To say that it must be "earned" in advance (which I suspect George doesn't hold as a general principle) is to effectively limit discussion before it even begins.

I concede your point. My post was not worded as clearly as it should have been.

Ghs

[J Neil Schulman]

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "That assumption, however, can be negated by an acceptance of physics that offers additional possibilities of cause and effect." I enunciate an even more sweeping powerful possibility-of-assumption-negating assumption: all assumptions can be negated by opposite assumptions. I call this Starbuckle's Law of How All Assumptions Can Be Negated by Opposite Assumptions. GHS provided a video demonstrating this based on work done by the Argument Clinic.

There are no "additional possibilities of cause and effect." There are only the different natures of things, which act in different ways because of their different natures. Causality depends on identity. Any scientific inquiry might give us new insight into stuff whose nature we thought we already knew, or into stuff of which we were previously altogether ignorant. But if one throws out the law of identity, how can even begin any scientific inquiry? The whole point of investigation is to find out the nature of things, the whats and the whys. There is no other basis on which to proceed. The law of identity is certainly an assumption, but an objective and inescapable one.

I haven't read Neil's whole testament yet, but it seems to me that his interpretation of his experiences are fundamentally informed by his blending of the merely speculative and even fictional with what can be objectively substantiated. The experience did not come first, followed by the re-thinking; the re-thinking preceded and seems to have produced the experience. (Either that, or God wants to confound the rationalists by being extremely coy. Why does he simply not reveal himself to all in a wholly unequivocal and undeniable way? Too easy and perhaps not very interesting and amusing. God is a kind of happy-go-lucky jester, perhaps.)

The following is incomplete but I don't know how long it will take me to finish the book so I thought I would just post some of my reactions so far.

The specific evidence for a God or the supernatural (if it is evidence) doesn't come until after J. Neil has graduated from atheism to agnosticism and begun playing out competing paradigms in his mind. Theory, argument or assertions, from C.S. Lewis and others, and cultural experience has been informing his evolving views before he gets to his "face-to-face" talk with God. We have C.S. Lewis versus Ayn Rand, maybe PhilipKDick Heinlein versus AynRand Heinlein, Judaism versus Catholicism. (Presumably the alleged paranormal experiences of his father are not regarded as firsthand evidence; we know in any case that psychics and other paranormalists can, like any adept magician, set up mind readings and moving objects, rely on a certain willingness to believe, and are suddenly shy when Randi walks into the room.)

A lot of Schulman's musing is about how the reality of under-informed rationalists is but a veil, rather than a realm that we can straightforwardly explore albeit with necesssarily greater sophistication as we become more aware of subtleties and complications. Philip K. Dick is supposed to have said, "The nature of reality is to disguise its true nature." Perhaps God spends a lot of his time hiding under reality's surface froth, or at least hiding from skeptics who have yet to throw the mental switch that would illuminate all? Dick, of course, was another fictioneer persuaded by his own unverifiable speculations, also not conventionally Christian.

In any case, it does seem that the distinction between myth and imagination on the one hand and observable reality on the other becomes blurred in Schulman's interpretation-crafting. Thus, if it is possible to speculate, without any evidence, about "multiple continua" or dimensions, on the basis of a mere mathematical construct positing oodles of dimensions, this becomes a substantiated possibility--a legitimate "hypothesis," although a hypothesis without any body of data that the hypothesis could be useful in explaining--rather than a mere unsubstantiated speculation useful for crafting SF and fantasy stories.

The stories that inspire him and the ideas he develops support each other. Some stories make more sense than others or are more congruent with Schulman's values than others, and it seems that he regards the more-congruent ones as, if not literally true, then at least kind of true (they can be cherry-picked)--at any rate, are more revelatory of the true nature of the secret world unknown to rationalists or not credited by rationalists and others who have only reality to work with.

A few excerpts from the book with my comments in brackets:

"I remember a day in 1970 that I was expecting, all day, a telephone call to come in saying that my grandfather, my father’s father, was dead. That call came around two in the afternoon. I’d been expecting it. This was when we were in the process of moving from Massachusetts to New York." [What is this evidence of?]

"...omething happened to me during the writing of The Rainbow Cadenza. I had some sort of event happen to me, probably in the last month of writing, that puts it somewhere in November to December of 1981, and I would say that my atheism was pretty well done at that point because I was seriously running at least a second or third paradigm, at that point. The materialistic view that Rand had given me was in suspension along with other views at that point so I would say I was agnostic by that point. Obviously, by the time I’m writing that statement 'I believe in God' – it’s dated March 24, 1992 – my agnosticism is pretty much over.

"I also talk about having the experience with God, I don’t think we’ve gotten to it yet in the first part, where I had an experience in 1988 around my birthday in which, I had been praying daily The Lord’s Prayer by 1988 probably for about a year. [schulman had been praying The Lord's Prayer for about a year before his alleged encounter with God. Did he have evidence of a God before undertaking this exercise?] The 1988 experience I have told you about but I’m going to be putting on the record here and this is as good a place to do it....

"So, by the end of 1981 when I’m finishing the writing of Rainbow Cadenza [in which there is a discussion between a C.S.Lewisian and an Ayn-Randian] I’m going through this transition period. It then starts accelerating so that by 1987, I’ve decided to make the experiment. We can call that period from 1982 to 1986 — at least five years — we can call that my for-sure agnostic period.

"In 1987 I decide to make a leap of faith — an experiment — and that is to pray....

"The very exploration of art in The Rainbow Cadenza started giving me new paradigms having to do with existence itself. I started seeing God, in the sense that Hill Bromley was talking about God, as being an artist. And this paradigm, that’s when it started running alongside in my head, these other paradigms, these purely mechanistic science paradigms. And, of course, there were the quantum paradigms, also, which I was getting from reading things like Illuminatus! and the The Schrodinger’s Cat books by Robert Anton Wilson. And of course Sam Konkin was a theoretical chemist and so I was given some, at least a Sunday supplement version of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. Not that I had any mathematical understanding of them, but at least that was one more of the paradigms that was starting to run in my head as I started thinking about quantum uncertainty as possibly having to do something with free will and freeing us from the mechanistic clockwork universe that seemed to be so much a part of the secularists...."

[Me: Which secularists? Rand doesn't deny consciousness and values, nor does she regard these as "mechanistic." She doesn't therefore consider herself a "materialist" (or if she is, in what sense is she a materialist? In the sense that she denies _supernatural_ spirit or consciousness, that is, denies the spirit or consciousness for which there is no evidence or which makes itself manifest only very irregularly and coyly.)]

"So this transition that I was going forward with, again a lot having to do with tension and release and realizing that Creation itself utilized these artistic principles, made me start at least running the paradigm of the created universe alongside the uncreated universe. Again, the contradiction in my mind was how could you have a created universe if existence exists? That existence exists was where Rand was starting out, how could you have a created universe if existence has always existed, how can something come out of nothing? That was one of the main problems that I was trying to resolve in my mind. If there has to be something which is uncreated, how could you have a created universe? Okay, so that was the unresolved problem in my mind.

"BRAD LINAWEAVER: You did not like the idea of Creation ex nihilo.

"J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Right, and to this day I reject the concept of creation ex nihilo...."

"J. NEIL SCHULMAN: [Heinlein was] Very prominent [in his mind], but at that particular moment I don’t know, okay? But again, it was this clinging to God, praying so tight that nobody dies, that no harm comes to everybody. You know this panicked clinging, which was what He was breaking. In essence He was telling me, 'Don’t pray so much!' because I’d been praying every day, constantly. Not just the Lord’s Prayer, but also the prayers for everybody to be okay – and not in the Christian sense of praying for their soul – but praying for them physically not to die, not to get hit by a truck.

"So, God ended that at that moment. [The Godvoice had indicated that Neil's praying was annoying and ridiculous.]

"Nonetheless, again, being the rationalist, I’m thinking maybe this is my science-fiction writer’s brain telling me that I’m having a heart attack. So at this point I woke up my roommate and I said, 'Call the paramedics, I think I’m having a heart attack.'...

"There was always that two percent of doubt because _I_ might be crazy. I knew that the human body was capable of doing odd things, and the human brain was capable of doing odd things. I thought that maybe I was suffering from some toxic poisoning from coffee or something like that. Maybe this was some sort of hallucinated experience."

[Me: Why isn't the rationalist interpretation the one that Neil sticks with? "I thought, at that point, I wonder if this is simply some sort of psychological event, some fantasy my body is having to tell me that I’m having a heart attack?" Isn't this a more likely explanation than that some kind of impish supernatural entity had invaded his brain? And how does he know it's "God" rather than some kind of other, perhaps lower-order supernatural trickster?]

###

The argument that opening oneself up to the possibility that one's belief system has led to a wrong conclusion makes a different conclusion automatic strikes me as weak. I also recount how I was tempted to convert to Christianity and rejected it -- so I'm not exactly like Jim Carrey in "Yes Man."

Of course if anyone here told stories about how their father, a minister, used to beat the shit out of them, would I then be justified in assuming that this person's atheism later in life was not logically derived but merely a psychological affectation?

I know publishing a personal memoir opens one up to it, but assuming I'm so fucking self-unaware that I never took seriously that all that happened to me was psychological strikes me not only as condescending but also priggish.

[J Neil Schulman]

George, unsurprisingly I think you raise the strongest challenge I face in making my experiences relevant or useful to anyone other than me.

The problem for me is that I'm not an advocate for religion, which I see as human institutions; and my tendency is unchanged from my atheist days to regard much of religion as stupid, dogmatic, often psychotic, and motivating a lot of irrational behavior. I'm afraid my own biases aren't all that far from seeing religion as cargo cults.

The problem for you is that many, many people in conventional religions have also claimed to have talked to God, and in many cases there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. The word "prophet" traditionally referred to people who had these conversations, and some prophets have reported revelations that contradict the revelations reported by other prophets.

Early Christians had to grapple with this problem. The New Testament warns against false prophets, but how could false prophets be distinguished from the true? Early Christians proposed a solution of sorts, namely, that true prophets could be identified by their ability to perform miracles. But even this didn't quite work, since miracles were a dime a dozen -- for example, reports of dead people rising from their graves were common during the first few centuries of Christendom. Thus Augustine was forced to admit that even false prophets can perform miracles, but he stipulated that such miracles are the work of demons, not God. Eventually, as this conundrum got out of hand, a more efficient solution was found: If the Church declared you a prophet, then you were a prophet; if not, then no holy fruit cup for you.

Given your acceptance of your own religious experience, you will need to reject like-minded people whose revelations have contradicted yours. And this puts you pretty much in the camp of traditional revealed religions whose proponents have repeatedly declared, "Your revelations are false, whereas mine are true."

It was this kind of appeal to personal revelation that Deists assailed so effectively during the 17th and 18th centuries. As believers in a rational creator-God, they were deeply offended by the notion that God would reveal himself only to a relative handful of prophets and leave everyone else dependent on their conflicting testimonies. Instead, they argued that God has revealed himself, but he has done so through the natural universe discernible by reason, not by "special" revelations to a select few that others must accept on faith.

The deistic conception of God was far more rational and noble than the stuff prophets have been pushing since time immemorial.

Ghs

George, I find the categorization of what I had a "religious" experience as curious, since I reject religion as a source of knowledge. I also reject accepting anything as true on faith.

I seriously don't give a rat's ass what offended Deists. Complaining that God doesn't make himself universally available strikes me as a claim of a property right, and makes God a slave. If I'm not obligated to answer my phone, or accept all Facebook friend requests, why should God be regarded as unreal if he were to be picky about who he finds interesting enough to chat up? Maybe his invisibility is nothing more than he values his privacy. For a living, conscious being, why isn't that a reasonable explanation? What basis for anyone demanding he make personal appearances is there? Surely you of all people don't regard the Book of Revelation as a contract binding on God, if he exists?

I also don't feel obligated to explain why other people claiming contact with God come up with different accounts. For one thing, I don't know. And, seriously, the only person I ever suspected had an experience similar to my own (and was perhaps smarter than me in never admitting it) was Avery Corman.

[J Neil Schulman]

A big month at OL -- an Intelligent Design crank, an I Met God crank, an anti-Muslim crank and now a Dianetics crank.

William,

It could be worse.

In my day, crank was crystal meth.

I am older now, but was a time in my early years of adulthood when I relished disabusing those whom I considered mistaken or deluded of their religious notions. Now in the late summer of my years I am not so enthusiastic. The sun has set on a few of these things. Where in the world of solid notions can I set Intelligent Design, Dianetics, or I Met God?

I was irked by AristotlesAdvance because he was in the wrong location. If he was truly burning with zeal to correct the evul evolutionist Darwinian liars and fools, then he was entering the arena only to hang out on the lower mezzanine, far from the real action. If he had been really challenging himself and others with the acuity of Intelligent Design he would have been in other forums devoted to these issues. Not that we are stupid or uninformed on OL, but ID refutation is not a specialty skill here.

It was funny that Neil popped in here, but funnier still is the gravid civility that attends his appearance.

As for combining Dianetics + Objectivism , I am curious to see how long it may be before we discover how that works out.

There is ever irrationalism in human affairs. What is somewhat discomfiting is that the sun has gone down on certain questions for Objectivists small o and large, and for most rational thinkers, yet here they are again. Whether ID or Dianetics or straight-up "Vulcan Mind Meld with God," I wonder at the reception.

"It was funny that Neil popped in here, but funnier still is the gravid civility that attends his appearance."

I was invited.

[George H. Smith]

George, I find the categorization of what I had a "religious" experience as curious, since I reject religion as a source of knowledge. I also reject accepting anything as true on faith.

"Religious experience" is a generic term that denotes any direct contact with a god. Many people who claim to have had religious experiences have, like you, repudiated conventional religions.

I seriously don't give a rat's ass what offended Deists. Complaining that God doesn't make himself universally available strikes me as a claim of a property right, and makes God a slave. If I'm not obligated to answer my phone, or accept all Facebook friend requests, why should God be regarded as unreal if he were to be picky about who he finds interesting enough to chat up?

Do you really think that God finds you one of the most interesting people in the history of humankind? What do you suppose he learned from his chat with you that he didn't already know? Or do you think he was bored and just wanted to hang out with a science fiction writer for a while?

I agree that God is not morally obligated to answer his phone or respond to Facebook requests. If, however, God has important information he would like people to know, he could surely find a better method of communication than chatting up a few people here and there.

Maybe his invisibility is nothing more than he values his privacy. For a living, conscious being, why isn't that a reasonable explanation? What basis for anyone demanding he make personal appearances is there? Surely you of all people don't regard the Book of Revelation as a contract binding on God, if he exists?

This exchange is getting progressively weirder.

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Ghs

[PDS]

Starbuckle wrote above: "(Why does he simply not reveal himself to all in a wholly unequivocal and undeniable way? Too easy and perhaps not very interesting and amusing. God is a kind of happy-go-lucky jester, perhaps.)"

Our friend Robert Nozick (he is/was an Objectivst's friend, is he not?), wrote something on this topic in The Examined Life which I have always considered quite interesting (I am paraphrasing): it is not all that obvious how even God himself could provide a convincing proof of his own existence. Thus, the failure of people to do so is not all that surprising. Assume a booming voice from the sky announced God's existence, or some other type of signal with equal clarity. Wouldn't we just assume trickery/misinterpretation/hallucinations anyway? (p.49-50) Nozick, in his cleverly Nozkickean manner, shows how even the Sun itself could be a "proof" of God but still subject to much dispute.

The reality (pun intended) is that Neil's special revelation--by definition quite personal to him--is the only way an individual is ever really convinced of the existence of God, as opposed to having the existence of God "proven" to him. Neil is willing to share his personal revelation, but I don't sense that he expects anybody to accept that revelation, on faith, as proof of God. If I had ever had or have in the future such a revelation, I would probably share it too.

[Brant Gaede]

This exchange is getting progressively weirder.

It has to or you guys will run out of things to say to each other.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

This exchange is getting progressively weirder.

It has to or you guys will run out of things to say to each other.

--Brant

I've been suggesting various ways in which a person might go about critically evaluating experiences of the sort Neil had. But Neil is not interested in the similar experiences of other people, nor in formulating criteria that would enable him to distinguish between true and false revelations.

If I had an experience like Neil's and convinced myself that it was veridical, I would be busting my butt investigating similar experiences by others in order to learn more about this fairly common phenomenon. But Neil is convinced that he chatted with an invisible man-god, and that, apparently, is all he needs to know.

Unfortunately, I haven't had any invisible friends since I was five.

Ghs

[PDS]

George: I consider myself one of your invisible friends, and am therefore offended by your comment.

[George H. Smith]

Starbuckle wrote above: "(Why does he simply not reveal himself to all in a wholly unequivocal and undeniable way? Too easy and perhaps not very interesting and amusing. God is a kind of happy-go-lucky jester, perhaps.)"

Our friend Robert Nozick (he is/was an Objectivst's friend, is he not?), wrote something on this topic in The Examined Life which I have always considered quite interesting (I am paraphrasing): it is not all that obvious how even God himself could provide a convincing proof of his own existence. Thus, the failure of people to do so is not all that surprising. Assume a booming voice from the sky announced God's existence, or some other type of signal with equal clarity. Wouldn't we just assume trickery/misinterpretation/hallucinations anyway? (p.49-50) Nozick, in his cleverly Nozkickean manner, shows how even the Sun itself could be a "proof" of God but still subject to much dispute.

Here as elsewhere Nozick was too clever by half. To suggest that an omniscient and omnipotent deity could not figure out a way to reveal himself to the entire world in a convincing manner is absurd. God could, for example, announce in an omnipresent voice that he is going to cure all cancer on the spot, and then do it. And if that didn't do the trick, he could announce that he is going to make the missing limbs of every amputee in the world grow back instantaneously, and then do it. And if these demonstrations were not convincing enough, he could give every person in the world the ability to fly for one day, or he could resurrect one dead relative of every person while permitting us to choose the relative, or God could give every dog and cat the power of intelligent speech, while again announcing all these miracles in advance. Or, if all else failed, he could make Xray write a string of posts praising Ayn Rand. The possibilities are endless.

Ghs