Starbuckle

Ragbrain wants to know why some viewers are "scared" to participate. "Or is it laziness, as manifested in the constant barrage of 'gimme a link' demands, because they can't be bothered to Google a given topic?" I did a survey of non-posting viewers and the most common answer was, "Who wants to deal with cretinous shitheads who bait people in hopes of getting a rise out of them, instead of offering something worth reading? Maybe instead of being 'scared' of the jerks, I simply lack any inclination to waste my time on dealing with them?"

Readers of this thread might enjoy the film "The Man from Earth," also about a story that others find hard to believe. Extremely well-done. It's all about a few people meeting in a cabin to say goodbye to a colleague who is moving, and the conversation they have. The difference between Neil's story and that of storyteller John Oldman is that Oldman's could be objectively verified if it is true (he explains why he would not cooperate with the attempt). The movie is available for instant viewing at Netflix.

Neil writes, "Now you're claiming for yourself omniscience regarding identity and causality? That's what is required to assert one particular view as the only possibly true one." Huh? I don't have any "one particular view" of what the nature of an entity must be; except that whatever its nature is, it is constrained by that nature. Everybody who understands that to exist is to be something is thereby "omniscient" about the fact that everything that exists must be what it is, not also something else. Theism has historically always been an announcer of miracles; gods hurl the thunder bolts, Christs turn water into wine or bread into fish or fish into beefsteak, etc. Neil states that the miracles he reports aren't miracles. But the events he describes violate the identities of things just like the miracles of yore. What's the difference, except that he perpentually appends unverifiable "maybes" about unperceivable causal processes to his reports of miracles in order to endow his miracles with a gloss of pseudo-naturalistic respectability? I don't think I need to add anything to Scherk's observations about the post by Neil in which Neil points to a couple of papers whose authors point to some anamolous data and say "maybe this is evidence of other universes," except to note that this is more of the maybe+maybe+maybe piling-up methodology that GHS dispatched above in a penultimate post. Maybe Jesus had a water-to-wine converter. Maybe he had access to a molecular-rearranger machine. Molecules are just atoms, and atoms are just neutrons, protons and elections. Maybe the Jesus doppelganger in the more technologically advanced society of Earth-N in one of the other universes loaned the Earth-1 Jesus the subatomic-particle rearranger. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other. How does the compilation of unsubstantiated maybes for which no evidence whatever is set forth advance the discussion? Whatever the Neil-God's (identity-violating) nature is supposed to be, Neil's own nature is not the same as that alleged nature. So how did Neil become God for the eight-hour stretch? Sans pseudo-naturalistic gloss, it can only be read as an identity-violating miracle. Or, reinstating the gloss: no, it wasn't a miracle...but the naturalistic process by which it occurred is utterly beyond our ken, as well as being utterly undectable by anybody else in the room. God, qua entity, is thus extremely powerful and masterly...yet so whispy and weak, so non-existent-like, that his arrival and departure leave no evidentiary traces whatever. Am I really pretending to omniscience if I note that the second alternative is as arbitrary, as galumphingly and belligerently impervious to understanding in naturalistic causal terms, as the first? However, if we define "God" as a trauma-evoked alteration of NEil's own consciousness, the whole phony mystery is dispelled immediately. Brad and perhaps others at the time of the mind-mulch can doubtless attest to Neil's depleted physical state; and, presumably, had a doctor examined him, that doctor could have attested to his condition in more specific medical or scientific terms. Neil's own testimony about it is credible, because nothing about getting sick is inconsistent with human nature. There is an overwhelming, endless supply of evidence that organisms are not the same as invulnerable robots, and that the health of organisms is not sustained regardless of circumstances. Evidence. Great stuff.

WSS wrote: "...Neil says that atheism is not in any way a premise of the philosophy, and that to so assert is a lie." First, let me point out parenthetically and uselessly that a lie and a misunderstanding are not the same thing. Atheism is an absence of belief in gods. Rand's metaphysics starts with "existence exists," rejecting any primacy of consciousness. The working out of the implications of the axioms implies rejection of theism, since theism (including Neil's theism) in various ways violates the principles of identity and causality. If there were a widespread belief in a species of sentient Martians, but no evidence whatever that they exist, you might have a doctrine of a-Martianism, but it would only be an application of a rationalist world view and of reason, not a basic premise of that rationalist philosophy. Neil intimates in one of his recent posts that I mischaracterized his act of faith by calling it an act of faith. He explains: "But both prior and subsequent events gave me benchmarks for testing the experience as real or unreal; and a long period of my attempting to negate it as real, and failing to do so, finally convinced me it was real. Having satisfied myself that it's real, I reject and -- frankly, I'm insulted by -- the charge that it requires an act of faith for me to decide an event which I've thoroughly tested against my Objectivist-inclusive premises was real." I hope I have been clear in indicating that I think Neil's experience was real; I don't think it was or could have been an experience of God, however. The "testing against Objectivist premises" stuff is so much nonsense. We know from the memoir, and certainly from this thread, that Neil's professed Objectivist-style rationalism has crumpled in certain key respects, both theoretically and in practice. Consider, for example, his unargued-for claims that the God who body-occupied him is "everlasting," that human beings are splinters or offshoots of God created by him, that maybe there are multiple universes which explain apparent miracles/paranormalities, etc. What is the evidence for any of this? What was the "testing"? That he has had experiences that he takes to be excursions into the paranormal? All these declarations are arbitrary and even insulting. I'm insulted by them. I've never been so insulted. The evidence is elusive. I've tried to pin Neil down about the evidence, any evidence, for the multiple universes that his theology relies upon and gotten nowhere. Assuming that the God-being that Neil "perceived" announced a laundry list of theistic tenets about his nature and the nature of humanity, fish and everything, that announcement itself constitutes no evidence whatever. If Neil-God has a specific identity and took over Neil's body by some means or other, what was the means of the takeover? Or is God a purely "spiritual" entity, with no matter-energy as a perceptible substrate? Is he the queen of the human hive-mind--a hive-mind, however, with no subspace radio receivers needed to link the hive-units? Neil says that participants in this discussion (or some of us) are "dogmatic cultists." He writes: "I have found more dogmatic cultists in this discussion than people with scientific curiosity. I certainly have found few I regard as an Objectivist in the school of Ayn Rand and the Brandens. They never regarded the existence of God as impossible and atheism as a primary tenet of Objectivism. Their atheism never went further than demanding that faith not be the basis for concluding the existence of God, and that God not be undefinable or unknowable, and that the supernatural not contradict the natural or known laws of existence and identity, and that if extrasensory perception existed concepts built from it would not contradict knowledge gained from the other senses." Well, what is the definition of a "dogmatic cultist"? What is the "cult," here? What is the "dogma"? What are the manifestations of the dogmatic cultism? Polemics? If the only way to avoid the charge of "dogmatic cultist" is to accept as possible every kind of claim whatever, including claims about recalcitrantly undetectable entities with attributes that are in fact impossible (however vehemently "reported" to be possible by persons in a physical-trauma-induced nontrance state), then "dogmatism" and "cultism" are pretty much wiped out as useful concepts. In that case, the only epistemological alternatives become: blanket skepticism and/or limitless credulity on the one hand, and "dogmatic cultism" on the other. Neil's recollection of Ayn Rand's perspective is faulty. When did Rand ever suggest or imply that a realm of the "supernatural" might be metaphysically possible so long as it did not contradict the law of identity? (Any entity limited to a specific nature and specific means of acting would be just another part of the natural order, not somehow above or beyond it; but Neil wants to have his miracles and eat them too.) And when did Ayn Rand ever suggest or imply that "extrasensory" perception, if it existed, must not contradict knowledge agained from "other" senses? Rand would not have framed the issues in the way Neil suggests, and certainly never did in any of her published work. In any case, it is a little strange that Neil charges his interlocutors with "dogmatic cultism" and then intimates that they are inadequately cultistic insofar as they fail to fall fully into line with his fictional rendition of Rand's views. Only a physical means can make possible given perceptions of the world--some sort of physical process of gathering sensory data and conveying that data to our awareness. If there were a sixth sense, it too would have to involve physical means of making the outer world accessible to our awareness. We are able to sense the locations of parts of our bodies in space without benefit of touch, sound, sight, smell or taste; but our means of sensing relative limb position, whether or not it involves what we can call a "sixth sense," is not _extra_sensory. The psychics and their ilk yabble about accomplishing various feats of cognition or physical manipulation without benefit of any actual means of interacting with the world, any means of knowing or manipulating. They allegedly "pre-cognize" future events without any physical means of being aware of those events or of any indirect but definite evidence of those events. They allegedly bend spoons by gentle stroking of them and beaming deep thoughts at them. It is mental power alone--sheer consciousness or awareness as such--which is supposed to accomplish these dynamic and astonishing effects. Such claims are regularly and effectively debunked by superhero James Randi and others with good reason; the claims presuppose that entities don't act in accordance with their identities; but of course entities always do. (There once was a guy named Yoda, claimed he could life spaceships out of swamps by sheer mind power--the Force, he called it--and he even put on a very persuasive demonstration. Turned out that the whole spectacle was nothing but special effects.) The same unmediated "mental power" is the implied means by which God tenanted Neil and by which Neil "met" God. (By Neil's own account, no physical takeover was observed by the other guy in the room when Neil became God-suffused.) God is an entity without any specific identity that can be known by the perceptual means that are the only means (in conjunction with tools and thinking) available to human beings engaging in scientific inquiry about the world. Neil "reports" that his God, unlike some other Gods, can't do certain things, and proposes that these inabilities separate him from the admittedly impossible God who is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. But although Neil-God is not all-powerful, what Neil-God can do, he can do limitlessly, and without necessity of causal process. For example, Neil-God is "everlasting," without any beginning. He is or possesses a consciousness that did not arise by any physical means; it was just always there. What is the evidence for this fantastic assertion?

RagBrain wrote: "Except Ayn and others never SAID it was best to not smoke, not exercise, etc. They apparently really believed that it didn't matter if they abused/neglected their bodies!" This is just a stupid smear about Roy.

WSS says: "Apparently the most awful lying lower sphincterish nastiness of all comes in saying I think Neil is implicitly asking for a leap of faith." Neil can be read as asking for or hoping for a leap of faith from others, but in light of his repeated explicit denials of this, I am willing to stipulate that he is not asking for a leap of faith from others. He is, though, hoping for acceptance of the legitimacy of his own leap of faith, which he insists is not a leap of faith. Perhaps no one who feels absolute certainty about an unperceivable, uncheckable claim about the nature of reality experiences his certainty as being a consequence of faith-leap rather than of self-evident perception either of God himself, directly, or of a revelation from God or the supernatural. But even a seer (#1) who claims to have the special perceptions will deny the validity of the special perceptions of another seer (#2) when the values and insights "confirmed" by #2's sighting conflict with #1's own. Thus, Neil is offended by a comparison of his experience to that of a man who was "talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening [a friend] with a knife and doing other things that were out of character.... They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God." In reply to Scherk's reference to this story, Neil says: "Find a witness who says I threatened anyone with a weapon between noon and eight pm on February 18, 1997. You won't. It didn't happen. But still you make this second vile comparison in your last two posts, the first one being to an end-of-the-worlder." Sequitur, meet non. Non sequitur. What was being compared and what is the point of the comparison? Is to show that others with similar experiences must have identical a] values and b] beliefs in purported consequence of their purported experiences--or to show that they can have starkly clashing values and beliefs as either inherited from their pre-experience selves and/or as revised, amended or distorted by the info purportedly conveyed during the purported linkup with the purported beyond? It is obviously something about the objectively assessable nature of the values and beliefs of the witnesses that allows us to make judgments about the knowledge-content/claims and values content/claims generated by the witnesses' contradictory experiences of the purported beyond and the lessons they take from their experience of it. It is something about the this-worldly, mutually perceivable and mutually checkable and communicable nature of those values and beliefs that enables us to decide which of those values and beliefs are reasonable and which are not reasonable. But if _that's_ the case, if it's the objective reality that every normal adult can perceive and infer about which allows us to make these fundamental determinations about which supernaturally-conferred values and beliefs are correct and which are not--judgments that no contradictory claims about the supernatural and deities may properly be allowed to override--then Neil's experience can have and should have no epistemological or ethical bearing on what he believes about the world or what he chooses to do in it. I don't mean that he should pretend that his experience of the God-takeover never happened, not grapple with it nor report on it, only that he ought not credit any insights or knowledge claims mystically conveyed thereby which cannot be independently confirmed by the sensory perception and logic that are the only intelligible bases of knowledge to the standard-issue, identity-limited mortals among us. If Neil deems the natural causes of his experience as outlined in his memoir and as cited in this thread to be inadequate to the task of explaining his experience, then that experience ought in reason be allowed to reside in his memory only as a novel but as-yet-unexplained phenomenon. If not, why not? But if, instead, that experience ought properly to substantively shape Neil's beliefs and values because it is so vivid and persuasive to him, would he be willing to concede that similarly empowered Islamic terrorists also justified, on the basis of their own vividly experienced revelations and unshakeable convictions, in knocking off a few thousand WTC denizens cuz Allah said so? The terrorist Islamicists, too, think life on earth is just a temporary way station. No biggie, in their view, if a true believer also dies in the holocaust; they'll just pop over to the celestial gates for post-mortal processing. The dreams in which Allah told them so may have been as clear and vivid as anything that Neil experienced. I don't suspect, I know--I'm not merely stipulating but actively affirming--that Neil unequivocally rejects the values and beliefs of the Islamicists. But what if, after a suitable period of physical self-deprivation, Neil were to experience a second God-takeover that is equivalent in power and persuasiveness of the first, but in which God made clear that that the conduct of the 9/11 thugs does indeed meet with his divine approval, that this sort of thing is, after all, what is on the right track, not the libertarianism and the O.J.-is-innocent stuff? What then?

Neil writes: "Question Number Three: "Is anyone else's disbelief sufficient reason for J. Neil Schulman, after concluding his experience was real, to deny it? "No." No, not disbelief as such, regardless of the reasons for that lack of belief. But the fact that Neil's interpretation of his experience is unwarranted is indeed sufficient reason for him to reject that interpretation. Neil also writes: "Question Number Four: Is a report of anecdotal evidence from a person who denies faith as a basis to accept a report nonetheless of potential utilitarian value to those who take such reports as a reason to keep an open mind? "Yes." No. Look at the matrix of the report, for details of which see Neil's memoir and Neil's posts in this thread setting forth his many untenable ancillary claims, and see also the posts by others in this thread explaining the untenability of those untenable ancillary claims. But the other question to ask is: Why would anyone take such unverified and unverifiable reports of impossible happenings as a "reason to keep an open mind"? People can regard instances of any category of claims as a reason to "keep an open mind" about whether the claims are valid. But whether people are justified (logically) in doing so depends on the nature of the claim category in general and on the nature of the specific instance (when the claim category has not already been disqualified). Neil furthermore writes, "That's why atheism as 'God is impossible' as opposed to atheism as 'I do not have sufficient reason to regard God as real' is the religious dogma I came here to challenge.' " I suppose I could be in error about my trance-like belief that God, even the hobbled yet still identity-warping, wonder-wielding Schulmanian version of God, could not possibly exist. Well, no, I don't suppose that I could be in error about this, myself; but I suppose others could suppose it. But I wonder if Neil would also regard as "religious dogma" a belief that an impossible thing which he himself acknowledges to be impossible must, in fact, be impossible. For entities to act in a way contrary to their nature is impossible. Yes, I know, I know, I know: Neil has insisted 473 times that he wholly and consistently agrees, affirms, accepts, endorses and otherwise promotes and reveres this metaphysical fact, this self-identity of the existents. He also reports that he was God or God was him for a little while and that it's the functioning of the multiple universes that enables us to reckon that the identity of things is not really being contradicted by the existence and doings of the Neil-God even when it seems that the identity of things is being contradicted thereby. However, the center will not hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Stony sleep vexes to nighmarish cradle-rocking of rough beasts slouching. Sorry if I'm using any of the wrong words. Doubtless at least a few and perhaps more than a few of the non-believers who have participated in or been reading this thread belong not to my ilk of atheist but rather to the laid-back, beach-strolling, happy-go-lucky breed of atheist and/or agnostic that Neil Schulman prefers: they merely attest to "lacking sufficient reason to regard God as real," without actually going out of their way to stress in so many words that the impossible things are impossible. But has Neil given them any reasons to believe in his or any God that can survive fair logical scrutiny? Answer: No. BTW, God mind-blended with me a few minutes ago and denies having mind-blended with Neil. "I never met the man," God, in a trance, told me. Lest anyone doubt the truth of this report, let me further report that I used a Report-Truth-Detecting machine to verify the truth of it, and that the arrow flung itself all the way to bright green (that means Strongly Verified). If you think I don't have such a machine, let me assure you that I do. Meanwhile, the arrow on my Lame Pretend-Anecdote Detector did not even flicker. Amen.

Scherk, I'll take that ten bucks now.

Schulman: "Starbuckle describes my experience as a 'trance.' You try taking a meeting with a lawyer during a trance. I double dare you." I can't deal with lawyers even when I'm in full possession of my faculties. To me it seems dishonest to call me dishonest because I used the word "trance" in re Schulman's state when he was occupied by God. (Sorry if "was," "occupied," "by," or "God" are also technically incorrect in some way.) The first definition of "trance" proffered at dictionary.com is "a half-conscious state, seemingly between sleeping and waking, in which ability to function voluntarily may be suspended." I got the impression from Neil's memoir that God had taken him over and was acting in his stead, or in combination with him, or some such, in Neil's view of it, during Neil's several-hour span of God-hood. If his condition during that period wasn't a trance in any way, shape or form, fine, I withdraw the word. I'm not convinced, however. I think this kind of febrile nitpicking and unsupported extrapolative indictment of character is part and parcel of Neil's approach in this thread. I don't insist that his assailing of others in this way is generally dishonest per se; perhaps it is merely, at least with respect to me, confused, beknighted and misbegotten. I think there are a few OL members who do tend to be dishonest, and they're on my don't-read list; I haven't read their posts in this thread either, so when Neil calls one of their posts "dishonest" I'm agnostic. I can only protest that I myself have not been dishonest. In the course of a debate between fundamentally opposed sides, the fundamental disagreements will often engender different language and rhetoric to characterize the very same referents. Certainly this is the case when those referents are understood in vastly different ways, as, for example, Neil's non-trance. Often the linguistic differences are connotative, but they are often unavoidably denotative as well, necessarily so in the case of Neil's experience. I think it should go without saying that the opposing sides on this kind of divide are not always going to be happy with how their own viewpoint is characterized by someone who believes it to be flatly and altogether misguided. A putative mischaracterization may well be dishonest; I've certainly found that to be so; but why would that be the _default_ assumption when no attempt of any kind has been made to seek clarification or correction? Disagreements about characterizations of one's views are better aired by stating how one thinks an opponent has mischaracterized one's viewpoint than by simply assuming--without evidence--that only the worst motive can explain it. Arguing in good faith will not ensure that one avoids offending the hyper-prickley sensibilities of someone on the other side of a discussion who is ready to pounce on and blow out of proportion any innocent turn of phrase that can possibly be pounced on and distorted. The only way to make sure of never doing that is to never say anything at all publicly in support of one's viewpoint. Moreover, the substantive points in my post are obviously unaffected by dropping the word "trance" in favor of some other word to label Neil's temporarily abnormal state of consciousness. So lamenting my deployment of that word seems diversionary.

JNS wrote: "Why, then, do I persist in asserting the reality of the experience? Why don't I simply admit that I experienced a temporary break with reality and that my experience was fantasy cooked up by an imaginative brain that was stressed by dehydration and ketosis?" This question, with the video clip from "Contact" as the answer, is what I nefariously neglected to comment on when I pointed out with regard to Neil's postscriptive FYI in re the release of the movie "Contact" that Sagan's book preceded the movie by many years (while carefully adding that I assumed that Neil had not read the book by the time God spoke to him). (Just FYI: don't reply to FYIs with FYIs of your own, no matter how congruent vis-a-vis the vectored data point; you'll just catch grief for it.) Setting aside everything that was supposed to have happened in "Contact" and whether the events are credible, whether the Foster character is behaving realistically as a scientist, whether the script sucks or not, etc., and looking only at what we can glean thematic-import-wise from this one clip of this one scene, it all boils down to sincerity of emotion as the foundation and proof of truthiness. When asked by the obnoxious but sensible Woods character why, given how admittedly un-credible her claims are, Foster-character doesn't simply admit that her experience didn't happen in the way she construes, she says, "Because I CAN'T," with all the emotive power you could want in a person stricken by inability to share the cosmically game-changing perceptions. Wants to share the transcendent experience, we're not alone, etc. The gist of the scene is the woman's very sincere emotional conviction about what she thinks happened to her. Whether emotion trumps rational appeal to evidentiary considerations in the rest of the movie I don't know, as it's been years since I saw the flick, even longer since I read the book; but emotion does seem to trump such considerations in this not exactly soul-rattling clip. However, neither sincerity of belief, depth of belief, persistence of belief, nor any other quantum, flavor or contour of belief constitutes warrant for belief. Belief properly comes AFTER you get the proper warrants. And what one believes depends on one's methods for arriving at beliefs, methods subject to improvement. Neil claims to have preserved an unstinting allegiance to rationalism and concomitant rejection of faith as a means of knowledge; yet these claims have been exploded on 97 separate and distinct occasions by George H. Smith in this thread, and been most signally belied by Neil's habitual reliance on ludicrous hypotheses in lieu of evidence, as explained in George's summary critique (post 563) of Neil's approach. Why so paralogistic? Neil had a feeling that he was God or that God was him during the eight hours of his trance. His trance did not happen in a vacuum. He had for years been wanting to believe in God. That's not too surprising, as many people do. Moreover, he's a science fiction writer and, even more moreover, a C.S. Lewis fan who in the process of rethinking his atheism had been finding more than charming storytelling to like in Lewis. Finally, by his own account, Neil had been suffering paranoia and severe physical debilitation or trauma of some kind just prior to his temp God-hood. My hypothesis is that the rethinking+longing+imagination+trauma (all of these, not just the physical trauma) render Neil's hallucination-or-whatever-it-was at least explicable, if not likely or inevitable. But none of these factors, alone or in any combination with each other or with anything else, support to any extent the conclusion that Neil became God or that God became Neil. Yes, that's the sentence I just wrote; no reason to believe that Neil became God or that God became Neil, even briefly. So why indeed doesn't Neil then just accept that he didn't do the God-becoming? Because he "can't"; about which conviction he is emotional and sincere. Neil says that during the event, he felt just as if he were God awakening to the knowledge that he is inhabiting the Neil-human; the "game was up"; God was revealed to himself. Okayyyyyyyyy... but...what DOES that "feel like," to know all of a sudden that one is God and to walk around emitting God-like insights? Keep in mind, Neil's FEELING here is fundamentally all that Neil himself has to go by as proof that what his feeling conveyed to him is true--the boatload of purportedly transcendent super-cognitive insights being of the sort normally possible to any bright and talented professional dream-weaver or psychologically perceptive person enjoying a biochemically enhanced creativity binge. Well, we know what it feels like to be God. It feels like what Neil felt like during his long-awaited union with the deity. QED. The 1) interpretation and the 2) feeling and the 3) belief are 1) coextensive and 2) mutually reinforcing, not to mention 3) self-reifying: the logic-proof, double-trinity package deal. Thus, if you believe that you are God or were for a while, that's all the proof you need to justify the conviction that you are God, or were for a while. You surely "can't" believe otherwise. At least, not without reassessing how you arrive at one's beliefs. I hope that I am now on point.

WSS wrote: "He won't be back..." You have faith. "So the OL gang has now run off all the recent inbound spiritual cranks." What do you mean, "run off"? I wanted to find out what his argument was.

GHS wrote: "There are so many possible and unspecified variables in Neil's examples that it is sometimes difficult to say with complete confidence how one would evaluate a hypothetical knowledge claim. ...Neil is using the old argument from human fallibility and limited knowledge. Isn't it possible that knowledge claims that are presently unsubstantiated might eventually be verified? Well, yes and no. This depends on the nature of the claim, and Neil's shotgun approach does not even begin to address the epistemological complexities involved here." Yes, I think this is fair.

Neil wrote in response to a post by Starbuckle: "That specific dialogue in the movie Contact written by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg was not released until five months after my experience. "This is another case where the context of something I write in this forum is completely ignored to make a cheap irrelevant, paralogical straw-man argument." Granted, I've skimmed some of the posts. I haven't studied every post in this tribblish thread as assiduously as I should have if I were to immunize myself against the charge of completely ignoring this or that detail of them. Against the charge of sullen obstreperousness and axe-murdering, therefore, I plead mere lazy slipshoddery. I really did simply miss the part of the relevant post or posts explaining how the weight of some point illuminating the God-meeting hinged on how the dialogue of the movie "Contact" differed from that of the book _Contact_. I may review the thread at some point to try to see where I ganged aft agley on this and other questions. But if I erred, why not simply point out that I did err and how I did err, rather than imply that I went out of my way to dishonestly ignore the vast differences between the novel and the movie and the relevance of these to the God-claims? Accidentally missing a relevant point, if that's what I did, and actively ignoring a relevant point, which I did not do, are two different things. I just wish Neil's God were more forgiving. In any case, there have been more than a few reports of coincidental similarities in executions of ideas by fictioneers who often haven't necessarily read each other. I'm not sure how much hay one can make out of these things, or how much gold one can spin out of such hay. In conclusion, it's neither here nor there ipso facto dipse ixit with respect to the plausibility of the God-claims whether "Contact: the Movie" came before or after Neil's memoir. My broader observation stands, and I do think that it is relevant to the question of this thread. If Neil were not a science fiction writer familiar with and practiced in the embellishments possible to familiar ideas, I think it would be less likely that he would have come up with the God-conversation and theology that he did. For example, in Neil's novel, written after Neil was God for a while, God explains that Adam and Eve were computer hackers. (I should stipulate--to forestall further charges about the ignoring and the paralogism-- that I don't remember offhand, first, whether this detail is a formal part of the theology or intended as a novelist's creative license; and, second, whether Neil clearly makes this distinction in this and other instances.) Re another case where I may have "ignored" an argument-- If someone can point out to me the post in which Neil has explained his assertions about the multiple universes, what the evidence for his characterization or assumptions about these is, and how this evidence demonstrates the identity-preserving causal mechanisms available to his God, I would really really appreciate it. I've been looking for that post but I may have missed it if it was not sucked into one of the other universes. Thanks in advance.

JNS wrote: "FYI: My ultimate experience was February 18, 1997. Contact was released in July 1997, so it could not have influenced my experience." Sagan's novel Contact was published in 1985. I assume Neil hadn't read it by February 1997. But the chronology is neither here nor there. Modern science fiction has been around since, let's say, the 1930s and 1940s. Neil's theology is one influenced by the ideas of sf. God is familiar with the literature.

MSK wrote: "Rand talked about reprogramming her subconscious." Where?

JNS wrote: "If I was the skeptic James Randi is, I'd start the J. Neil Schulman Education Foundation, and solicit a million dollars to be placed into a trust account and paid to the first person who can prove to me that there is such a real condition as tinnitus." Randi began the challenge with $10,000 of his own money. Others supporting his efforts to expose fraud later added to the sum.

For a true religious experience, captured on video, watch the following: The musical based on it:

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "The quantum paradigm for multiple 'universes' isn't the only one. If a bounded universe exists between a big bang and a big crunch, then repeats, then there are multiple universes. Since T is a function only within one of those iterations, an observer from within any of these iterations would be able to conceive of any of the other iterations as existing simultaneously, and existence is a standing wave of multiple continua." How would a universe that repetitively expands and contracts, if that's what we're in, constitute more than one universe as opposed to stages of the same universe? And what relevance would this possibility have to the claims about God and his powers? "Since T is a function only within one of those iterations, an observer from within any of these iterations would be able to conceive of any of the other iterations as existing simultaneously, and existence is a standing wave of multiple continua." What does this statement mean and what is the evidence for it? I'm guessing "T" is time, but since time would exist in earlier or later iterations of the expansion and contraction, I'm not sure why you would say it is a "function within" only one of them. How could a repeated event be properly construed as occuring at the same time as a preceding or following one? What is a "standing wave of multiple continua"?

BC wrote: "There is a basic epistemological problem here. There is no clear way for an uninvolved party to distinguish between a genuine encounter with the Almighty (assuming there is an Almighty) and a psychic dysfunction." This is true only if it is possible for an Almighty to exist. If the posited Almighty clearly cannot exist, it is easy enough to distinguish between the genuine encounters with the Almighty and an experience of a different character. Only a theist or agnostic can regard Neil's interpretation of his experience as possibly correct.

George H. Smith wrote: "Rather than cook up some scenarios, suffice it to say that I think John Denver's character in 'Oh, God,' having experienced the events he did, was quite rational to believe that he was dealing with God. This trailer doesn't present all the relevant data, but it gives some indication." I saw the movie, some years ago. It is understandable that the Denver character, given his cultural inheritance, should after a brief period of incredulity accept the claim that the strange old man who has booby-trapped his car is God. I would say that he is reasonable in believing it, but not justified in believing it. He has observed some so-far inexplicable events the causes of which he has not as yet investigated, and perhaps lacks the means to investigate. (Although I think the causes of thunder and lightning are pretty well known.)

J. Neil Schulman wrote: "The quantum paradigm for multiple 'universes' isn't the only one. If a bounded universe exists between a big bang and a big crunch, then repeats, then there are multiple universes. Since T is a function only within one of those iterations, an observer from within any of these iterations would be able to conceive of any of the other iterations as existing simultaneously, and existence is a standing wave of multiple continua." How would a universe that repetitively expands and contracts, if that's what we're in, constitute more than one universe as opposed to stages of the same universe? And what relevance would this possibility have to the claims about God and his powers? "Since T is a function only within one of those iterations, an observer from within any of these iterations would be able to conceive of any of the other iterations as existing simultaneously, and existence is a standing wave of multiple continua." What does this statement mean and what is the evidence for it? I'm guessing "T" is time, but since time would exist in earlier or later iterations of the expansion and contraction, I'm not sure why you would say it is a "function within" only one of them. How could a repeated event be properly construed as occuring at the same time as a preceding or following one? What is a "standing wave of multiple continua"?

Judith wrote: "The biggest problem I see with Hume's approach is that our knowledge of natural laws is itself fallible and evolving. Too many things have been dismissed out of hand as being 'impossible' because they appeared to defy conventional wisdom. Many of the most important breakthrough inventions have been made by people outside the field because these people didn't know which things were 'impossible' and therefore proceeded to do them. "By dismissing testimony of miracles out of hand as the testimony of people who were either lying or deceived, we might miss asking the question, 'WTF really happened?' And the answer to that question might be one for science, not one for religion." I think you're conflating two separate questions: what happened, and whether what happened demonstrates what the witness claimed happened, especially when the claim does entail a notion that clearly violates identity and causality. The latter is not an issue of conventional wisdom or the latest scientific understanding. It's not possible that Geller is bending spoons directly with his mind, but of course it's well-documented that he bends spoons with his hands. Credulous people are deceived about how he bends the spoons, not whether he bends them. It is possible but not likely that aliens have visited the earth in very furtive ways; but sometimes a fuzzy photograph of a frisbee is just a fuzzy photograph of a frisbee. Reports of a "miracle" (whether linguistically tagged that or not) are not on a par with arguments for a scientific paradigm for which evidence and coherent argument can be presented and that contradicts a prevailing paradigm about some aspect of the world. No evidence can be presented that "minds can bend spoons" in any way but indirectly, i.e., by triggering the neurons hitched to muscle cells. There are no musculo-mentalic thought waves that the brain can emit to bend spoons, lift weights or spaceships, explode planets, etc. Hume is not saying that a historic report of a "miracle," if it can be investigated at all, is never worth investigating in any respect. Some reports of alleged miracles may be more credible in at least some respects than the reports of other alleged miracles--but not with respect to any assumption that the identity of things can be supernaturally violated. Of course, Hume's observations about the credibility of reports of miracles depend on the self-evident validity of identity and causality, which he here implicitly takes for granted but has elsewhere taken pains to dispute with epic idiotic ingenuity.

J. Neil Schulman referred to his assumption of "a cosmology that is in line with current scientific paradigms about multiple 'universes.'" What is the scientific evidence that there are multiple universes or more than one "bounded universe"? This premise, so far from being a self-evident axiom of thought on a par with existence and identity, seems to me merely a borrowing from the tropes of fantasy writing--the kind of unsupported premise which science fiction deploys liberally despite the division of speculative fiction into roughly separate "science fiction" and "fantasy." ("Star Trek" constantly deployed the rule-bounded magic of fantasy writing: the cardboard aliens who can freeze or miniature the Enteprise and its inhabitants, the miracle-wielding meta-continuous Q, the limitless confections of the holo-rec-room, etc.) In the absence of any evidence and even any intelligible conception of these multiple universes or multiple bounded continuums, the assertion serves the purpose of a back-door means of violating the law of identity without admitting it as a violation. By this method, whenenever a metaphysical assertion sounds like a violation of the law of identity, one can simply tack on the footnote, "But it's not a violation of the law of identity, because this is the sort of thing multiple continuums and the nature of God, etc., enable." Presumably, then, if God has the power to temporarily turn moon rock into green cheese in such a way as is perceptible only by those who have experienced God and/or are sufficiently gullible, that claim of miraculous-seeming but invisible transmogrification would have nothing to do with a violation of the law of identity, however much it may challenge the (dogmatic) rationalist's paradigm in other ways. Although such moon-to-cheese alchemy may be beyond the stipulated powers of the stipulated God-nature, how is Neil's transformation into God any different with respect to the ability of an entity to act in ways contrary to its nature? And there's this doubleplusgood feature of the transformation that it not only accomplishes the impossible, it does so invisibly. Neil became God for several hours. What was the causal process? Neil has not substantiated the stipulated characteristics of God: for example, that God is everlasting, unlike all other complex entities in the universe; that, unlike all other entities with the faculty of awareness, his consciousness did not need to arise out of neuronic activity (or some comparable biological cause); that God is able to splinter off humanity from his being; that God has a cloak of invisibility that makes him indetectable to skeptical human beings even when he is right on top of them (though human beings have found means of detecting everything from baryons to black holes); etc. We are advised that Neil learned such attributes of God from the report God allegedly made to him; but these purported characteristics are supremely elusive and routinely violative of the nature of things. If God can by no detectable or inferrable causal agency turn the moon into green cheese, water into wine, Neil into God himself, God can change anything into anything without any means or process--albeit perhaps only in a way that cannot possibly be detected. But a universe in which things acts naturally, i.e., consistently with what they are, except when they invisibly and undetectably don't...is a universe that resembles a universe without gods or supernature or multi-continuums in every respect.

GHS wrote: "1) Could any kind of personal experience (i.e., an experience not accessible to or verifiable by others) ever convince a rational atheist of the existence of God? I can think of some fantastic scenarios where the answer to this question would be Yes." What would an example be, if the concept of God is of an entity outside the natural order and able to contradict it? (J. Neil stipulates that his God is not of this type, but given his claims about this God and what it can allegedly do, I don't believe it.)

PDS said: "If I am right, there is some very interesting ground for psychological inquiry here, and Neil's (unintentional, one presumes) choice/experience of this [i.e., Genesis] version of God, rather than the Conqueror-God of Isiah, or the largely silent God of Esther and the lesser books, or, for that matter, the Wagering-Whirlwind God of Job. Honestly, I do think most people would prefer a Genesis God to those random alternatives I mentioned above. Not surprisingly, given Neil's background, the Genesis God is more or less a libertarian." Well, unless you are going to argue that God's character changes within the Book of Genesis as well, what you seem to be saying here doesn't quite work. The story of Noah comes very early on in Genesis, and reveals God as a vicious mass-murderer.