Starbuckle

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.

J. Neil wrote: "Because when I wanted to find out whether God was real, I managed to come up with a protocol to do it that succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. What you need to ask yourself, George H. Smith, is why I succeeded where you have failed. Of course you'll just reply I haven't. How can you be certain without running my experiment for yourself?"

THe utility of anybody's doing any scientific experimentation presupposes the possibility of investigation of the world, i.e., presupposes the self-evident fact that things have a specific nature that can be investigated--that things are what they are and that my awareness is awareness of reality (and that any principles of directing that awareness must be based on reality).

The law of identity, what Aristotle formulated as the law of non-contradiction, is an axiom, an inescapable foundation of thought, not a dogma. A dogma is a formulation or creed hewn to in unreasonable disregard of any evidence that might contradict it. But there is no possibility that any feature of reality might contradict the fact that the features of reality are what they are.

If I accept this fact consistently, what reason do I have to suppose that there is a particular entity who does have an inexplicable ability to alter the nature of things not by some wondrous unknown alchemic machinery (which would mean simply that God is a space alien with better tech), but by the mere working of his will?

According to Neil's memoir, his transformation into God, or God's self-depositing into Neil, was accomplished via no detectable causal process explicable in terms of the evident and observable nature of things. The antecedent short-term experiences and longer-term philosophical rethinking described in the memoir DO help to explain the experience as some kind of vivid dream or other event of human consciousness. But these prequels do nothing to either explain or even render intelligible the proposition either that there is a God to begin with or that God and Neil were as one during the several-hour period described. Neil's God is more limited in various ways than the omniscient, omnipotent type of God; but if Neil's God had no power to subvert or ignore the nature of things, he would not be a god at all. Yet God even in Neil's conception is still regarded as somehow above and beyond the natural world, and regardless of any inconvenient rules that might arbitrarily limit his arbitrary power.

For a person conscious of his limited time and resources, spending time and resources on ANY activity requires some possibility of a pay-off; even aside from the issue of judging the extent of a likelihood of success, there has to be at a minimum a metaphysical possibility that a thing could happen to begin with.

What I mean is that if I were to investigate a boulder and learn from observation and experimentation--for example, by being hit by one--that it has certain properties of mass and density, I would have no reason whatever given my acceptance that entities are only what they are (not also something else the incompatible properties of which could allegedly also be experienced at any moment) to then entertain and investigate a claim that the boulder also and secretly or potentially has the properties of lasagna or styrofoam. (Of course rock has the potential to become rock dust, but this potential nature is consistent with its actual nature.) What sensible geologist with the goal of understanding the stuff that mantles are made of could be tempted to commence an inquiry into the possible lasagna feature of a boulder "just to be sure," as if such claims could be on a par with an erroneous theory of tectonic plates? Would the geologist, if a practical and reasonable sort of person, be tempted to do the investigation into whether rocks are also lasagna if a vivid dream that such were possible were reported to him? Would he at least be tempted if he experienced such a dream himself (and would it in the latter case be reasonable for him to accept as "proven" by his own direct sensory perception what the revelation of his dream implies)?

Yet claims about psychic spoon-bending powers, dream-powered teleporation, multi-dimensional rabbits popping out of multi-dimensional hats and/or being transfigured into a downsized version of the Christian God--who needn't, this time, die on the cross--are exactly of this unbelievable character with respect to what they require the prospective investigator to accept about identity and causality. The claims about the gods are more plausible than the proposition about the rock and the lasagna to many people for a wide range of cultural and psychological reasons--but not for any logical ones.

Despite his own imaginative theological innovations, many of these cultural factors, mediated in part by the apologias and story-telling of C.S. Lewis, have clearly helped shape Neil's understanding of his experience. For example, Neil would not have learned during his revelation that there was no need to die on the cross "this time" had there been no other time that an incarnate God had died on the cross according to the dominant religious mythology of the West.

Brad Linaweaver wrote: "...you Objectivist people..."

Oh dear.

I was very angry to learn that J. Neil Schulman had been excommunicated, especially as it is Christmas, so I immediately put in a call to the Official Excommunication Processing and Records League of America, Inc., LLC, CCD, demanding to know what in the name of facts qua facts was going on.

The OEPARLOAI, LLC, CCD vehemently denied that any such excommunication had occurred; they reported that although they had indeed received papers attesting to his excommunication, these turned out to be fraudulent. No actual steps had in fact been taken to excommunicate Neil. Moreover, the League has commenced an investigation to determine how and why the fraudulent attestation could have gotten as far as it did despite their ancient protocols installed to prevent just such an occurence.

As best I can understand from what little I was reluctantly told, it is probable that information about the fraudulent attestation got back somehow to Neil and that this is why he believes that he had been excommunicated from something. Based on my discussions with the League, I am convinced that it was indeed someone at this very site who filed the phony attestation, perhaps as a practical joke. (Not funny, mister.) Unfortunately, the League has some kind of confidentiality policy that prevents them from divulging the name. Therefore, I am hoping in the spirit of the season that the guilty party will come forward publicly and admit his wrongdoing, and apologize to Neil and to all those who were unfairly besmirched by this heinous and ridiculous excommunication attestation action.

Roy was not doing a lot of work on any major long-term projects in the last several years of his life. An ambition of his was to do a sort of historical survey and critique of modern libertarianism (which, I think would have been a much more engaging and insightful book than Brian Doherty's thick but often thickheaded Radicals for Capitalism). I think Roy had written about a paragraph of this project in longhand on a yellow legal pad before he died.

I knew Roy well during only the last few years of his life. But I didn't get the impression at that time that he felt his views in favor of limited government were weak or could be easily exploded. In any case, the opening passages of Roy's projected article on anarchism, reprinted in Joan Taylor's collection and pasted below, state only that he stopped writing about anarchism for many years because he had changed his mind but was not yet ready to make his opposing case. I believe that by the time he drafted the opening passages of his projected essay below, Roy was ready to make a case that he himself at least believed was solid. But after the newsletter that Joan mentions failed to get off the ground, he simply did not have the time and energy to finish it. Paying work had to be his top priority, and as has been reported above, Liberty's Bradford had indicated that Roy would not be compensated for a big article for Liberty on the topic. Joan believes that the scrap below was written in 1988. Roy died in 1992.

The following from Joan's anthology of Roy's work, Liberty Against Power, was reprinted at the now-defunct web site dailyobjectivist.com; that's where the copy below comes from. (The subheads were added by TDO.)

http://web.archive.org/web/20030706104406/dailyobjectivist.com/Extro/AnarchistIllusions.asp

Anarchist Illusions

by Roy A. Childs, Jr.

(Originally published in Liberty Against Power: Essays by Roy. Childs, Jr.

edited by Joan Kennedy Taylor; 1994)

(First published on TDO November 13, 1999)

Editor's Note by Joan Kennedy Taylor: During the early 1980s, Roy Childs mentioned to some of his friends that he had changed his mind about anarchism, and intended someday to write about the subject at length; exactly when and why this change occurred is unclear. He said to me once that the hostage crisis in Iran was a turning point for him, because it became obvious that when the Iranian students took the hostages, because of the de facto anarchy in that country there was no one with whom to negotiate for their release; but he didn't argue the point further. Many limited government libertarians, including myself, feel that their arguments were decisive in changing his mind, but we will never know. When Laissez Faire Books announced in 1988 that Childs would edit The Libertarian newsletter for them, he decided to put his new views on anarchism in the first issue, but neither the article nor the first issue was ever completed—this fragment (which was found in his papers after his death) is as far as he got. What his argument would have been, we will unfortunately never know, but because his views in defense of anarchism have been so influential, it seems only fair to include this tantalizing beginning here.

* * *

Many years ago I wrote a little essay published as "Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand," which caused quite a stir. At the time, I was a young libertarian who had become converted to the position I called "free market anarchism," and it was my intention to convert Rand to that position; I knew that, through her, her followers would be reached as well.

Rand disagrees

Things did not exactly work out as planned. In place of the astonished but eager acceptance of my argument—and there was some minor hope on my part for that result—I received notice in my mailbox of the cancellation of my subscription to Ayn Rand's magazine, The Objectivist. I took my original letter to Ayn Rand and circulated it to a handful of friends and acquaintances, and after making a few minor line changes, published it in a magazine of small circulation.

The reaction astonished me because I received nearly as many letters in response to my argument as the magazine had subscribers. Two letters were favorable, while about two hundred were not. Over the course of the next few years, the position of free market anarchism found more and more acceptance in the libertarian movement, and its enthusiasts easily gave the advocates of limited government a run for their money. I was not the first to advocate free market anarchism, but for a while, at least, I found myself one of its most vocal advocates, writing letters, engaging in public debates, publishing articles ("Anarchism and Justice," a multi-part series, appeared in the The Individualist; "The Epistemological Basis for Anarchism," a privately-published essay, was circulated in the thousands; there were others), making speeches, and always returning to print to refute new attempts to provide a justification for limited government.

My last essay on the subject was published as a critique of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, published more than ten years ago as "The Invisible Hand Strikes Back," in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

I have said that I was not the originator of free market anarchism, and that is indeed true. Murray Rothbard thinks that the original "anarcho-capitalist" was probably Gustav de Molinari, the nineteenth century Belgian economist and follower of the great French libertarian, Frederic Bastiat. At the time I began writing about anarchism, I knew nothing about Molinari. My own mentors were Robert LeFevre, whose doctrine of "autarchy" or "self-rule" caught my fancy as a teenager; and, later, the thinking done by such figures as Morris and Linda Tannehill, authors of the recently-reprinted work The Market for Liberty, and Murray Rothbard, particularly through my acquaintance with one of his associates, the late Wilson Clark.

Change of heart

Nevertheless, I was a tireless propagandist for anarchism, and probably convinced as many people of the legitimacy of the position as anyone else at that time. This was, no doubt, due to the fact that my argument was cast in the form of critiques of the most influential libertarian theorist of the time, Ayn Rand. Her followers were far more numerous than those of any other figure. Her influence was so vast that it easily dwarfed that of anyone else, with the possible exception of Ludwig von Mises, who pretty much stuck to economics and broader issues in the social sciences.

Since writing my critique of Nozick, which had a very favorable reception, I have been asked to expand on some of my views in this area. How would anarchism work? What were my current views on the subject? I regularly ducked the first issue, and anyone familiar with my writings on the subject may notice that I have never written anything about how free market anarchism would work; my published views have been limited to knocking down justifications for government. I ducked the second issue as long as I could, for a very good reason: I had changed my mind, and was not ready to argue my new case.

But I knew that sooner or later I would return to the subject of anarchism. That is the purpose of this essay: to refute myself as well as other anarchists. Why? Because, to paraphrase my open letter to Ayn Rand, I was wrong. I now regard anarchism as incoherent and even dangerous to the libertarian movement.

It will be said that the only issue is the truth or falsity of an idea, and that calling an idea "dangerous" is itself somewhat a "dangerous" mode of thought. But it is my conviction that anarchism functions in the libertarian movement precisely as does Marxism in the international socialist movement: as an incoherent and therefore unreachable goal that inevitably corrupts any attempted strategy to achieve it. I will argue that, as in the case of advocates of a Marxist utopia, libertarians attempting to implement anarchism would find themselves invariably moving in practice toward something very different; something, furthermore, that they never intended.

Fantasy masquerading as ideology

My purpose, then, is twofold: to refute anarchism as a doctrine, to expose it as a fantasy masquerading as an ideology, and to show how in fact it has led too many libertarians away from reality, and, indeed, set them on a collision course with it.

Too often in social or political thinking the unreflective acceptance of an incoherent ideal has led to trouble. We need only look at the often pernicious effects of such ideals as "equality" or "planning" to see how something apparently innocent can lead otherwise well-meaning people into the acceptance of the most absurd proposals and realities imaginable. And sometimes, of course, the proposals and realities have not been merely absurd, but criminal. What crimes have not been committed in the name of equality? And what amount of arbitrary state power has not been sanctioned in the name of state planning of the economy?

But, it will be answered, we have never seen a full-fledged attempt to achieve anarcho-capitalism in the modern world. How can the things be compared? We simply lack the experience that we do in the case of ideals like equality and planning.

True enough, but an incoherent goal pursued with enough diligence and success must always produce unexpected and even shocking outcomes. Equality and planning were incoherent goals. So too, I will argue, is anarcho-capitalism. It has become a standard libertarian argument that the malicious implications of equality and planning are indeed implicit in any sustained, rational analysis of the actual meanings of the concepts involved. If we look at what is involved in the ideal of equality, we must be able to discern that it is either perniciously arbitrary (why only equality of wealth? what would "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcomes" actually entail?) or that it can only be achieved by the most extreme and unacceptable means. And if we examine the notion of "comprehensive planning of the economy," we find similar questions and implications. We would find that it would be necessary to accept not only a vast concentration of power in the hands of the state, but also a destruction of wealth on such a large scale as to render whole populations destitute.

Some people might not shrink from accepting such consequences, but they would probably be in the minority, which is where psychopaths properly belong.

–DO–

Roy A. Childs, Jr. was the editor of Libertarian Review from 1977 through 1981. For the next few years he was a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, before moving to New York City to assume editorial duties for Laissez Faire Books. Roy was Laissez Faire's editorial director from 1984 until his death in 1992. He was 43.

GHS wrote: "I haven't seen the Python sketch for a while, but aren't we supposed to poke Neil with soft cushions before we resort to the drastic measure of the comfy chair?"

Oh brother. Did I get the incidents of the sketch out of sequence? Man alive. THIS is what you call the "argumentation"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????????????? Oh man, I am OUTTA HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

GHS wrote: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Bring on the comfy chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guy's mom thinks it's all a terrible violation of the First Amendment too. From the story:

"Turner had criticized the panel from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a June 2009 ruling upholding a handgun ban in Chicago. 'Let me be the first to say this plainly: These judges must die,' he wrote. 'Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty.' " He also posted the judges’ work addresses and photos."

Just febrile polemics to post the addresses and photos in conjunction with such an injunction?

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

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

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

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

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

Neil wrote: "It is only the disbelief that what I report is already within the recipient's belief system of what is possible that casts dobt on my report. I am being demanded to provide a higher degree of proof than would be expected if the recipient of my report did not doubt such events were possible."

It's not just an issue of my belief or disbelief, but what is objectively possible. What is the nature of the god you met and the supernatural realm which you suggest he has some ability to control? How is the supernatural different from the natural? If supernatural powers do not entail any ability to violate the law of identity, how is the entity you say you met able to do the things you say he does? What is the process? What are the mechanisms?

I'm disappointed by Neil's ad hominesh blasting of GHS. I don't think all of Smith's comments have been equally effective, but they have not been willfully diversionary. Neil has not really made any case that his psychological experience, foremost the mindmeld, are both a] real (which no one has disputed) and b] a manifestion of god and the supernatural.

A theistic understanding of the universe can't stand if it is metaphysically contradictory or arbitrary. In his memoir, Neil very thoroughly documents philosophical evolution, creative braintorming, and certain physical and psychological experiences. He does not make any clear argument that his psychological experiences are evidence that he has met a god, and I don't see any fundamental grappling with that issue in this thread. His experiences are per se supposed to be demonstrative of the validity of his conclusions. They're not.

JNS wrote of GHS: "Neither of you [George H. Smith or Dennis Prager] strike me as having much genuine intellectual curiosity."

This strikes me as condescending and even a little priggish to say of an intellectually curious fellow like GHS.

Okay, let me immediately withdraw that characterization; I said it only because Neil, earlier in the thread, had called me condescending and priggish for wondering why he accepted the least reasonable of the explanations of his experiences allegedly encountering God. (I never suggested, as Neil asserted, that he had not given any consideration to alternative explanations.)

Anyway, I still have the same c&p impulses, inasmuch as it still seems to me that Neil's insistence on believing in a deity and in the supernatural (which, however, according to Neil, do not contradict the law of identity that is the hallmark of the natural realm, however much they may be apparently unconstrained by the identities of things) cannot be rationally justified.

I don't mean that Neil's interpretation of his experiences cannot be rationally justified by others, although that also is true; he's said several times that others may well be reasonable in declining to accept his claims. I mean that the answer posed in the title of this thread is No: Neil himself is not logically justified in believing in God, his God or any other. That he suffered a fugue-like state brought on in part by physical deprivation, in part by his previous speculation and theorizing, constitutes no evidence that a semi-all-powerful (but invisible) deity suffused his being. That Neil has a firm conviction that this is what happened is no evidence that it did either.

Neil's affliction-based theology has the virtue, like Marxism or other self-feeding concepts, of being infinitely elastic, such that any objection whatever may be countered in the theory's own terms, however implausible and unverifiable those terms may be. Neil himself has not and cannot verify the assumptions underlying his theory--not even to himself. He is convinced, yes. Rationally convinced? No.

Neil's protestations that he is still a rationalist, just as much a rationalist as ever, fall flat unless rationalism has nothing particular to do with going by facts, nothing particular to do with deriving theoretical conclusions from those facts rather than with simply casting an antecedent theory out like a net to willy-nilly snag and incorporate any of the more inconvenient and obstreperous ones. If Neil's conceptions of "God" and the "supernatural" don't contradict the identity-bound natural world, what are they? How would they be defined?

Men create gods in their own image, with traits that are sympathetic and utilitarian with respect to the human believer's purposes. The king likes a god with the inclination and power to push people around and get them to fall in line; he likes a god who delegates to him the divine right to act as the god's representative on earth (the divine right to do what he wants to do anyway). The Calvinist bully who wants nobody to do anything of his own free will employs a god whose creations are entirely predestined. Flower children have the Jesus version of god with the long hair and beard, more relaxed and forgiving (except with respect to bankers) than his uptight and war-mongering father-god.

What kind of god does the fiction writer have? The god who wants aesthetic satisfaction and who has an sf-spin on the myths of the Bible. The God who points out that Adam and Eve were computer hackers, for instance.

Neil confuses the subconscious and the creative process with revelation and god-power. That his theology is often interesting is a tribute to his creative abilities, not to his openness as a receptacle to his new-and-improved God's words of wisdom.

Do all the veteran writers and beginning writers who come up with either mundane or provocative and engaging twists on the tale of Adam and Eve believe that they have received a clarifying memo, via mind meld or whatever imposing mechanism, from the Almighty Himself? I do not know for sure, but my suspicion is that most do not believe this, not literally; although some writers sometimes vaguely speak as if their creativity entailed delivering messages from the beyond, not having much deep insight into the human mind and its creative workings.

What is the difference, then, with respect to J. Neil Schulman's riffs on religious mythology in Escape from Heaven (outlined and excerpted in Neil's memoir) and the riffs of all other artists who have come up with theological variations in fiction or sermons?

It has something to do with the final revisions of Neil's novel, Escape from Heaven. The revision was a substantial re-envisioning. He implemented massive changes in a very short time. I gather from the memoir that the novel is still a novel, not just a report of information relayed by God; but a novel which in Neil's view has been radically informed by God's input. Thus, in his view, the novel includes both his own fictional web-spinning and something more akin to a transcription of details about heaven ops and God-nature conveyed by God himself during the mind-meld.

However...it is more plausible, especially in light of the fact that the proposed alternative is impossible, that Neil had the mind-meld with himself, with the result that he ended up replacing an unsatisfatory approach to the novel with something much more satisfactory and persuasive.

That may well be the case--if by persuasive we mean literarily persuasive. I, for one, am happy to give Neil full credit for his own work, even if the author is too modest to accept that full credit.

Neil writes: "If that's the Devil, then where did the idea of the Devil as destructive and evil come from?"

The Bible has a different version of God from Neil's. But wasn't the devil the guy who tried to overthrow a deity who (according to the Bible) is a vicious mass murderer and tyrant? And if the serpent in Eden is the same as the devil, was not the devil a partisan of knowledge as opposed to blind obedience to authority?

It is a very good question, though, because many readers of the Bible regard God as the good guy. Of course, it's not as if the devil has an unmixed track record, if he is the one who incited God to harass and sicken Job, kill off his cattle and kids, etc., as a "test."

J. Neil writes: "I also believe that O.J. directed his attorneys not to 'Plan B' Jason and that O.J. has purposively redirected public and press suspicion away from Jason and toward himself post his criminal acquittal."

1) What is the evidence that O.J. "redirected" suspicion toward himself? (And haven't most people watching the case always believed that O.J. is guilty?)

2) Did Jason have the same history of conflict with Nicole that O.J. did, and the same motive and opportunity?

3) Why is it implausible that the killer would be the one who is the killer?

4) If you could be persuaded that O.J. is the killer, would that cast any doubt on your interpretation of your experience of the mind meld, i.e., that you were in communion with God? Or would you say that God either deliberately misled you or blundered in intimating that he knew more about the case at the time than he really did?

Neil writes: "...I think my well-documented prior skepticism -- and my credibility as a writer on other matters -- should give me a modicum of credibility..."

Neil, when did Linaweaver conduct the interviews with you that make up the book I Met God? I ask because during the interviews you seem to continue to support your theory that O.J. Simpson was framed for the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. (Neil's book The Frame of the Century? was published in 1999.) You state that when God took over during the mind-meld and you were God for those hours, you learned that your theory about Simpson was correct.

You say of your state during the mind-meld: "I realize that I am revealed to myself. The game of hiding from myself [i.e., the fact that you are God] is over and now obviously I’m here. And now the mission begins. This is what’s going through my mind at that point and I begin asking myself certain questions about what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen in terms of the O.J. thing — is my [Neil's] investigation correct? Yes, your intuition there was correct."

That is, O.J. was in fact framed, according to God; although God is not omniscient on your account, he would seem to be a savvy and powerful enough guy to give an unequivocally true thumbs up or thumbs down to your proposal that O.J. was framed.

I ask about the date of the interviews because the first news report that Simpson was going to publish his pretend-spurious account of the murders, If I Did It, was published in 2006. (I thought I saw the date of the interviews on the web site but can't find it again.)

In any case, do you still hold that O.J. was likely (or definitely) framed?

"I expected him to shut me up by citing an original idea."

Yeah, I guess it would have been out of the question to avoid being rude to begin with.

Reidy wrote: "Here's one citation: the intro to the Playboy interview called Atlas Shrugged 'the most fiercely damned and admired bestseller of the decade.' "

I believe that this claim is true. This is not the same claim as that there is a myth floating around that "Ayn Rand’s ideas inspire fanatical love or hate within the majority of people who read her." I have never heard this contention anywhere.

Of course, according to MSK, I proved that I "misunderstood" his claim by...quoting it exactly.

WS wrote: " 'It's quite interesting to observe the current emergence of believers (in whatever religion) posting here. Now wouldn't that give Objectivists the opportunity to demonstrate the efficacy of their philosophy by going for the believers' premises? But for some reason this does not seem to happen. Why?'

"Objectivists may not have the specialized chops, nor the desire to spend a lot of time rooting around in difficult material. For example, AA posted a long discursion on probability, mostly derived from Berlinski, and further derived from materials put forth by the Discovery Institute. I spent a few days reacquainting myself with the immense material elsewhere that has developed in response to the DI bumf.

"AA was mostly regurgitating arguments that had been debunked elsewhere by folks with a stupendous advantage over me on the subjects. I think if AA had good faith, he would be acquainted with those debates and debunkings and raised his game. Instead his eructions increasingly took the form of Trollery."

Where are you guys getting the notion that there has been no criticism of the basic notions of either AA or Schulman? AA was smashed repeatedly and kept evading what was said. Schulman can't say why the god he spoke to is even possible, let alone why the most reasonable explanation of his experience is that it was a communication from this impossible god. The fact of his conviction is his primary argument. But as we all know, people can have and have had throughout history very rock-solid, firm, imperturbable convictions that completely contradict each other. I understand why Xray would make baseless assertions just to annoy, as that's his stock in trade, but Scherk should know better.

With regard to AA's disquisitions, I don't think it's necessary to know every in and out of the improbable probabilisticalism of the unintelligent design argument to understand why it's a fabrication and dishonest. His underlying assumption was in fact refuted, and that refutation was ignored.

Deliberate, cavalier obscurantism can't really be answered per se. If you ask, "What do you mean by X?" and the purported expositor just doubles down on his impenetrability, or skips immediately to some unrelated assertion, you know he doesn't even understand his own claims himself.