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

[Selene]

Neil:

Out of curiosity, do you recall how many total CD' s were on the table?

Adam

[PDS]

Neil: how do you know I'm not already a convert, albeit one without the benefit of God having entered my body?

Edited January 22, 2011 by PDS

[J Neil Schulman]

Neil:

Out of curiosity, do you recall how many total CD' s were on the table?

Adam

Behind the table. Half a dozen, give or take.

[J Neil Schulman]

Neil: how do you know I'm not already a convert, albeit one without the benefit of God having entered my body?

A convert to what?

[9thdoctor]

Neil:

Out of curiosity, do you recall how many total CD' s were on the table?

Adam

Behind the table. Half a dozen, give or take.

I checked with my Ouiji board, and it was the Bruch Scottish Fantasy played by Heifetz. They had it on shuffle play so you didn't hear the whole thing. What's the point of all this again?

[Jonathan]

Of course it crossed my mind. I didn't just check jewel cases or CD labels. I checked every CD by putting it into the player. They were all Bach, all the time.

It's odd that on the first telling of the story, you said that you asked the audio lecture dealer if you could "look through" his CDs, but now you're telling us that in the middle of the conference, you took over this stranger's CD player long enough to sample every track on half a dozen discs. And you tell us in post #848 that you think it's unlikely that the people who were at the table would remember the incident!

(I'm assuming that the people were strangers since you've said that you think you're unlikely to find them now. Just knowing their names would probably be enough to find them pretty quickly. Do you know their names?)

J

[Jonathan]

What's the point of all this again?

That's my fault. Sorry that we're covering old ground. Somehow I missed a lot of the info on the Bach thing the first time around. I just wanted to get some details from Neil which I thought others might not have asked.

J

[9thdoctor]

What's the point of all this again?

That's my fault. Sorry that we're covering old ground. Somehow I missed a lot of the info on the Bach thing the first time around. I just wanted to get some details from Neil which I thought others might not have asked.

J

I've been to Leipzig, where Bach worked for 35 years, he's more or less the town's patron saint (though Mendelssohn and Wagner came from there too). Not once in a restaurant did they play Bach, let alone all Bach, all the time. Just saying.

[Xray]

For Dawkins, it is as clear as it can get: "You have been hallucinating!", he tells the man. Dawkins comes to this conclusion on the grounds that depending on the various religions people are born into, they use to have sightings of the gods/saints figuring in those religions. Therefore Catholics will "see" the Virgin Mary, Hindus will "see" Shiva, etc.

It is often good to test the strength of an argument by playing devil's advocate (in that case, it would be god's advocate ;)).

Supose a theist tried to counter Dawkins' assertion by arguing that God can manifest himself in many different forms.

I suppose Dawkins would say that the different gods contradict themselves in their messages, and that even the god of one religion is often a bunch of contradictions.

But if the theist does not share the premise of a God having to be non-contradictory, wouldn't Dawkins' alleged "proof" of hallucination go down the drain?

For atheists too can fall into the trap of the "Ontological Argument" when they want to disprove any existence of a god by criticizing the traits of God as contradictory and then conclude God cannot exist.

Just as the theist (using the Ontological Argument) imagines God as a perfect being and concludes (which is a thinking error) that this being must exist - doesn't the atheist operating from the other side of the fence, when he points out that God is presented as a contradictory being in the various religious texts, and from that concludes this being cannot exist, make the same thinking error?

Neil Schulman, post # 846:

(to PDS): What are you worried about -- that I might win some "converts"?

Converts to what?

Xray, post #845: You have evaded my question. I'll ask you again: "Which technical term would you use for this type of misprocessing?"

Neil Schulman, post # 848: The technical term I'd use for this happening is "maximum hypothesis."

That's pretty evasive again, Neil. Maximum hypothesis about what?

Neil Schulman, post # 848:

If you need to sleep at night you'd do better simply saying my mom and I are liars and simply made the whole thing up.

Since my question was clearly not implying you had made it up (for I spoke about misprocession in the brain of sensory input, not about deliberate deception), I'm surprised that you bring it up at all here.

Here is what I wrote in # 841:

"A question about terminology: With regard to the music both you and your mother heard playing: suppose what was playing on the CD really WAS Bach, then obviously your brains wrongly processed the sensory input you received. Which technical term would you use for this type of misprocessing?" (end quote)

Edited January 22, 2011 by Xray

[PDS]

Neil: how do you know I'm not already a convert, albeit one without the benefit of God having entered my body?

A convert to what?

Isn't that the grand question of this thread: i.e., if I have become a Neil convert, what exactly have I converted to?

[Starbuckle]

Xray says: "For atheists too can fall into the trap of the 'Ontological Argument' when they want to disprove any existence of a god by criticizing the traits of God as contradictory and then conclude God cannot exist. Just as the theist (using the Ontological Argument) imagines God as a perfect being and concludes (which is a thinking error) that this being must exist - doesn't the atheist operating from the other side of the fence, when he points out that God is presented as a contradictory being in the various religious texts, and from that concludes this being cannot exist, make the same thinking error?"

What "thinking error" is that? Thinking based on acceptance of the fact that contradictions can't exist in reality?

The axiom that metaphysical contradictions can't exist is just a restatement of the law of identity. Without implicitly recognizing that all entities are bounded by their own nature, i.e., that things are what they are and only that, no intelligible thinking can be done at all. If a person asserts both that "x is true" and "x is not true," one is thinking clearly to conclude that both statements cannot be true, that only one at most can be true. If a person states, explicitly or even unbeknownst to himself, that a posited super-being both has attribute X and does not have attribute X, one is thinking clearly to conclude that such a being cannot exist. Gods are always presented as being outside the natural realm and unbounded by the considerations of cause and effect that circumscribe and inhibit mere natural entities.

Of course, theists like to pretend that logic and reality are irrelevant to assessing their mystical presumptions and experiences. And, of course, they also insist on the validity of the law of identity when it suits them and drop it like a hot potato when it doesn't suit them. They are happy to make use of the benefits of coherence for the sake of cosseting and camouflaging the stretches of incoherence they want to indulge in.

Neil, being more aware than other theists of the obvious metaphysical objection to his posited natural-realm-transcending entity, contends that his uber-being does not suffer from any of these self-contradictions. But if one presses him on the matter, one will learn that "Well, you really had to be there!" One can learn nothing, for example, about how it is possible for the Neil-God to be "everlasting" or purely spiritual in form; or how Neil knows these features of Neil-God; you really had to be there and partake of the invisible mystic communion yourself to get any inkling. Such mysteries are incommunicable. It all comes down to a Jerry-Lewis version of epistemology: "For those who understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, none will do."

Another commentator averred somewhere in this thread that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This statement is too compact. It would be more precise to say that absence of persistent and observable evidence is not evidence of absence of what that evidence, had it remained available, would have shown.

If a corpse has been effectively hidden and all traces of murder expunged, this doesn't mean that you now have evidence that no murder was or could have been committed; true enough. Perhaps you must remain in a state of agnosticism and speculation about the fate of a missing person who has in fact been murdered. On the other hand, the primary evidence we have of any entity and what it can do or has done is not the traces that it leaves in reality, but the acting entity itself. Had you been around at the time of the murder, you certainly could have observed the murderer committing murder. If the murderer had then failed to detect you but wiped away all other evidence, evidence of murder would have persisted in the form of your memory of having directly observed the murder. Another person hidden with you in the room could have witnessed the same event too. Suppose there had been three persons hidden in the room. Then all three would have seen it. Suppose there had been a hundred persons in the room, all with decent vantage points. Then all hundred would have seen it.

Gods, however, are among those peculiar kinds of entities which cannot be observed either directly or indirectly, anyway, anyhow, when they're "there" and when they're not there, except insofar as allegedly manifested in dream, delusion, imagination or hallucination. Even specks of dust are more metaphysically potent than that.

Edited January 22, 2011 by Starbuckle

[George H. Smith]

I'm baaack...

Reopening the plagiarism scandal caused me a good deal of anxiety. I couldn't eat or sleep much, and I spent hours pacing back and forth trying to figure out how to handle everything.

I was so exhausted and on edge that I figured this would would be a good time to give God another call. This time he answered.

God explained that the creation of humans was his first class project, undertaken during his first semester of How to Be a God School. He didn't know anything at the time, and he fucked up the project so bad that he got an F. His teacher said the project couldn't be fixed, so God went on to other things.

God apologized and asked me to pass his apology along to others. He also he said that we are on our own and will have to make the best of a bad situation. He said, "Good luck; you are going to need it."

When I asked God about his conversation with you, he said he was on a drinking binge at the time and doesn't remember anything about it. God has been following this thread, however, and insisted that if he said what you claim he said, he must have been playing a practical joke or goofing with you. God asked me to convey his sincere apologies.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

[PDS]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

No, he needs a message.

[Selene]

The medium is the message.

[George H. Smith]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

Not from you I don't. I never get massages from anything with a penis.

I do appreciate your concern, however. I rested up yesterday, went with a friend to see "True Grit," and had an excellent steak and lobster dinner. I am going to spend today cleaning up this not-so-natural disaster that I call home. I will relax tomorrow and watch some football -- Go Bears! On Monday I will stick my head out of my cave, look around, and see if the real world looks appealing enough to venture out -- on a trial basis, of course.

Ghs

[PDS]

The medium is the message.

Let's hope He's a Happy Medium.

[Brant Gaede]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

Not from you I don't. I never get massages from anything with a penis.

Ah. I see you remember that scene from The Godfather.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

Not from you I don't. I never get massages from anything with a penis.

Ah. I see you remember that scene from The Godfather.

--Brant

What scene?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

Not from you I don't. I never get massages from anything with a penis.

Ah. I see you remember that scene from The Godfather.

--Brant

What scene?

I see you don't.

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

George, you need a massage.

--Brant

Not from you I don't. I never get massages from anything with a penis.

Ah. I see you remember that scene from The Godfather.

--Brant

I don't see a connection between a penis and being shot in the eye. Well, yes, there is a possible connection via porn, but I would rather not think about that now.

Ghs

[BaalChatzaf]

I see you don't.

--Brant

I saw the movie. What scene?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

When Michael is having his son baptized in the church and the assassinations are going on, Moe Green is on the massage table and he picks up his glasses to see who just came in and he is shot through the eye.

[Brant Gaede]

When Michael is having his son baptized in the church and the assassinations are going on, Moe Green is on the massage table and he picks up his glasses to see who just came in and he is shot through the eye.

The actor was actually hurt doing that scene, but he kept acting and they kept filming.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

I see you don't.

--Brant

I saw the movie. What scene?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Tut, tut.

--Brant