you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim
No, that wasn't me, it was Lumifer.
Now you're mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices.
That doesn't seem to me like a good description of what I'm doing. In particular, my criticism is not mostly about the rhetorical effect of what you wrote, but about its logic.
Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The boundary between experience and explanation is fuzzy and porous, but it seems to me that when (say) Richard Dawkins calls belief in God a pernicious delusion, what he is saying is precisely that believers' explanatory theory of their experiences is wrong, not that they didn't have the experiences. The same goes, I think, for most other atheists who loudly criticize theism and theists. So I fear you may be tilting at windmills.
But I must say a few words about the fuzziness and porousness of that boundary. Suppose I have a hallucination, think I see my dead grandmother, and conclude that I have seen a ghost. And suppose you don't believe ghosts are real. I say to you "I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother". You say "No, you didn't". Are you denying my experience, or my interpretation of it? I think you might reasonably deny two things I would claim, while accepting a third. You accept that I had an experience as of seeing my dead grandmother. You deny that I actually saw an actual thing that resembled my dead grandmother. And you deny, more specifically, that I saw a ghost. Something similar -- though of course it needn't involve outright hallucination -- may happen with religious experiences. I feel an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and majesty; I conceptualize this as experiencing the presence of a divine being; I conclude that Jesus loves me and wants me to go and be a missionary. Richard Dawkins may reasonably accept that I felt those things; deny that I felt the presence of a divine being; deny in particular that I learned that Jesus wants me to be a missionary.
And the difficulty is that if you ask me in either of these cases to say what my experience was then -- quite aside from the possibility that it may have been somewhat indescribable -- I may well think of it, and describe it, in terms that already have some theorizing built into them. I may say, in the first case, "the experience I had was that I saw a ghost"; in the second, "the experience I had was of feeling the presence of God". If you disagree with the inbuilt theorizing, are you denying the reality of my experience? I think that's mostly a matter of definition; in any case, I see no reason why skeptics shouldn't do it. (Though sometimes it might be impolitic to do it out loud.)
You have to do something else.
If you want a deep understanding of the experience, yes you do. But I'm not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that. I feel quite comfortable saying that, at least to a good first approximation[1], no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences. And if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death, it may suffice to say "your experiences can't possibly be much evidence for that" rather than getting an intimate understanding of what those experiences are like.
[1] The hedging is because maybe there are exotic ways for an experience to convey a lot of evidence; e.g., perhaps when you think you hear God speaking to you he tells you some very specific piece of information you couldn't reasonably have known or worked out, and it turns out to be correct; that's at least evidence of something, though it's hard to see how you could know it was God. So far as I can tell, nothing like this is going on in the great majority of religious experiences.
No, that wasn't me, it was Lumifer.
Oh, sorry, my mistake.
I say to you "I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother". You say "No, you didn't".
I wouldn't say that. I would say, "I believe that you think you saw the ghost of your dead grandmother. And it's not entirely out of the question that it was in fact the ghost of your dead grandmother. But I think it's more likely that there's some other explanation."
And actually, I probably wouldn't even say that. I would probably say, "I'm sorry your grandmother is dead. S...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.