sensory experience

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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[warning: this thread is poorly thought out, though this poster has high hopes for it]

In another thread Ucci responded to a question by saying that his justification for believing the idea of God has objective reality is his senses in the same way that for me, him, and everyone else, the justification for the idea of elephants having objective reality is our sensory equipment. How many of the board theists will claim the same?–that you justify the conclusion that your idea of God has objective reality with your senses as evidence?

Will anyone go as far as to say that most of theists are in the same position? The questions that are immediately raised in my mind are why do you bother with the rationale? And why is there such discrepancy between the representations of this thing? What about the polytheistic Greeks, how could they interpret this thing so wrong…And why is it that those who claim to experience God, any God, do so only in light of already having an idea of God…historically, for example, the Abrahamic notion of God never sprung up in an isolated culture. Native Americans didn’t hear of the Abrahamic God, and neither did Africans, nor Asians until people actually told them that this idea exists…Do you think of yourself as special, then? Your culture, too? Tell me where your leap of faith starts? What do you make of those theistic scholars who rehash old rational arguments for Gods existence…are they just wasting time, when they could just justify their claims via this very simple but very potent argument; I sense it therefore I’m justified in claiming it exists as I sense it.

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Some might say that things aren’t always as they seem. The propositions that my senses encounter may be the same as those that a theist encounters, but we may draw different conclusions from them. The fact seems to be that even if my senses and the theist’s are the same, an inasmuch as they’re the same there’s some objectivity, both of us abandon our empirical justifications for what we believe when we assert that it’s either true or false that there’s a god. The nature of empirical observation prevents us from founding that assertion either way.

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Weren’t their gods based on sensory objects? The sun, moon, planets, and stars. Seems a good question of how the god concept was ever allowed in to our system of beliefs.

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God is a person, not the sky. That pretty much answers all your questions, as far as I can tell. :slight_smile:

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God transcends the split between subject and object. The divine is sensed by the queen of the senses: intuition. The discrepancies in conceptions of the divine are because the human mind is a kluge. The polytheism and monism are obviously variants of theism. Plato and Aristotle and the stoics got there. Native American hold to the great spirit. Hindus have Brahmin. Confucians have heaven and Buddhists Nirvana. Taoists the Tao. Only you, Erlir seem to believe and have nothing. Just kidding. :smiley: You have plenty of company.

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Them be some mighty fine an’ purty words…can you rephrase that in a way such that a yonker like me might understand it?

First, obviously many people fall short of sensing the divine (and that number is rising!, thank the great god Athe). How do you explain that? Secondly, you choose to use the term the divine, instead of God, and I find that curious. In my opening post I ask whether you use sensory experience to to justify your conclusion about your idea of God. Tell me, to what extent do you? Do you sense a gray somethingelse which you agree most people of other theistic persuasions feel too, and then use your judgment to paint it Christian? If you can, and want, tell me how much is painting and how much sensed? How much, or what, of your idea of God do you actually sense and how much or what do you faith faith to be of a certain type?

The human mind is not a kludge with regard to elephants…

Then tell me what exactly is it that that theists sense, which then allows them to make of this sensation such varying and different concepts. One possible way of getting an answer could be by analyzing all the different claims of the different theists and arrive at some thing depicted in all. Agree?

It seems to me that if all these people of varying traditions do sense something, then this something must be very non-specific, because the difference between Nirvana, the tao, brahmin, the native american great spirit, and your God are non-arguably great. What is the common denominator between them?

Do you mean sense, in that only I seem to sense, and yet have nothing? Fact is, I don’t sense this somethingelse…and I trust the billions of others throughout the ages who have said they don’t, really don’t. I don’t trust you guys, though, and I hope there’s no real shock there, when I say this. :slight_smile:

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Here is some context for my opening post:

This is a quote from Uccisore (anyone else feel silly when referring to people by their online alias? Who’s with me…huh?..high five) from this (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=163494) topic where I ask what the conditions, wherein if they were met, a theist would stop believing. As you can see, Uccisore gives a solid answer, by stating that were the conditions met, he would be in position to stop believing in elephants too, thus he has said that he has the same justification for elephants as he does for God. So, to clarify matters here, I’ve started this thread where I ask some questions regarding this notion, that the idea of God is justified by sensory experience.

Our sensory perceptions are pretty different then, because I sense that you’ve answered none of them. :slight_smile:.

I’m not sure what you mean here…but I am sure this is an angle I hadn’t thought of. Can you elaborate in a manner that I might understand? As for the unbolded text; can you describe for me this sensation which an atheist interprets to be something, which whatever it may be, is soo different than the interpretation of the theist?

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Erlir

Well, if you’ll permit me to wax Socratic, why would you expect isolated cultures to have arrived at theism? Why exactly, is that problematic for the situation as I presented it? Don’t feel like you have to give a real long answer, I’m obviously leading you somewhere. :slight_smile:

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I enjoy it when I’m shown to be in error…honestly…I find it to be what motivates me most.

because were you idea of god to actually have objective reality as you sense it (or judge) to have, or I should say as Abraham sensed it to have, then I see no reason why another culture, foreign to a concept of God could not produce the same concept of God. Elephants seem to have been represented the same from cultures everywhere, and so I take it that it was the actual elephant that produced the thought of elephant in men’s heads all over the world.

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Well now, how did the American Indians represent elephants, say, 500 years ago?  Compared to people from the African plains, I mean.  It seems to me that the elephant being objective isn't enough- it also must be present for people to observe, right?
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Ah, so ‘god is a person’ in the sense that he decided to reveal himself to some and not others then, and that the discrepancies are not counter to the god idea as much as they are conditions to it, right?

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Right. I don’t know about other traditions, but the idea that God is invisible, and that the people and cultures who know Him know so because He chose to reveal Himself is pretty standard to mine. You seemed to be presenting Abraham as though he looked around and found God, and that’s not quite how the story goes. :slight_smile:

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I did not write that.

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Like a theist is walking in a park, and nearly gets run over by a golf cart. He thinks about why he didn’t actually get hit. He looks around for a physical explanation, and finds none which satisfy him, he postulates a god, then says, Thank God I didn’t get run over. Nothing about his experience necessarily implied a God, he just wasn’t satisfied with the physical explanation of why he didn’t get hit. Someone said to him, you didn’t get hit, because you were standing here, and the golf cart went there, but this isn’t enough. He feels himself too special and unique for such a cold and impersonal account of the time his life was nearly extinguished.

The atheist on the other hand is walking through the same park at the same time, but just behind the theist, safely out of the way of the golf cart, so he sees the whole thing go down. He looks around to try and figure out why the theist wasn’t killed and noting the physical circumstances, realizes that since that’s all there is to it, and the theist, in the atheist’s opinion should be run over just like the rest of the warmongering fanatics of the world. He then speculates beyond the physical description of why the theist wasn’t killed, and given his particular emotions about the issue decides that there certainly can’t be a God, because if so he’d make the world a better place by getting rid of the theist.

Neither of the two can really empirically illustrate that there is or isn’t a God.

They can show you things that give you experiences which make you feel as though, or wish that there was or wasn’t.

But the only kinds of things that are for sure the kind of empirical that the theists and the atheists are trying to convince you that there observations are are only found in chemistry and biology and shit.

We don’t have to speculate about whether two chemicals will react in a certain way. So when we see them over and over and over doing it, then we can say that it’s been empirically verified.

This is not the case with religious debates.

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Uccisore,
then let’s work within these smaller samples of people, viz the “chosen ones.”

Why do you bother with the rationale?
Do you think the Christian scholars who’ve gone about proving god through use of reason wasted time…why didn’t some of them even use their senses of justification…were they not chosen by god? Were they, in their proofs for God, missing the quint-essential one.
Tell me where your sensory experience ends, and where you pick up your painters brush, if you can be exact about it.
What of those other theists who’ve got a very different conception of God than you do? How do you account for that? The polytheists, for example, who might say the same thing you are.
Do you think of yourself as special, then? Your culture, too? Is it fair to surmise that God is a racist? I’m sure he has his reasons, but is not the bottom line that…God is…a fucking racist? :smiley:
What do you make of your chosen peoples, in comparison to non-chosen people? --and please, be as smug about. :smiley:

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This is a good example, and I agree with your conclusions about the example. Unfortunately, my debate here is focused with those people who claim they sensed God, not with those people who infer God from various [unlikely though beneficial] occurrences; Those that claim to have actually sensed God in his formal existence, like you or I may sense an elephant and then use that sensation, or I should say memory of a sensation, to justify the conclusion that our idea of elephant represents something outside our minds which resembles our idea of elephant.

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Then I don’t know what to tell you. I think if you’re saying that you sense something, and you’ve smelled, touched, tasted, heard or seen it, and you can show it to others, then it’s got a chance of being “empirical”. If I were to grant that intuition was in fact a real sense, I think I’d probably want to come up with a way to rule that sense out when it comes to my empirical claims.

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Erlir

Well, because God’s revelation of Himself isn’t constant or crystal clear, due mostly to the Fall of Man. Also, experience is still merely experience. Also, remember that you have people trying to prove the existence of God through reason, you have people trying to prove the existence of matter, time, consciousness, and all the other, more obvious objects of experience, as well. Finally, realize that people who devote their lives to such experience (monastic type folks) generally don’t bother trying to prove God through reason.

 Me? Like I said, I get as far as theism with my experiences, and the rest of it is philosophy. But that's mostly my fault- if I developed my spiritual life enough, I could know more about God than I do. So could anyone. I think that answers your question about the polytheists, too.

As far as the racist bit, that strikes me as another subject. I’m mostly interested in nailing down this idea of God-as-Person and how it effects our experiences of Him. We can do a bit on God’s goodness once this is cleared up.

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So you’re saying there is a zoo wherein one can go to see God? (I do love to be cryptic) Any theories on Mother Theresa and what she was doing wrong?

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Very well said Smears. =D> I love that golf story! :smiley:

I think our concept of God is molded by our senses but this alone cannot fully give us the totallity of a God or give us its absence. So arguing from sensory experience is quite subjective and people do understand certain realities differently.

Assuming this god is infinite could a finite being like us can prove or disprove it empirically speaking? My opinion is no.

I would liken the god question into seeing a car accident. Viewing it from the fifth floor, roof top or the other end of the block will give us different interpretations. The question is how definite are we of the details of the accident or if there is an accident to begin with? Generally I think our concept of a deity, revealed or not, is molded by our culture and location