Trav,

“David, there have been studies which have shown that children automatically attribute teleogical explanations for things.”

Yes, children seek cause. I’m an adult, and I know sometimes there none available.

This is a disingenuous statement, “Developmental psychologists have interpreted this as evidence that supernatural belief is in some way innate and that it's been a part of our evolution.”

A small minority of religious developmental phycologist if you don’t mind. It’s to be expected.

I guess we are making a departure from science with this one, “Also, there have been cases of people who have been culturally indoctrinated against Christianity, for example, but who have had dreams and visions with Christian themes and then become Christians.”

Anecdote, especially when there are more prosaic explanations mean less than nothing does.

And this deceptive sentence, “The philosophy of scientific naturalism doesn't usually spring into people's minds without having someone tell them about the idea and without books and study.”

Such ideas are logical and are not the result of indoctrination as is religion.

Explain to me how people arrive at the idea of Yahweh/Jesus, Allah, Krishna, Zeus, Ra and so on and so forth, without indoctrination using holy books and culture. If you don’t answer this satisfactorily, I am not going to waste anymore time on you except for the rest of this post waiting on the numbers limit for this site.

(Continued next post)

Most people get on

Planes and just hope they don't crash

What evidence there?

AFA-David:

<<Only arguments or testimony based on logic and empirical data should be used to govern our society. Otherwise, we have a mishmash of subjective imperatives and the evidence is that that kind of thing is harmful for civilisation.>>
First of all, I’m not trying to govern any society. My aim in explaining my world-view is to help you and others understand why I and people of similar world-views talk and act as we do. The belligerence of your statements shows that in your eyes we are enemies: maybe deeper understanding of different ways of some spiritual or religious mind-sets could lead you (and any in whatever “government” you have in mind) to a more constructive, peaceful engagement with the rest of humanity.

Secondly, good governance cannot occur without some essentially non-empirical and non-logical thought, discussion and decisions. Value-judgements must be made and explained, for instance, and these are not logically derived. Symbols must be developed, used, evaluated and abandoned, and this occurs primarily through the type of perception I earlier called “intuition” – the diametric opposite of the sensory perception which produces empirical data.

I wrote that “your continued assertion that empiricism is the only channel for investigation of human life is simply plain wrong.” Your response: <<Why is it wrong? Is guessing better?>>

“Guessing” is not the only other channel. I presented some others in earlier posts. Did you actually read and consider them?

Interpersonal relationships and artistic work or appreciation are two areas of human being in which success requires much more than logic and empirical data. Exploring spiritual life – the focus of this discussion – is another.

Common to all these relationships and to every moment of human life is the unceasing and inevitable activity of the unconscious mind. To further understanding of human life we must explore the unconscious through its manifestations and effects. Your strenuous scientistic emphasis on logic and empirical perception suggest to me that you devote your life to a defence against your unconscious mind. In fact, I would not be surprised if you deny the reality of the unconscious

Crabsy
You wrote, “Glen, devote time to trying non-empirical perception. You play recorders: so contemplate the sense of relationship to people and the natural world which you experience as you play in ensemble; once you enter the “flow” zone the sense of oneness can be profound.”

I’d love to have time to engage properly with you but don’t at the moment. That’s my loss, not yours. Let me just say that in a recent desperate attempt to get some understanding of what people mean by spirituality, I enrolled in a spirituality class. One of our exercises required us to talk about a spiritual experience we’d had. I apologized for having nothing to report. The best I could come up with was a heightened emotional response I’d experienced on hearing and seeing the Australian Chamber Orchestra play Beethoven’s 7th like I’d never heard before. The brilliance of their performance excited me into having the most emotionally rewarding musical experience I’d had in recent years.

Then the others in the spirituality class, most of whom were deeply into meditation and exploring “spiritual reality”, began to recount their spiritual experiences. Without exception, they were no more than experiences of heightened emotional response to sensory stimulation, just as mine was. One woman’s “spiritual reality” experience was enjoying driving around Australia in a motor home! I went to the class hoping to gain some understanding of a reality beyond the empirical. I left let down by the realisation that every spiritual believer there was merely mistaking a perfectly normal and mundane empirical event as a glimpse of a “spiritual reality”. They were merely convincing themselves of a “truth” that they wished for so much that they allowed their faith to drive out their rationality. And of course I’m familiar with the feeling that you might call a profound sense of oneness that you experience when everyone is in synch and the performance is working as you’d hoped and dreamed, but I’m not so naïve as to think that that feeling indicates that you have departed real reality and entered into an unreal, spiritual one.

"One of our exercises required us to talk about a spiritual experience we’d had... Without exception, they were no more than experiences of heightened emotional response to sensory stimulation, just as mine was."
-GlenC

I must dispute this from a younger man's perspective. For about half my life my parents dragged me to Roman Catholic Mass. I'm baptised and confirmed, and I've never had a spiritual experience in church. Even in the other churches I've been to - apparently in the Pentecostal churches folk speak in tongues and have visions and all sorts of cool sh1t (although I suspect if I worked out the math, the necessary tithing would prove more expensive than a good old fashioned crack habit). So I tried it, but the only impression I got from Pentecostals was that they were a pack of highly impressionable retards with a chronic inability to discern beautiful hymms from sh1tty Christian pumice (like rock, but still not quite proper rock).

I have had a spiritual experience, indeed more than one... and without exception, they were no more than experiences of heightened emotional response to the ingestion of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). At the time they were very profound and very real. Once the drugs wear off and reality and logic re-assert themselves, you realise you've just had a very pleasant trip away from conventional reality... and that the spiritual reality you perceived whilst hallucinating was merely a drug induced fanstasy.

Shintaro,

The evidence is produced by inductive reasoning.

Squeers,

I'll accept that a philosophical approach is one way to consider the question and I'm not sneering at philosophy. However, as far as I know, 2500 years of philosophy have not produced a single fact or useful artifact. So my money's on the AFA's scientific approach to the problem.

As to ideology, I think you're conflating the AFA's stated position with its organizational characteristics.
Religious people often misrepresent atheism as a 'belief system', that's simply a crude strawman argument.

I'm a member of the AFA -- I'm simply expressing a personal opinion.