Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Aug 06, 2018 4:38 pm
Wow. For a person who claims to prefer short answers, you sure give long ones.
But I'll stay brief, because you asked me to.
Thanks and I appreciate that.
Unfortunately to get to the point, the answers has to be somewhat necessarily long. I am trying to make it short [just enough] to save time. I am only scratching the surface at present.
My point is, if you break my responses into too many smaller points or line by line then I will have to spent more time on a reasonable reply to each point [tendency to be long-winded] and at times there tend to be repetitions.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Aug 06, 2018 3:39 am
Thus you can see from the above;
- If one's God is empirical which 80% of theists believe,
Actually, they don't.
An "empirical" God would be a created being, a product of material reality only.
Nope, note.
- Empirical = based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.
God is the ultimate creator and not [never] a created being but yet 80% of theists believe God is either verifiable by observation [based on hope] or can be experienced.
Therefore 80% of theists believe in an empirically-possible God.
Theists who are informed of the limitations of an empirical God will turn to the transcendental ontological God.
It's one thing to say that the Supreme Being can act into the material realm when He so chooses. It's quite a different thing to say that God is a member of the subset of things within the material realm. And I have known no Theists (and believe me, I know a lot) who believe the second view.
The majority of theists do not deliberate consciously on whether God is empirical or transcendental.
Note the definition of 'empirical' above.
By the thoughts and acts of the majority of theists, they imply these theists believe God to be empirical, i.e. a real God who answer prayers, intervene in world affairs and its presence can be experienced.
If God is claimed to be transcendental, then it is an illusion, thus impossible to be real.[/list]
This also isn't what the Transcendentalists believe; but I'll let them speak for themselves, I think.
In contrast to the definition of empirical above, what is transcendental is not empirical but rather based on theory or pure logic. This is the God of the Deists or panentheists who avoid any empirical characteristics for their God.
Whilst the majority of humans need God as a psychological crutch and cannot do without it
Wow. The old "psychological crutch" argument.
Note the definition of 'psychology';
Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, including conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feeling and thought.
It is an academic discipline of immense scope and diverse interests that, when taken together, seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, and all the variety of epiphenomena they manifest.
As a social science it aims to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases.
-wiki
Psychological is the study that involve behavior with the mind as the basis.
So my reference re "psychological crutch" is not directly related to Freud.
I am more interested in neuro-psychology i.e. to understand the neural connectivity and the underlying issues that drive theism.
Well, really, this has always been a very, very weak argument. The "psychological crutch" insult works every bit as well as a counter to Atheism as it does a rebuke to Theism, actually. One can have a "wish fulfillment" (Freud) desire for God to exist, sure; but one can also have a "wish fulfillment" desire to imagine there's no God, when actually, there is. The first option may provide a sense of consolation, but the second promises a sense of freedom from judgment. An human being actually can have deep psychological longings to believe either way. Even Freud himself, who really invented the argument, said this was true. He thought Atheism was an expression of the Oedipal desire to "kill the father." But if it is, it's potentially just as much a "psychological crutch" as any other wish-fulfillment desire.
As explained and my attention on the "psychological crutch" in relation to neuro-psychology and neuro-psychiatry, the above is not applicable.
And either way, the presence of psychological longings does not logically tell us anything about the existence or non-existence of the thing longed for. You can long for a unicorn, or you can long for a glass of cold water. The former does not exist, but the latter surely does. But if one has to choose between the two, it's more likely that if you experience a profound longing, you're longing for something that corresponds to reality. For how do we explain, as a survival instinct, that we just happen to have a lot of unaccountable deep longings for things that simply don't and can't exist in reality?
So you'd have to say that if the "psychological crutch" argument counts for anything, it probably counts more for the existence of God than against it. But maybe it just doesn't count at all.
As I had argued the 'longing' for God is ultimately defaulted to an illusion.
For theists who insist God is an empirical thing, they are caught in a dilemma of ending with an inferior God and infinite regression.
To escape the dilemma they have to jump from the frying into the fire, i.e. the transcendental God of pure logic which is a transcendental illusion.
The only reasonable and provable case for God is psychological. There is an Everest to climb here. Many has taken this path, I had mentioned Eastern religions and philosophies so it is not a mere fanciful idea.