www.paulnixon.org

Are you against all views of God, or just those of the major religions - Christianity, Islam etc. What about Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism? Any truth possible there?

And if my sources are correct, Einstein was a Pantheist.

:)

Steve, show me a sound theory backed up with a smidge of evidence and I'll believe anything.

But give me absurdity and a complete absence of evidence...

I think it's always going to be a fairly rhetorical argument. The question of God is more in the philosophical realm (or spiritual if that even exists). It can be certainly argued for in a philosophical sense but then equally against depending on your stance.

Eastern philosophers would point that God is not the creator but the creation itself, and therefore the evidence is all around you - you are walking on it, eating it and breathing it. A case of not seeing the wood for the trees.

To ask for emperical scientific evidence is beyond the range of our current scanners so to speak but that's not to say that it wont be in the future. Personally I dont think the realms will ever cross.

I'm glad you pointed out the people who experience 'altered states' which leads them to rationally believe in something else as I am one of those people who up until that point was a staunch mickey-taking atheist same as you. It messed me up for a while but with a healthy amount of research I think I've settled on a belief system that takes a bit from here and a bit from there and it makes sense within a certain set of parameters.

I may well be wrong but I doubt that matters in the long run.

I believe a question of greater significance is whether or not there should be a God. All evidence suggests that having one has generally been a Bad Thing, so I am of the opinion that promotion of such entities should be actively discouraged. Gods are more trouble than they are worth.

Steve, I'm not sure I get this "philosophical realm" business - it always sounds like an unnecessary murkying of the waters.

I'm will accept the rather nebulous sounding "eastern philosphy" creation-everywhere stuff - just so long as there is the slightest reason to believe it. If it can't be detected by our senses or 'scanners' how did someone know it was there in the first place?

I don't think you can just dismiss philosophy out of hand. Take the concept of nothingness for instance - which most atheists believe is what happens after death. It is a situation in which even the rules of science break down and can only be approached in a philosophical sense.

I'm certainly no expert or even really a student but my view is that Philosophy allows us to approach topics that are inherently difficult to wrap our limited minds around. This includes subjects such as nothing, infinity and God.

We are limited by what we can symbolise in either words, numbers or other symbols. Actual reality is an infinite wriggly place and we try to cast an abstracted net over the top of it with our tools.

Again, experiencing God is something that transcends most description and all we can do is point a finger to it and try to describe it as best we can such as in the eastern tradition Zen.

As for scanners not detecting things, well, they do - it just depends on which side of the fence you sit about what they represent. A personal choice between believing in something romantic and something more pragmatic.

Steve. I think our conversation can be much simplified.

If we have no way of knowing or sensing something, how can we know anything about it? Why would we waste time speculating about it?

Who knows if there are big purple monsters running the universe in extra dimensions that we can't see?

But given an infinite number of super-natural possibilities, all of which are totally unknowable by definition, why, for the love of all that is holy, would we waste time on any of them?

I do agree with what you say there, but I come at it from a different angle out of necessity. Having experienced 'something' I have learnt that there is something else. It's not something I can communicate easily to other people without coming across like a complete fruit loop and I certainly have no chance of changing anyone's opinions without them experiencing it directly also.

Not every god-botherer has one of these experiences, but I'm certainly not in a minority.

The experience does not hold all the answers but instead opens up all kinds of questions and it's quite fun exploring trying to find possible answers.

I guess it's the same as seeing a UFO. Easy to disbelieve if you haven't seen one but after someone sees something they can't rationally explain then they become believers.

Steve, very interesting.

So we are closer in viewpoint than it originally appeared.

In this situation we have to decide - is the probablity that your brain has fooled you into believing that you have glimpsed something 'supernatural' greater than the probability that you actually have?

One of the reasons I love optical illusions. We have a greatly misplaced faith in our abilities to accurately perceive reality. Just to make where I stand clear :-).

Bit of a long one this one :)

It's nice to be able to have a civilised dialog about these matters and I like being able to take a somewhat contrary stance to you without being lumped in with the vast majority of believers without proof.

This forum may not be the most forgiving place for me to air my opinions given the amount of humourous bible-banter around but what the hey, I love you guys :)

That's exactly what it was, a different perception of reality - an internal view where external senses such as sight and time perception broke down. Just because we can only experience the information that our senses send in a certain way means that we are already removed from what is true reality. For instance, you know that a bat experiences it very different than we do.

It happened under the influence of weed but that doesn't make it any less valid an experience. The weed simply facilitated my brain to function and perceive in a different way than it ordinarily would. It is a state which I believe can take a meditator years to achieve but it happened to me in minutes - which is why my tiny mind struggled to make sense of it - I had no chance to prepare for it.

Whether this state is true or I was fooled into thinking it was true is open to debate but if I try to describe the sensation it may make more sense as to why I subscribe to the former.

I have kept the experience etched into my mind and always find myself returning to it and re-evaluating not just it's greater meaning but what it actually 'physically' was.

Like a caveman encountering fire for the first time, I had no frame of reference. Nothing to call it. My instant reaction was to call it God. And I was it. After much deliberation, the most accurate non-religious description I can give of what happened is a singularity of consciousness.

Everything came together into one. Outside/inside, up/down, left/right, me/other, time/space. It all collapsed down into one unit. A dot. A something. With no frame of reference as to its size.

It was as though I were nothing but in that nothingness I found everything. I hate these paradoxes as much as anyone but this seems to be the nature of the beast.

It was almost a mathematical experience as much as anything. The feeling of rushing to the end of the collapse felt as though I were travelling to the end of the number Pi. And at the end the equation collapses with all sides equally zero with me being the equation.

While waiting for you to reply I did a quick rummage and found this which strangely sounds very similar to what I experienced - http://www.erowid.org/spirit/writings/spirit_writings1.shtml - don't let the fact that it's Erowid put you off, it's quite interesting.

The experience was necessarily transitory and obviously time passed during it but while in it it felt timeless. All I managed to be aware of was the fact that it was happening. No verbal thoughts. Pure mind/ego/consciousness/spirit if you will.

To conclude, this was something that actually happened to me - not something I merely read of or hoped would happen. So, with all that in mind I hope you can see from my point of view that as far as I am concerned there is proof. But it's a subjective proof and not one that can strictly be recorded on paper except to point to it through metaphors.

phew :)

(I love optical illusions too - particularly the black and white castle one)

Steve, phew indeed.

That does sound fascinating and having had such a profound experience it's hard to imagine anyone not drawing some significant (naturally false :-)) conclusions.

You know I think that these experiences are pretty common, if not always so profound as yours. I have spoken to quite a few people that mutter darkly about experiencing "something" but I suspect that most are not so open as you are to relate those experiences.

Shame you can't bottle it though, eh :-). As Sally would have said, 'I'll have what he's having'.

I agree. Discussion is good. The upside of all stunts like the latest bus ads. I will warn you that I am cursed with a complete inability to be brief. I will try (not wanting to spam your blog with waffle only my second ever comment)

I don't like to talk about "outside the scope of science". I like science and it has always been central to my interest in origins. While it is obvious that science does have a limited scope and a lot of what people consider religous falls outside of that scope, those things are not useful in debate. If someone believes that there is purple monster in an unobservable dimension controlling us all, then science can say little about the truth or falsity of that belief. That said it is a fallacy to say, as some do, that because it is beyond the reach of science it is false. It does however make it a matter of blind faith and is of no value to anyone but the believer.

In general athiests are in the habit of misusing terms and attacking strawmen, religious people have many debating bad habits too (again, in general). The discussion surrounding these bus adverts demostrates this perfectly. It drives me mad and is one of two reasons that I said that the issue is too substantial for a bus ad campaign and that meaningful debate was to be had elsewhere. They put out a few ads and then a collection of people that don't seem to understand how to debate and don't properly know their opponents position scramble to make the same flawed arguments that they always make. Your comments regarding dinosaurs demonstrates this as well as any.

The matter of God or no God *is* a scientific issue. We have no other methodology with which to judge. If a worldview is completely out of scope then it is scientifically weak, not necessarily false but simply purely blind faith. However, the scope of science is not as limited as some believe. The modern arguments from design are in my opinion the strongest scientific evidence of the existance of God. Explanatory, logically consistant internally and falsifiable. It is science. Then for specific worldviews there are scientific arguments made based on predictions made by that worldview (biblical creationist examples: intelligent creation, flood, age of the earth, etc)

It is a matter for the fossil record, radioisotopic dating, probability, genetics, information theory, statistical mechanics, etc. etc. This is the second reason I said that the issue is too substantial for a bus ad campaign. Most people don't have any understanding of any of these things. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt and they must substantiate their dogmatic assertions. Few do and so their 'arguments' are mere opinion.

Okay, that look way longer in this column width than in my notepad :-\ Sorry.

steve i reckon you took acid by mistake

mmmmm...acid

To be honest, I'm not sure hallucinogens are a valid basis for a belief system.

never did it myself. well not intentionally anyway. had an incident in Ibiza though where some E's turned a bit naughty and the sky clouds turned into skeletons. a right laugh...(i was shit scared)