Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

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Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Sun Nov 22, 2015 3:32 pm

First Affirmative Constructive: religious belief is rationally warranted; Metacrock Joe Hinman).

Decision Making Paradigm:

God Corrolate: The co-determinate is like the Derridian trace, or like a fingerprint. It's the accompanying sign that is always found with the thing itself. In other words, like trailing the invisible man in the snow. You can't see the invisible man, but you can see his footprints, and wherever he is in the snow his prints will always follow.

We cannot produce direct observation of God, but we can find the "trace" or the co-determinate, the effects of God in the world.The only question at that point is "How do we know this is the effect, or the accompanying sign of the divine? The answer is in the argument below. Here let us set out some general parameters:

We can set up criteria based upon what we would expect from encounter with the divine:

A. Life Transforming and vital in a positive life=affirming sense

B. It would give us a sense of the transcendent and the divine.

C. No alternate or naturalistic causality could be proven

These criteria are based upon the writings of the great mystics and religious thinkers of history, especially in the Christian tradition, and distilled into /theory by W.T. Stace. The theory is verified and validated by several hundred studies using various methodologies all of them published in peer reviewed journals. The following argument is based upon the findings of these studies. All of this, the studies, the methods used, Stace's theory, these studies and their methodologies are discussed in depth in The Trace of God: a Rational Warrant for Belief by Joseph Hinman, (all proceeds go to non profit) available on Amazon



Read much about the book on the Trace of God blog..

Argument:

(1) The affects and effects of mystical experience are real in that they are measurably transformative in a positive sense.

(2)These affects cannot be reduced to naturalistic cause and affect, bogus mental states or epiphenomena.

(3)Since the affects of Mystical consciousness are independent of other explanations and the affects are real we should assume that they are genuine experiences of something transcendent of our own minds.

(4)Since mystical experience is usually experience of something, the Holy, the sacred, or some sort of greater transcendent reality we should assume that the origin of the experience is rooted in transcendent reality.

(5)Since mystical experience is usually about the divine we can assume a divine origin.

This fulfills the criteria for the trace: therefore, e are warranted in asserting that mystical experience is the trace of God, and this gives us warrant for belief in God.

Analysis:

Real Affects of Mystical Experience Imply Co-determinate

A. Study and Nature of Mystical Experiences

Mystical experience is only one aspect of religious experience, but I will focus on it in this argument. Most other kinds of religious experience are difficult to study since they are more subjective and have less dramatic results. But mystical experience can actually be measured empirically in terms of its affects, and can be compared favorably to other forms of conscious states.

1) Primarily Religious

Transpersonal Childhood Experiences of Higher States of Consciousness: Literature Review and Theoretical Integrationm (unpublished paper 1992 by Jayne Gackenback

http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/cehsc/ipure.htm

Gackenback website is Spiritwatch
Quotes:

"The experience of pure consciousness is typically called "mystical". The essence of the mystical experience has been debated for years (Horne, 1982). It is often held that "mysticism is a manifestation of something which is at the root of all religions (p. 16; Happold, 1963)." The empirical assessment of the mystical experience in psychology has occurred to a limited extent."

2) Defining charactoristics.

[Gackenback]

"In a recent review of the mystical experience Lukoff and Lu (1988) acknowledged that the "definition of a mystical experience ranges greatly (p. 163)." Maslow (1969) offered 35 definitions of "transcendence", a term often associated with mystical experiences and used by Alexander et al. to refer to the process of accessing PC."

Lukoff (1985) identified five common characteristics of mystical experiences which could be operationalized for assessment purposes. They are:

1. Ecstatic mood, which he identified as the most common feature;
2. Sense of newly gained knowledge, which includes a belief that the mysteries of life have been revealed;
3. Perceptual alterations, which range from "heightened sensations to auditory and visual hallucinations (p. 167)";
4. Delusions (if present) have themes related to mythology, which includes an incredible range diversity and range;
5. No conceptual disorganization, unlike psychotic persons those with mystical experiences do NOT suffer from disturbances in language and speech.
It can be seen from the explanation of PC earlier that this list of qualities overlaps in part those delineated by Alexander et al.

3)Studies use Empirical Instruments.

Many skeptics have argued that one cannot study mystical experince scientifically. But it has been done many times, in fact there are a lot of studies and even empirical scales for measurement.

(Ibid.)

Quote:

"Three empirical instruments have been developed to date. They are the Mysticism Scale by Hood (1975), a specific question by Greeley (1974) and the State of Consciousness Inventory by Alexander (1982; Alexander, Boyer, & Alexander, 1987). Hood's (1975) scale was developed from conceptual categories identified by Stace (1960). Two primary factors emerged from the factor analysis of the 32 core statements. First is a general mysticism factor, which is defined as an experience of unity, temporal and spatial changes, inner subjectivity and ineffability. A second factor seems to be a measure of peoples tendency to view intense experiences within a religious framework. A much simpler definition was developed by Greeley (1974), "Have you ever felt as though you were very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself?" This was used by him in several national opinion surveys. In a systematic study of Greeley's question Thomas and Cooper (1980) concluded that responses to that question elicited experiences whose nature varied considerably. Using Stace's (1960) work they developed five criteria, including awesome emotions; feeling of oneness with God, nature or the universe; and a sense of the ineffable. They found that only 1% of their yes responses to Greeley's question were genuine mystical experiences. Thus Hood's scale seems to be the more widely used of these two broad measures of mysticism. It has received cross cultural validation" (Holm, 1982; Caird, 1988).

4) Incidence.

(Ibid.)

Quote:

"Several studies have looked at the incidence of mystical experiences. Greeley (1974) found 35% agreement to his question while Back and Bourque (1970) reported increases in frequency of these sorts of experiences from about 20% in 1962 to about 41% in 1967 to the question "Would you say that you have ever had a 'religious or mystical experience' that is, a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight?" Greeley (1987) reported a similar figure for 1973".

"The most researched inventory is the State of Consciousness Inventory (SCI; reviewed in Alexander, Boyer, and Alexander, 1987). The authors say "the SCI was designed for quantitative assessment of frequency of experiences of higher states of consciousness as defined in Vedic Psychology (p. 100)."

"In this case items were constructed from first person statements of practitioners of that meditative tradition, but items were also drawn from other authority literatures. Additional subscales were added to differentiate these experiences from normal waking experience, neurotic experience, and schizophrenic experience. Finally, a misleading item scale was added. These authors conceptualize the "mystical" experience as one which can momentarily occur in the process of the development of higher states of consciousness. For them the core state of consciousness is pure consciousness and from it develops these higher states of consciousness.

Whereas most researchers on mystical experiences study them as isolated or infrequent experiences with little if any theoretical "goal" for them, this group contextualizes them in a general model of development (Alexander et al., 1990) with their permanent establishment in an individual as a sign of the first higher state of consciousness. They point out that "during any developmental period, when awareness momentarily settles down to its least excited state, pure consciousness [mystical states] can be experienced (p. 310). " In terms of incidence they quote Maslow who felt that in the population at large less than one in 1,000 have frequent "peak" experiences so that the "full stabilization of a higher stage of consciousness appears to an event of all but historic significance (p. 310)."

"Virtually all of researchers using the SCI are very careful to distinguish the practice of meditation from the experience of pure consciousness, explaining that the former merely facilitates the latter. They also go to great pains to show that their multiple correlation's of health and well-being are strongest to the transcendent experience than to the entire practice of meditation (for psychophysiological review see Wallace, 1987; for individual difference review see Alexander et al., 1987;

B. Empirical Studies show Long-Term Positive Effects of Mystical Experience

Research Summary

From Council on Spiritual Practices Website

"States of Univtive Consciousness"

Also called Transcendent Experiences, Ego-Transcendence, Intense Religious Experience, Peak Experiences, Mystical Experiences, Cosmic Consciousness. Sources:

(1) Studies Wuthnow, Robert (1978). "Peak Experiences: Some Empirical Tests." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 18 (3), 59-75.

Noble, Kathleen D. (1987). ``Psychological Health and the Experience of Transcendence.'' The Counseling Psychologist, 15 (4), 601-614.

Lukoff, David & Francis G. Lu (1988). ``Transpersonal psychology research review: Topic: Mystical experiences.'' Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20 (2), 161-184.

Roger Walsh (1980). The consciousness disciplines and the behavioral sciences: Questions of comparison and assessment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(6), 663-673.

Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (1983). ``Psychedelic Drugs in Psychiatry'' in Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, New York: Basic Books.

Furthermore, Greeley found no evidence to support the orthodox belief that frequent mystic experiences or psychic experiences stem from deprivation or psychopathology. His ''mystics'' were generally better educated, more successful economically, and less racist, and they were rated substantially happier on measures of psychological well-being. (Charles T. Tart, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm, p. 19.)

(2)Long-Term Effects

Wuthnow:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

(3) Trend toward positive view among psychologists. Spiriutal Emergency MYSTICAL OR UNITIVE EXPERIENCE "Offsetting the clinical literature that views mystical experiences as pathological, many theorists (Bucke, 1961; Hood, 1974, 1976; James, 1961; Jung, 1973; Laski, 1968; Maslow, 1962, 1971; Stace, 1960; Underhill, 1955) have viewed mystical experiences as a sign of health and a powerful agent of transformation." (4) Most clinicians and clinical studies see postive. (Ibid) "Results of a recent survey (Allman, et al,. 1992) suggest that most clinicians do not view mystical experiences as pathological. Also, studies by several researchers have found that people reporting mystical experiences scored lower on psychopathology scales and higher on measures of psychological well-being than controls (Caird, 1987; Hood, 1976, 1977, 1979; Spanos and Moretti, 1988)".





Posted by Joe Hinman at 10:58 AM No comments:


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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Michael Hill » Sun Nov 22, 2015 4:15 pm

Doing it a bit at the time is easiest rather than a long post like that. Part one.

All religions are called faiths. You call it religious belief. That is because it is recognised that there is no testable evidence to support any religion so religious belief is not rationally warranted.

If you see footprints in the snow, how do you know it is an invisible man and not an invisible monster? You are making decisions on what you cannot see.

General parameters:

A. That could be giving up booze, smoking or taking up yoga.

B. Some drugs do that.

C. This would assume that you know everything, and that you have investigated every known cause. Even the catholic church which accepts miracles seem to disagree with some 99% of them.

"great mystics and religious thinkers of history". That I would take as an oxymoron.

What peer reviewed journals? You do understand what peer reviewed means? A few years ago, some people thought they had discovered cold fusion. Scientists then set about trying to duplicate the experiment and could not. Had they been able to do so, it would have been peer reviewed. Creationists when they do peer review check out that an article matches up with what is in the bible, so a travesty.

Argument:

(1) Dopamine and other feel good chemicals, some of which are in foods and plants, etc are often mistaken for god. Just having a good day makes people feel good. Because you feel good, as religious people do when they think about their god and feel like they are in touch with him, that is not measurable or proof. It is just feeling good.

(2) How do you have "controls" on these experiments to show that there are no other causes? There seems to be an unwarranted certainty here. What precautions are taken against other causes?

(3) The mind is notoriously uncertain like where it rewrites your past, where ten people can look at a robbery and all give different descriptions of the suspect afterwards, it's ease with suggestion, Chinese whispers, it's gullibility, and so on. That is why science works on hard facts rather than vague mental processes.

(4) Why should you make such an assumption? A christian has a mystical experience of Jesus. A hindu of one of their gods. A muslim of allah or Mohammad. But atheists have no mystical experiences. It is all down to what you already believe in.

(5) A huge leap of faith. Thinking about god does not mean god is thinking about you.

Belief in god just requires you to have faith and not that it be in any way testable. Billions have it without praying, opening a holy book, going to a religious service, etc because it is brainwashed into them by people they trust when very young.

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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Michael Hill » Sun Nov 22, 2015 4:42 pm

Part two. Analysis:

You cannot talk of real effects of the mind when there are so many X factors involved in how our mind works. Have you tried hooking up to an EEG and using that in experiments, looking for "alien" brain waves?

(A) I'm just reading Dan Barker's GODLESS. He was an evangelist preacher and converted many people. He attended services where people talked in tongues, shook and rolled about on the floor, lay on the floor with their hands upraised, had fits, screamed out loud, and so many more similar things. These were all self induced, like the stigmata. People have blood pouring from wounds in their hands. They are deeply religious people and see this as a sign from Jesus. HOWEVER, when people were crucified they put the nails through their wrists. If you nailed people up by their hands, the weight of their body would rip the skin apart and the body would fall forwards. There are cases of people being told they have advanced cancer and do not have long to live, and going way downhill till they look like death a few weeks later. Then they find it was a mistake and they do not have cancer and make a very speedy recovery to good health. it's all in the mind.

(1) The man has a book to sell and as anyone selling a book knows, the more you sensationalise it, the better it sells. I had a quick look through the link and it looked like all hearsay to me. Nothing that could be repeated under strict scientific conditions.

(2) 1-5. Barker could tell you about many such people he knew. As an atheist now, he knows that these were all deluded people, that the presence of god he felt, the voice he heard, the god he spoke to, etc were nothing more than his imagination. It's like common superstitions, astrology and such where people make the real world fit what they imagine. In America they did an experiment and had an astrologer do a forecast for a convict on Death Row. They then sent it out to 1600 people at random (with random birth dates) saying it was designed especially for them. They got back numerous testimonies complimenting them on how accurate the star forecast was.

(3) I suspect that if you told that to a scientist working in testing facts, they would laugh like a drain. "Three empirical instruments" boil down to the question: "how do you feel?"

(4) Asking a religious person if they have ever had a mystical experience is like asking a fat person if they have ever had a pie. This is again all hearsay and relies on memory of the past, not always accurate, suggestion, honesty and so on. There is no hard evidence here like say measuring the speed of a falling body in Earth's gravity.

B. Not exactly peer reviewed science journals.

Long term effects seem to be the same as doing something positive with your life. There are endless self help books in America which promise similar things if you do as they say. Just losing a few stones in weight will fit most of those effects.

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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Wed Nov 25, 2015 3:48 pm

Michael Hill wrote:Doing it a bit at the time is easiest rather than a long post like that. Part one.
glad you could make it. Sorry it took me so long. I agree a bit at a time. give me a chance to answer what you put up.
All religions are called faiths. You call it religious belief. That is because it is recognized that there is no testable evidence to support any religion so religious belief is not rationally warranted.
Obviously that's empirically disproved. My entire post was about a couple of hundred studies that establish how it can be tested.
If you see footprints in the snow, how do you know it is an invisible man and not an invisible monster? You are making decisions on what you cannot see.
that has nothing to do with it. The principle is still the same. the print goes with the foot.


General parameters:

A. That could be giving up booze, smoking or taking up yoga.

B. Some drugs do that.

C. This would assume that you know everything, and that you have investigated every known cause. Even the catholic church which accepts miracles seem to disagree with some 99% of them.

"great mystics and religious thinkers of history". That I would take as an oxymoron.
sorry, if you challenge the validity of the criteria you have to actually discuss why. You did not answer the validity of the criteria. I chose the criteria because that's what religion says it will do. the studies prove it does, why is that not valid?


What peer reviewed journals? You do understand what peer reviewed means?
I used to run peer reviewed journal and I was ASKED TO BE REFEREE FOR ONE.

A few years ago, some people thought they had discovered cold fusion. Scientists then set about trying to duplicate the experiment and could not. Had they been able to do so, it would have been peer reviewed. Creationists when they do peer review check out that an article matches up with what is in the bible, so a travesty.
The 200 studies I'm talking about have been done over a 50 year period. No studies counters them.


Argument:
(1) Dopamine and other feel good chemicals, some of which are in foods and plants, etc are often mistaken for god. Just having a good day makes people feel good. Because you feel good, as religious people do when they think about their god and feel like they are in touch with him, that is not measurable or proof. It is just feeling good.
No researcher in any of tho9se studies says dopamine is God. Read chapter seven in The Trace of God that's where I deal withy chemicals and placebos and such. Essentially I have several reasons why chemical explanations don't work. I have 11ctie breakers. I'll list three:

(1) drugs can't produce life long transformational effects
(2) can't demonstrate or explain why it's positive
(3) these guys are not taking drgd you have to how they mimic the effects without drugs.

(
2) How do you have "controls" on these experiments to show that there are no other causes? There seems to be an unwarranted certainty here. What precautions are taken against other causes?
they are not experiments. The control is to compare the experiences to theory and see how many with that experience have it in a way that validates the theory. since it was validated it now serves as a template. if the experiences don't match then it's that experience.
(3) The mind is notoriously uncertain like where it rewrites your past, where ten people can look at a robbery and all give different descriptions of the suspect afterwards, it's ease with suggestion, Chinese whispers, it's gullibility, and so on. That is why science works on hard facts rather than vague mental processes.
(1) These effects are measurable, or many are. you know if you give up heroin that's not a trick of the nd.
(2) if one could do those things with just a trick or psyching themselves there would be no drug addicts or alcoholics or wife abusers and so on.
experiences. It is all down to w(4) Why should you make such an assumption? A christian has a mystical experience of Jesus. A hindu of one of their gods. A muslim of allah or Mohammad. But atheists have no mystical hat you already believe in.
That's the point I as making about the experiences being universal. when they take the names out the experiences are all the same. you are assuming a fundamentalist take n exclusivity. I'm not a fundie.
]My take on salvation and Other Religions

Paul said "To those who through persistance seek glory, honor and immortality he will give eternal life.But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the good and follow evil there will be wrath and anger...first for the Jew and then for the gentile; but glory honor and peace for everyone who does good. For God does not show favoritism. All who sin apart from the law will perish apart form the law and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Indeed when Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirement of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences bearing witness and their hearts now accusing, now even defending them..." (Romans 2:7-15). New American Standard and other translations say "their hearts accusing, now excusing them..." Most Christians are afraid of this conclusion and they down play this verse. Often Evangelicals will come back and say "he makes it clear in the next passage that no one can really follow the law on their hearts." Well, if they can't, than they can't. But if they can, and do, than God will excuse them. God knows the heart, we do not. The verse clearly opens the door to the possibility of salvation (although by Jesus) thorugh a de facto arrangement in which one is seeking the good without knowing the object one is seeking (Jesus). In other words, it is possible that people in other cultures who follow the moral law written on the heart know Jesus de facto even if they don't know him overtly. Paul backs up this conclusion in Acts 17:22 Paul goes to Athens as is asked by the Athenian philosophers to explain his ideas to them.

These were pagan followers of another religion. Paul stood up and said to them, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious for as I walked around and observed your objects of worship I even found an alter with this inscription 'TO AN UNKOWN GOD' Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."He basically says that they are worshiping God, they just don't know who he is. That's why he says "I will make it known to you." He doesn't say "you have the wrong idea completely." Most Evangelicals dismiss this as a neat rhetorical trick. But if we assume that Paul would not lie or distort his beliefs for the sake of cheap tricks, we must consider that he did not say "you are all a bunch of pagans and you are going to hell!" He essentially told them, "God is working in your culture, you do know God, but you don't know who God is. You seek him, without knowing the one you seek. He goes on,(v27)"God did this [created humanity and scattered them into different cultures] so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him though he is not far form each one of us." This implies that God not only wants to work in other cultures, but that it is actually his paln to do things in this way. Perhaps through a diversity of insights we might come to know God better. Perhaps it means that through spreading the Gospel people would come to contemplate better the meaning of God's love.

In any case, it does mean that God is working in other cultures, and that God is in the hearts of all people drawing them to himself. Of their worship of idols, Paul said "in past times God overlooked such ignorance but now he commands all people everywhere to repent" (v30). Now what can this mean? God never overlooks idolatry or paganism, in the OT he's always commanding the Israelite to wipe them out and expressly forbidding idolatry. It means that on an individual basis when God judges the hearts of people, he looks at their desire to seek him, to seek the good. That their status as individuals in a pagan culture does not negate the good they have done, and their ignorance of idolotry does not discount their desire to seek the good or the truth. IT means that they are following Jesus if they live in the moral life, even though they follow him as something unknown to them. IT also means that all of us should come into the truth, we should seek to know God fully, and when we do that we find that it is Jesus all along.
(5) A huge leap of faith. Thinking about god does not mean god is thinking about you.
Sorry the nature of the experience disproves that assumption. The nature of it is a presence of love.
]Abraham Maslow documents the intensity of the experience.

Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Appendix I. An Example of B-Analysis

1) Valuable as End in itself.

(Maslow)


"The question has to be differentiated still further. There is no doubt that great insights and revelations are profoundly felt in mystic or peak-experiences, and certainly some of these are, ipso facto, intrinsically valid as experiences. That is, one can and does learn from such experiences that, e.g., joy, ecstasy, and rapture do in fact exist and that they are in principle available for the experiencer, even if they never have been before. Thus the peaker learns surely and certainly that life can be worthwhile, that it can be beautiful and valuable. There are ends in life, i.e., experiences which are so precious in themselves as to prove that not everything is a means to some end other than itself."


2) Ego and Identity Issues

(Maslow)
"...Another kind of self-validating insight is the experience of being a real identity, a real self, of feeling what it is like to feel really oneself, what in fact one is—not a phony, a fake, a striver, an impersonator. Here again, the experiencing itself is the revelation of a truth..."

3) Life Transforming Experience.

(Maslow)


"...My feeling is that if it were never to happen again, the power of the experience could permanently affect the attitude toward life. A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again. It is my strong suspicion that even one such experience might be able to prevent suicide, for instance, and perhaps many varieties of slow self-destruction, e.g., alcoholism, drug-addiction, addiction to violence, etc. I would guess also, on theoretical grounds, that peak-experiences might very well abort "existential meaninglessness," states of valuelessness, etc., at least occasionally. (These deductions from the nature of intense peak-experiences are given some support by general experience with LSD and psilocybin. Of course these preliminary reports also await confirmation. )... ...This then is one kind of peak-knowledge of whose validity and usefulness there can be no doubt, any more than there could be with discovering for the first time that the color "red" exists and is wonderful. Joy exists, can be experienced and feels very good indeed, and one can always hope that it will be experienced again...."

"...Perhaps I should add here the paradoxical result—for some—that death may lose its dread aspect. Ecstasy is somehow close to death-experience, at least in the simple, empirical sense that death is often mentioned during reports of peaks, sweet death that is. After the acme, only less is possible. In any case, I have occasionally been told, "I felt that I could willingly die," or, "No one can ever again tell me death is bad," etc. Experiencing a kind of "sweet death" may remove its frightening aspect. This observation should, of course, be studied far more carefully than I have been able to. But the point is that the experience itself is a kind of knowledge gained (or attitude changed) which is self-validating. Other such experiences, coming for the first time, are true simply because experienced, e.g., greater integration of the organism, experiencing physiognomic perception, fusing primary-and secondary-process, fusing knowing and valuing, transcending dichotomies, experiencing knowing as being, etc., etc. The widening and enriching of consciousness through new perceptual experiences, many of which leave a lasting effect, is a little like improving the perceiver himself...."
those sorts of experiences rule out any negative element in the cause.



Belief in god just requires you to have faith and not that it be in any way testable. Billions have it without praying, opening a holy book, going to a religious service, etc because it is brainwashed into them by people they trust when very young.
sorry you are going to have to demonstrate the claim It's obviously circular reasoning since I just demonstrated that it is verifiable.

there is no requirement that faith can't be verified and I just showed it can be. God doesn't need to require verification, the individual has the right to seek justification for belief. I just gave it to you if you want it.
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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:55 pm

Michael Hill wrote:Part two. Analysis:

You cannot talk of real effects of the mind when there are so many X factors involved in how our mind works. Have you tried hooking up to an EEG and using that in experiments, looking for "alien" brain waves?

(A) I'm just reading Dan Barker's GODLESS. He was an evangelist preacher and converted many people. He attended services where people talked in tongues, shook and rolled about on the floor, lay on the floor with their hands upraised, had fits, screamed out loud, and so many more similar things. These were all self induced, like the stigmata. People have blood pouring from wounds in their hands. They are deeply religious people and see this as a sign from Jesus. HOWEVER, when people were crucified they put the nails through their wrists. If you nailed people up by their hands, the weight of their body would rip the skin apart and the body would fall forwards. There are cases of people being told they have advanced cancer and do not have long to live, and going way downhill till they look like death a few weeks later. Then they find it was a mistake and they do not have cancer and make a very speedy recovery to good health. it's all in the mind.
(1) Barker was church of Christ. they don't believe in the gifts. I'll it up again.

(2) you are making an anecdotal argument based upon one person's experience to counter 200 empirical studies that wont work.

(3) doesn't matter what Barcker did if they score high on the M scale they had a mystical experience and those people experience transformed lives,.

3 the placebo argument can't prove placebo causes positive life transaction. you might prove it helps alleviate pain or suggestion might cause negate e effect but you cant show transformation effects.

4 document these cases here the suggeste4d of cancer caused them to have that effect.


(1) The man has a book to sell and as anyone selling a book knows, the more you sensationalise it, the better it sells. I had a quick look through the link and it looked like all hearsay to me. Nothing that could be repeated under strict scientific conditi
1 that casts doubt onj Barker not on me He's making a profit. I am not. I don't get royalties.
(2) 1-5. Barker could tell you about many such people he knew. As an atheist now, he knows that these were all deluded people, that the presence of god he felt, the voice he heard, the god he spoke to, etc were nothing more than his imagination. It's like common superstitions, astrology and such where people make the real world fit what they imagine. In America they did an experiment and had an astrologer do a forecast for a convict on Death Row. They then sent it out to 1600 people at random (with random birth dates) saying it was designed especially for them. They got back numerous testimonies complimenting them on how accurate the star forecast was.
sorry I've never been impressed by Barker's palaver. He did not have a mystical experience. Mystical experience speaking lounges. I was an atheist so I can tell you how drab and horrible and despairing life was with no God but let's can the BS and stay with logic and empirical studies.


(3) I suspect that if you told that to a scientist working in testing facts, they would laugh like a drain. "Three empirical instruments" boil down to the question: "how do you feel?"
people doing the studies are scientists. btw I quoted the journals or some of them in my first post so you can see them. right before the list of effects. Abraham Maslow was a sociologist so that's a scientist. They use controlled methods to do their studies.


(4) Asking a religious person if they have ever had a mystical experience is like asking a fat person if they have ever had a pie. This is again all hearsay and relies on memory of the past, not always accurate, suggestion, honesty and so on. There is no hard evidence here like say measuring the speed of a falling body in Earth's gravity
1 upon whist do you base that opinion? apparently you didn't even read the material in my first post. in describing mystical experiences you see it is not miracles it; snot speaking tounges or healing. it's a feeling and a feeling that is very hard to descrbe.

It's not enough to just say you felt a certain way you have to answer the m scale the right way. The thing is people do even when they haveno ideas what the questions are they need to get right that is how we know they are answering correctly and truthfully.

B. Not exactly peer reviewed science journals.
Barker isn't but my stuff is.
Long term effects seem to be the same as doing something positive with your life. There are endless self help books in America which promise similar things if you do as they say. Just losing a few stones in weight will fit most of those effects.
if that were true everyone would have a transformed life. there are specific criteria you have to answer that;s the control. you ca;t just say "I feel happy" if you don't make the right answers you didn't have the experience.
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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Michael Hill » Fri Nov 27, 2015 5:33 am

(1)The point about Barker is that all the believers going through fits, convulsions, talking in tongues, etc would say they are the real christians and really are in touch with god when you are not. This is common amongst christians to believe that their kind is the one true version of christianity and all the others are in some way false. These people believed in Jesus and god as much as you do and believed they were in contact with him. As an outsider, I think you are all as much christians as each other, worshipping god in your own way.

(2) If these studies were as good as you claim, they would be recognised by science. There are all sorts of religious studies of people out there on the power of prayer, faith healing, life after death and so on. But none are rigourous enough to be accepted by science. Do you understand what a "control" is?

(3) The placebo effect, by definition does whatever you want it to.

(4) Something I read years ago. Can't find it now, so as anecdotal as your studies.

(1) Barker's book is full of factual stuff and bible quotes you can check for yourself. OK, you don't get money out of your book but you must get something out of it to go to all the trouble of writing it. You want your belief system validated.

(2) I have yet to believe anyone who says they were an atheist but now are religious. There is nothing tangible to make any atheist believe. It is like people I debate with who suddenly claim they work in science, even have degrees in science when their posts prove they do not.

"I can tell you how drab and horrible and despairing life was with no God". Any atheist who reads that knows it is not the truth and that you were never an atheist. You are and have always been a religionist who needs someone to lead them around by the nose.

Google: "a sociologist is not a scientist". Sociology is the study of the behaviour of society. A chimp could do that. A home PC could do it with the right programme and statistics fed in.

There is no branch of science dealing with mysticism because such things are not repeatable or testable. Such cases are normally down to hearsay, as in miracles and such.

Peer reviewed is when outsiders (and unbelievers in this case) can get the same results, and then it becomes a science.

Feeling happy is all in the brain and can be caused by chemicals. As I pointed out, a change of lifestyle for the better can also accomplish this. There are many storioes of people who have turned their life around by their own efforts.

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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Sat Nov 28, 2015 10:00 am

Sorry Michael. Next speech is the last rebottle you have not answered a single argument with anything specific and you have no evidential support for your arguments, I presented a prima facie case you have lost presumption.


click on the link below and read the article. it will explain how the m scale works and what it proves. You have no evidence. None of your arguments have applied. You have no studies vs my 200 studies. Until you find at least one studies that applies specifically to mystical experience you have lost. submit this link as my evidence please read it.

http://religiousapriori.blogspot.com/20 ... re-of.html

just a couple of things about the way you argue.

First guilt by association is a fallacy. Arguing from guilt by association means your logic is weak and it really weakens your case. John is an atheist. All atheists lie, therefore John is a liar. do you see the problem?

Secondly ,science is not an enforcement mechanism for atheism. Science is not about disproving God. I was a teaching assistant and Ph.D, candidate in history of ideas (secular) and I studied history and philosophy of science. I ran a peer reviewed journal and I was asked to be a referee for a peer reviewed journal on political and social criticism. So I know the process of academic publishing. Peer review means authorities in a field read the articles and decide if they do in the journal. I was asked to do that because I ran a journal for a few years.

Another thing sociology is certainly a science. go look it up and look up social science. you try to use science as a weapon to defeat belief in God but you don't really know much about it. I am not saying that to insult you. I want you to learn,. If you don't get saved you should at least understand the ideas you are attacking and the things you use for support.

One other thing I was an atheist. Moreover I was a college debater and I understood what peer review was.

please read that article.
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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Michael Hill » Sat Nov 28, 2015 11:02 am

I had a look at ideas 1-5 on the M scale and the same could apply to a drug trip. You can use all the scales you want but at the end of the day you ask people questions and they answer depending on too many different factors to be trustworthy. As I have pointed out, and as experts on the mind and even people like Derren Brown will tell you, the mind is a very gullible and untrustworthy thing. We evolved to live in jungles and forests and hunt for food but in the last few thousand years we have civilization and live in cities. Our minds are still struggling to cope with this.

Election opinion polls use the same principle and are notoriously wrong. This is down to the people concerned and not a trusted mechanical device that will always produce exactly the same trusted answers for the same conditions for anyone using it. It's like getting twenty people on acid trips and getting answers and a week later doing it again and expecting the same answers, which you are not going to get. I have twice asked you about "controls" which are important in any serious experiment and you seem to have none.

That is why what you have is not recognised as a science because despite claims, it is not testable or repeatable and the results cannot physically be seen but reply on people's opinions. How easy to influence opinions by telling people what to expect at the start of these "experiments" so leading them by the nose to get what you want. Uri Geller and such cranks used such tricks, as do televangelists and the like. Who would believe in Jesus or your god if the bible had never been written and it was necessary to rely on personal experience only?

We know various drugs can cause people to have religious experiences. The most famous being John of Patmos who ate magic mushrooms to produce the book of Revelation. More:

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hsmith.htm

I'll give you the same challenge I gave someone on youtube a number of times in reply to what he said and he would not answer. You tell me what super powers your god has and I'll tell you why you are wrong. Your god does not exist and I can prove it, given a chance.

Your 200 studies? Your experts? Your books? This is the sort of stuff I have come up against from creationists for decades now. Creationists can do as many studies as they want, write as many "peer reviewed" articles as they want, and do as many "experiments" as they want and at the end of the day, when their hand waving and snake oil has been stripped away, I will tell them why they are wrong.

I drop something, it falls. I am using guilt by association and blaming gravity. All religious people lie when questioned about their religion, because it is a core thing which is a major part of their life. Show it to be wrong and you show their life to be wrong. Religious people know there is no hard evidence for their beliefs so will hang on to them very tightly less they unravel. I have caught so many, many religious people lying that I know it to be true.

If peer reviewed means people in the field look at it and check it out, then all creationist articles are peer reviewed, as are all other kinds of quackery because their own people are checking it out. Cold fusion was proved fake when people in other fields could not duplicate it.

A "Ph.D, candidate in history of ideas" sounds like what they call a "nothing course" this side of the Atlantic. I have found that people who introduce qualifications, real or imagined, into an argument are losing and using them to claim they must be right because they are "smart". You think you are smart, come and debate with me here, at the bottom of the page:

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-a ... /#comments

Sociology is not a science. Some may claim it is but it is another of those "nothing qualifications" in Britain and the tabloids frequently lambast socilogists for getting it wrong so many times. In science, that does not happen, except through incompetence.

I can conceive of nothing that would turn an atheist into a believer. "You" see something happen and what spin you put on it depends on what you think. The catholic church has been inundated with miracles, and people really believed they were miracles, but when the church investigated, almost all were discarded and the remainder which they could not explain were left as "miracles". An atheist would not look at a religious or miraculous explanation for anything happening in their life but would see or think of mundane reasons for it happening, even if they could not ultimately find a good explanation for it.

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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Sat Nov 28, 2015 8:02 pm

Michael Hill wrote:I had a look at ideas 1-5 on the M scale and the same could apply to a drug trip. You can use all the scales you want but at the end of the day you ask people questions and they answer depending on too many different factors to be trustworthy.
that's something lot of atheists have said it's just nonsense. Suppose I shoed you an eye chart would you say "ebjduit" what does that mean? that's not a sentence. Kind of matters what you do with it. Why would it matter if you can have some of the same effects from a drug trip? There are theories that drugs open the receptors that cause one to respond to God. the brain is part of our information processing. It just makes sense that there would be effects upon the brain from prayer. There are a lot of reasons not to equate one withy the other.

Cannot be reduced to Drug inducement.

Most Skeptics are not going to argue that all mystics take drugs. But many will argue that since drugs can induce mytical expereince this proves it is merely a chemical reaction in the brain, wheather naturally occurring or induced by some foreign agent. However, this is a mistake. Mystical experience cannot be induced by taking drugs. This is a popular fallacy and many studies disprove it.


The Religious Experience: A Social-Psychological Perspective.
Batson, C. Daniel, and Ventis, W. Larry. (1982).
New York: Oxford University Press.

"If this analysis is correct, two implications follow. First, drugs can facilitate but cannot produce creative religious experience. They can facilitate it if they are used in the context of an ongoing intrapsychic process that includes not only self-surrender (incubation) and new vision (illumination) but also a preceding struggle with one or more existential questions (preparation) and a subsequent new life (verification). If the individual is not already wrestling with existential concerns, psychedelics are not likely to evoke a creative transformation. This point is underscored by the findings of Masters and Houston, of the Spring Grove project, and of Pahnke; in each study religious insight seemed limited to those actively addressing existential questions (preparation). At the same time, if the experience is to be more than psychic "fireworks," there must be positive consequences for one's everyday life (verification)." (page 115)

Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences.
M.Laski. (1990).
Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher.

http://www.csp.org/chrestomathy/ecstasy_in.html

"I conclude, then, that though mescalin may occasionally give momentary ecstatic feelings, as it may have done to Mr. Mayhew, it does not typically do so and that mescalin experiences do not feel like ecstatic experiences. This is not affected by the fact that some people may believe that what they have experienced under mescalin is religious experience; but I should have thought that for anyone seeking the Beatific Vision (which was, before Mr. Huxley, granted only to Moses and St. Paul) there were surer and pleasanter ways of attaining it than by taking mescalin. "(pages 271-271)


Laski complies quite a lengthy list of differences between mescaline use and spiritual ecstacies, to summarize:


"Ecstatics always unanimous about high value of their experince, mescaline users are not. (pages 263-264) Mescaline experience is always extrovertive, extacy of the highest type introvertive Escstatic experience always goes either from escstacy to extacy or despair to ecstacy, never the reverse. The Mystical experience may be momentary or last a half hour, but it is never hours, and it is always transformative, leaving a long term sense of the highest value, the Mescline user may feel very casual approach, last for hours. Also mystic in introvertive state cannot function, Mescaline user do any ordingary things (pages 264-265) Feelings about time are vastly differnce. Mescaline user has casual attitude, but the mystic systeses eternity. (page 265) Major differences in triggers are recorded, the escatic usually taking the trigger form that which is found to be beutiful or valuable, the Mescaline user form whatever ordinary object seems inhanced. (pages 267-268) Differences toward a sense of a transformed world, (page 269) pleasure and pain (page 269-270)

The Evidential Force of Religious Experience. Davis, Caroline Franks. (1989).
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

"There is a great deal of evidence that drugs cannot produce religious experiences on their own, in the way that, say, a blow to the head produces an experience of 'stars'. At the most, it appears they can act as a catalyst, and so it is open to the theist to argue that it was other, nonpathological factors which were crucial to the religious content of the experience. John Bowker informs us, for instance, that drugs do not introduce anything new into the mind or behavior or affect stored information in a discriminatory and meaningful manner, but can only initiate or inhibit brain activity. ..."

"The discussion in the previous section showed that, in some respects, typical drug-induced experiences are like psychotic experiences in the way they differ from typical mystical experiences. It is, moreover, clear from the literature that drug-induced mystical experiences are almost always extrovertive rather than the introvertive type extolled by most mystical traditions, and there is rarely a sense of personal presence or of union with another being. The use of drugs to induce religious experiences cannot be recommended, partly because of the dangers of drug use, and partly because experiences produced in such a way tend to be regarded as something separated from normal life and so may not become properly integrated into the subject's religious, psychological, and cognitive development."[Ibid.(pages 218-221)]


Davis also adds that subjects given drugs do not have mystical experiences in sensory deprivation, another indication that the convetional triggers have to be in place, that the drugs merely facilitate but cannot cause the experiences; the setting has to be appropriate.

Gagenback also Docujments Lukoff , Alexander, and other sutdies which find important differences in Drug induced states and pure consciousness, such that pure consciousness is not reduceable to mere drug induced states.


5) Not the Result of Technique alone

This is an important point, because some have argued that Such expreinces are just the result of years of training, practice of Transcendental Meditation, psychological states and imagination due to self-hypnosis and the like.However, as many as 43% of mystical experincers are children. IT is highly unlikely that many children would have spent years praciticing transcendental meditation, have eleaborately developed ideologies of the world, or been exposed to any hypnotic techniques. Although of course mystical experience is also developed over long term though such techniques as Transcendental Meidtation.

Experiences in childhood are obtained from adult recollections and children's reports or studies on children doing a technique proposed to get near or attain PC. Both Millar (1990) and Hunt, Gervais, Shearing-Johns & Travis (1991) asked their adult subjects about mystical experience incidence in childhood (Hunt et al. defined it as, "During waking you may experience a sense of oneness and unity in all things, along with experiences of awe, bliss, and/or wonder. Sometimes this involves a sensation of melting or fusing with one's surroundings, feelings of being overwhelmed by a sense of love or compassion. Some of these experiences can be very hard to put into words." while Millar defined it as, "This is often a profound and deeply moving sense of communication, unity and oneness; a transcendental experience of higher consciousness or love, too beautiful to fully express in words. It can also be an experience of the void."). A large percent (45%) of Millar's sample of self identified psychics reported mystical experiences in childhood. In Hunt et al. meditators reported significantly more mystical experiences in childhood than the nonmeditators.

Finally, Robinson (1977) found that 15% of his adult respondents spoke of childhood mystical experiences. As this from a 40 year old female:


When I was eleven years old I spent part of a summer holiday in the Wye Valley. Waking up very early one bright morning, before any of the household was about, I left my bed and went to kneel on the window seat, to look out over the curve which the river took just below the house. The trees between the house and river ... The scene was very beautiful, and quite suddenly I felt myself on the verge of a great revelation. It was as if I had stumbled unwittingly on a place where I was not expected, and was about to be initiated into some wonderful mystery, something of indescribable significance. Then, just as suddenly, the feeling faded. But for the brief seconds while it lasted I had known that in some strange way I, the essential "me", was a part of the trees, of the sunshine, and the river, that we all belonged to some great unity. I was left filled with exhilaration and exultation of spirit. This is one of the most memorable experiences of my life, of a quite different quality and greater intensity than the sudden lift of the spirit one may often feel when confronted with beauty in Nature (p. 37).

btw this is a new argument in rebuttals,
As I have pointed out, and as experts on the mind and even people like Derren Brown will tell you, the mind is a very gullible and untrustworthy thing. We evolved to live in jungles and forests and hunt for food but in the last few thousand years we have civilization and live in cities. Our minds are still struggling to cope with this.
1. Brown doesn't use the M scale or any other control so there's no way to know he gave them the experience. Just going O wow I felt something is not proof.

2. here's my paper disproving Brown

http://bogusatheistsocialscience.blogsp ... gious.html
Election opinion polls use the same principle and are notoriously wrong. This is down to the people concerned and not a trusted mechanical device that will always produce exactly the same trusted answers for the same conditions for anyone using it. It's like getting twenty people on acid trips and getting answers and a week later doing it again and expecting the same answers, which you are not going to get. I have twice asked you about "controls" which are important in any serious experiment and you seem to have none


Opinion polls are not wrong. Obama won both times because he had better polling techniques,80% of social science research involves polls,
That is why what you have is not recognised as a science because despite claims, it is not testable or repeatable and the results cannot physically be seen but reply on people's opinions.
this is the hazard of spending time in the echo chamber. you can't even understand the concepts I' giving you.

1. they are published in peer reviewed journals that means they are accepted by science. told you that every time,

2. you are living in deniel. stop running from truth

3.you don't know shit about science.
How easy to influence opinions by telling people what to expect at the start of these "experiments" so leading them by the nose to get what you want. Uri Geller and such cranks used such tricks, as do televangelists and the like. Who would believe in Jesus or your god if the bible had never been written and it was necessary to rely on personal experience only?
where are they being told what to expect> survey ius designed so they don't expect it. besides they already had the experience.
We know various drugs can cause people to have religious experiences.
no we don't know that. that's just what we don't know. I already disproved that, people ho do those studies do not use a control to method to understand if there is an experience or not. the M scale is the control.


The most famous being John of Patmos who ate magic mushrooms to produce the book of Revelation. More:
1. not proof of any kind that he did,

2, I read that book before you were born. the mushroom man embarrassed himself totally with that nonsense,

3. see drug stuff above

http://www.psychedelic-library.org/hsmith.htm

I'll give you the same challenge I gave someone on youtube a number of times in reply to what he said and he would not answer. You tell me what super powers your god has and I'll tell you why you are wrong. Your god does not exist and I can prove it, given a chance.
\He's the ground of being. God is not a big man with powers. He's not a being. he is not just another thing in creation not even the most powerful thing. He is not a he or a she or an it. he's the basis of reality he's being itself. An angiology would be if you say is God a big scientist and I said he's the laws of physics,
Your 200 studies? Your experts? Your books? This is the sort of stuff I have come up against from creationists for decades now.
stop trying to use science when you don't understand it. Many of the researcher are atheists they are all Ph.Ds in social science, you don't really kno9w what peer review is do you?


Creationists can do as many studies as they want, write as many "peer reviewed" articles as they want, and do as many "experiments" as they want and at the end of the day, when their hand waving and snake oil has been stripped away, I will tell them why they are wrong.
actually you are the creationist because you are pretending to under stand science and you don't even understand what makes a study scientific,. you are much like as creationist because you use science to justify your world view rather than shaping your world view around science.

I drop something, it falls. I am using guilt by association and blaming gravity. All religious people lie when questioned about their religion, because it is a core thing which is a major part of their life. Show it to be wrong and you show their life to be wrong. Religious people know there is no hard evidence for their beliefs so will hang on to them very tightly less they unravel. I have caught so many, many religious people lying that I know it to be true.
look genius ell me ho Iranian peasant who don't speak English and have no way of knowing of W.T. Stace to lie on the M scale so as to validate Stace. If you had read that article you understand this. facts in front of your face you can't be bothered,
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Re: Metacrock v.s Michael Hill: God Corrolate argument

Post by Metacrock » Sat Nov 28, 2015 8:32 pm

If peer reviewed means people in the field look at it and check it out, then all creationist articles are peer reviewed, as are all other kinds of quackery because their own people are checking it out. Cold fusion was proved fake when people in other fields could not duplicate it.
so just as I thought you don't know what peer review is. It's obvious you don't understand science; the lynch mob mentality trying to bully people over things you don't understand. scientific publication turns on peer review,
A "Ph.D, candidate in history of ideas" sounds like what they call a "nothing course" this side of the Atlantic. I have found that people who introduce qualifications, real or imagined, into an argument are losing and using them to claim they must be right because they are "smart". You think you are smart, come and debate with me here, at the bottom of the page:
never heard of history of ideas. that settles it you are in high school right?

http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-a ... /#comments

why can't you lean how to0 make links/; punch one button...give up? it says "URL."
Sociology is not a science. Some may claim it is but it is another of those "nothing qualifications" in Britain and the tabloids frequently lambast socilogists for getting it wrong so many times. In science, that does not happen, except through incompetence.

"
"Sociology is the scientific study of social behavior or society, including its origins, development, organization, networks, and institutions.

Sociology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology
Wikipedia"
Sociology is a science every bit as much as biology or chemistry. Social sciences, like natural and biological sciences, use a vigorous methodology. This means that a social scientist clearly states the problems he or she is interested in and clearly spells out how he or she arrives at their conclusions.Jan 11, 2015

2015
SOCIOLOGY AS SCIENCE, Russ Long's Lecture Notes
http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/intro/science.htm
In this paper, I try to put forward several points in favor of sociology as a science. In the course of argument, I will also discuss the problems of "value free" sociology and scope of sociology.



2. What is science?

To answer the question if sociology is a science or not, first we need to know what is science, otherwise the question does not make much sense. Actually current ph ilosophical views on the nature of science is diverse, and largely liberalized from previous views. First, they no longer accept strong criteria of falsification as a scientific method. There are several ways to formulate falsification, but her e I mean something like this: scientific theories should make observable predictions and we should discard a theory if we find only one discrepancy between a prediction of the theory and an observation. Because even physics cannot meet such a strong crite ria, now philosophers like Lakatos (1970) admit tolerance to such failure to some extent. Another new movement in philosophy is the attack on the universal laws. Cartwright (1983) argued that seemingly universal physical laws are not really universal, fro m logical point of view. This and other reasons (note1), Cartwright (1983) and Hacking (1983) presented a new view of science in which piecemeal "models", instead of universal laws and theories, play the central role of scientific investigation . Here, "models" means oversimplified mental pictures of structure. For example, planetary model of atoms is long known as an oversimplification, but still it is widely used by chemists as a convenient way for thinking about chemical reactions.
Conclusion

According to the liberalized philosophical view on science, there is nothing wrong with admitting Weber's "Verstehen" and "ideal types" as scientific method, thus admitting sociology using these method as a science. Recent distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values makes the claim of "value free" sociology int elligible, and I think it is a reasonable position if taken in the sense I defined. I also briefly talked about the scope of sociology, and argued that we should not be restrictive on the subject matter of sociology


http://tiseda.sakura.ne.jp/works/soc-sci.html

Webster's dictionary


http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sociology
1 sociology

: "the science of society, social institutions, and social relationships; specifically : the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of organized groups of human beings "
I can conceive of nothing that would turn an atheist into a believer. "You" see something happen and what spin you put on it depends on what you think.
or peer reviewed journals, or sociology or forms of knowledge beyond the atheist echo chamber or biblical scholarship or moral reasoning, or the synoptic problem, or history of ideas, or....
The catholic church has been inundated with miracles, and people really believed they were miracles, but when the church investigated,
I never argued for miracles I never said a word about them.

almost all were discarded and the remainder which they could not explain were left as "miracles". An atheist would not look at a religious or miraculous explanation for anything happening in their life but would see or think of mundane reasons for it happening, even if they could not ultimately find a good explanation for it.

that's some spin, which message board did you get that from. that was by Bad-ass Christian hat'n boy. He's real smart he can read, but he doesn't like to.
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