Maybe it’s too much to say people who experienced this stuff are delusional? I know a lot of them personally and they live a normal life, but they keep saying testimonies about holy experience, that God talks to them etc.
What supernatural things actually exist?
The appropriate explanation is, “I don’t believe you.” Just because somebody believes something strongly and has a story doesn’t make it real.
“But I saw my cousin levitate when we were all praying once! My mom agrees that it happened! Surely that must be God!” Or a demon. Or a freak, natural phenomenon that we have yet to document. Or aliens. Or Loki. Do you see why “I’m not lying” isn’t enough to prove a miracle? Christians have to explain why it’s their god, why it’s their rationale that should be taken as fact. If they can demonstrate their claims in front of a camera, sensors, etc., then we can begin to investigate the truth value of their claims. If they can’t reproduce their magic, why should anyone take it seriously?
And that’s the problem. The minute you bring out actual scientists, set up actual studies, and start really probing, the miracles can never stand up to scrutiny. Ever. Here’s an example: https://showmethetoes.com/
You don’t have to say people are delusional. You can simply demand better evidence than testimony, and you should.
The word you’re looking for is “coincidence.” Humans are literally pattern recognition machines; we’ll see patterns in random noise if we look long enough. People finding meaning in patterns they see and can’t explain is pretty natural. It becomes problematic, though, when we do have explanations for things and those explanations are ignored.
Impossible to give one answer for countless experiences.
But its important to note that people all around the world have the same class of experiences, with different beliefs and contradictory outcomes.
If people’s expectations shape which miracles they experience, it seems likely to come from the mind.
If none of the purported miracles are able to be studied physically, it seems unlikely to be a real, physical effect.
What miracles? What supernatural?
These are all things we don’t understand. They literally mean we don’t know how or why things happened the way they did. You can’t use “I don’t know” to claim you therefore know the answer.
When someone claims a god is responsible, the only appropriate response is “how do you know that?” When the answer comes back “what else could it be?” I respond with “literally anything else.” They must still meet their burden of proof before they can claim victory for their answer.
Why do you believe that your account should be preferred over theirs?
I don’t have an account. I simply don’t believe theirs. You can’t use “I don’t know” to then say “therefore this is the answer.”
When something happens, people try to explain it. So when someone has a religious experience, feels the presence of the holy spirit, talks to god or something like that, I see no reason for that person to say this is just a delusion, as opposed to interpreting this experience religiously. I would not. And I think you would not either, but who knows.
That’s because we’re conditioned to turn to religious explanations when we don’t understand, and that’s fallacious thinking. It’s called the argument from ignorance.
At no point at any time in all of history has a religious answer to physical phenomenon been validated as the correct answer. It has been accepted as the default assumption because of the dominance of religion in society, but that doesn’t make the answer true. No answer is true just because it’s popular or traditional.
But I am talking about religious experiences specifically, not physical phenomena.
Also, you seem to think that when society was more religious people had beliefs about physics that were informed exclusively by religion, but this is not the case. Greek tradition of philosophy has been inherited by Christianity (which has elements of both Greek rationality and Jewish mysticism), and in the middle ages physics and other sciences were rooted in Aristotle.
But that is hardly relevant. As I said, I am talking about religious experiences, not explanations of natural phenomena.
How is a religious experience not a physical phenomenon? Define it for me, please, with sources where possible. How did you eliminate brain activity, such as with the god helmet?
The Greek tradition of physics that Christianity adopted was established by Aristotle, not Epicurus. If they’d chosen to follow the evidence instead of inference, the world would look very different today. You can’t think anything into existence the way Aristotle proposed. He had good ideas, but his approach to physics was completely wrong.
I did say that Aristotle was a major inspiration.
You can’t think anything into existence the way Aristotle proposed.
I am not sure what you mean by this. I have not found that in Aristotle and it is hard to imagine someone from that time saying this, seems very uncharacteristic. Feel free to clarify what you meant.
What “evidence” are you speaking of? The experimental method was not employed by anyone then, philosophy is a speculative endeavour. There were arguments, however, and saying that Plato, Aristotle, or any other non radical materialist is somehow intellectually deficient simply shows a lack of familiarity with antique philosophy.
Also, materialism is about as metaphysical as it gets.
I am not sure you noticed, but no pre-modern physical ideas are currently employed, whether Epicurean or Aristotelian.
While I disagree woth you on everything you said with regards to philosophy, I will grant you thatyou are correct and a religious experience is in a sense, a natural phenomenon. I will add, however, that while it is possible to deny the spiritual nature of such an experience(which I mentioned), it is, philosophically speaking, possible to deny any proposition, so this alone is not a refutation.
Most people have internal monologues.
It’s how we think things through, and usually the voice we hear, is our own. Which makes sense, because we can make it say whatever we like simply by thinking it.
But we often hear other peoples voices, too. Most common is probably the voice of a parent. You might imagine how they’ll sound when they scold you, if you think about doing something they won’t like.
It’s really not that weird that religious people claim to “hear” god. In the exact same way most people imagine what others would say in response to something they might say or do, the religious imagine how god or jesus might react.
But really, they’re just hearing their own mind frame their own thoughts in the way they picture that their religious icons might react to their thoughts and actions.
It’s not really a higher power speaking to them. They’re just interpreting the way the human mind works as supernatural, because their upbringing and belief system has them constantly asking themselves “what would god have me do” the same way we all ask “what would my friends and family have me do”.
There’s really no way to dispel this illusion, except by explaining internal monologues, and giving them time to think about it. You might also have the religious compare notes on what “god” is telling them, untill they dee how each of them hear whatever they would themselves imagine god would say. But this is something they really don’t like doing.
Humans also experience very powerful emotions. It is entirely possible to feel a sense of the sublime or epiphany or profound and misattribute those feelings to some kind of supernatural cause. If you’re never taught to critically examine your emotions, it is easy to bask in those feelings and be accepting of supernatural explanations for those feelings.
