Many people pray, and to various different entities they pray. But for certain religions, the theist themselves do not know, or care not to know, how controversial praying is to their own religion.
"With God's blessing, the doctors saved the boy's life."
Compare the one-liner above with,
"The doctors saved the boy's life."
It is without doubt that the doctors saved the boy's life. But did a god help? The above is a very clear example of adding unneccesary complexity and interpretations to very simple stuff.
How can one determine that God helped the doctors. Did the person see it, or did he claim so? What if the operation was a failure? Would the theist then go on to say "Even with god's blessing, the doctors couldn't save the boy's life."? No, that would have made the omni-potent guy look bad. Apparently only selective things, normally good things, get attributed to God.
"I was cured of my illness because I prayed."
Yet again, a total disregard to doctors and modern medicine. Did the person mean that if he did not pray, he would never become well? Does medicine not work on him? Or should he step back into reality and say, "I was cured of my illness because I swallowed paracetemol."
What of miraculous recovery, an illness where no known medicine can cure?
"God cured me of cancer."
Wow... a miracle, i'm impressed, not. While i cannot find an explanation on how a person can miraculously be rid of cancer, saying God did it is a weak assertion that puts more weight on blind faith than the scientific method.
All of these are only a theist's claims, with no scientific evidence for proof. You might not agree, but let me put it in another way. How did you know that God did it? Maybe Allah did it, and Allah is speaking to you in his very own way, so why do you not believe in Allah then?
I once asked a friend, that whether if i led a virtous life, be nice and helpful, but yet ultimately do not believe in God, would God still send me to hell for an eternity of torture? Would he forgive me, when i stand (do spirits stand?) before him to be judged? No, my friend said. God does not bargain.
And if God does not bargain, why does anyone pray? If God has a plan, then there's no need to pray, for everything is in due course, is it not? If God's plan is for you to pray, and help you sometimes, then thank god, God's plan was for me to say that prayer is useless.
Prayer is not without its evils. There are those in this world, who in believing in the power of prayer, deny themselves or others medical treatment.
[lbandit's note] Prayer is not exactly useless. It is useless in that no supernatural being is going to grant you wishes. It is useful in that the person praying, often feels good afterwards. Somewhat similar to a session with a psychologist. And it is this good feeling and peacefulness that people attribute as God's pressence or something like that. Unfortunately, feeling good about something does not make it work. I always feel good about my computer...
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Ah, my friend.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much more to this, you know. The fact that your friends make poor arguments about prayer, does not mean that better arguments do not exist about prayer.
But ultimately, it is experiential. All of us are on a journey. Some of us have travelled further, some of us have travelled less. Some of us remember, some of us do not.
You doubt. But doubt is good. Doubt is part of the process. To doubt, and then to examine critically, and finally to accept; is far better than blindly accepting.
Btw, I am not a Christian. Nor a Buddhist. Nor a Muslim, Hindu or Taoist. :)
ReplyDeleteHi mr wang says so,
ReplyDeleteI do welcome any better arguments for prayer. But unfortunately, prayers work on the premise that the entity being prayed to exists.
But evidence for these entities are often questionable at best. Many theists treats the existence of the entities they believe in as a baseline, beyond doubt.
Which is sad, because not only are they blindly accepting, they're blindly arguing :/
You are right.
ReplyDeleteQuestions about the power of prayer must inevitably be linked to a whole host of other questions such as whether the entity being prayed to exists at all.
In considering those types of questions, I sense that you have a preference for the scientific method.
Actually, the scientific method has many limitations which you may not be aware of. Right now, I would only point one of them out to you:
Science accepts nothing that cannot be proven. Yet most things which are true did exist and were happening long before science proved their existence.
Electricity, bacteria, quarks, neutrinos, Saturn, the law of gravitation, photosynthesis, Tyrannosaurus Rex and testosterone are some examples.
But never mind. The scientific method, for all its many flaws, is the one you're most familiar with.
So have you ever seriously considered the many pieces of many different kinds of scientific evidence & research which, although fragmented, would, when put together, seem to point to the existence of spirit/God/soul?
It is true, many of the miraculous things could be possible. Maybe there really is a spiritual entity with supernatural powers classed as a god. And maybe said god is referred to by one of the many man-made religions. And maybe prayer really does work. Maybe all these are just undiscovered science.
ReplyDeleteThat's a whole lot of "maybe"s. What about the other "maybe"s? Maybe there is really no god. Maybe man-made religions are just fairytales. Maybe prayers doesn't really work.
And what about the not so maybe's "maybe"s? Maybe Santa Claus exists. Maybe an unmonitored tree falling in the forest makes no sound. Maybe we'll wake up to find that Matrix was for real.
There are so many possibilities, how do we determine which one as likely? Tell me, other than the scientific method, what other methodologies should i employ?
And of the different kinds of fragmented scientific evidence and research, when put together, seem to point to the existence of spirit/God/soul?
What are some of these evidence?
The blue pill or the red pill? Or should i take them all just in case?
On the scientific evidence -
ReplyDeletewell, there is so much I'm not too sure where I should start. Maybe with the following:
Dr Brian Weiss - research on the use of hypnosis to explore past life regression. Patients are not only able to recall past lives, but also what happened immediately after their deaths in each past life.
Prof Raymond Moody - documentation of near-death experiences. People who are clinically dead, and then revived, report their experiences "on the other side".
Dr Ian Stevenson - research on reports of young children who are able to recall past lives. They describe specific places, people etc which on further investigation turn out to be true.
Dr Elizabeth Kubler Ross - doctor, psychiatrist & thanatologist (researcher on the dying process); her personal experiences with "the other side".
Professor Carl Jung - father of modern psychology. See his explanation of his "principle of synchronicity", also the concept of the "superconscious" (as opposed to the subconscious, the "conscious" etc) Note the resemblance to the idea of God.
Compare also the Big Bang theory with the Hindu explanation of the creation of the universe.
There's more. But the above should keep you busy for quite some time, if you're genuinely interested in thinking more deeply about these matters.
Also, scientists are finding support for the God concept in physics.
ReplyDeleteNot Newtonian physics, but quantum physics. Try googling these names:
Amit Goswami, professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oregon;
Fred Alan Wolf, PhD, theoretical physics at the University of California (he has a book entitled "The Spiritual Universe - How Quantum Physics Proves The Existence of the Soul".
Ah.. homework, never liked them.
ReplyDeleteAbout hypnotism.
Hypnotism is really a tricky topic. how much credence should we give hypnotism? There are courts of law which reject evidence through hypnotism. This is mainly due to the suggestibility of the human mind. You asked me to look up on hypnotism, i'll ask you to look up on False Memory Syndrome.
Oh, btw, children are highly suggestible creatures. I'm sure you know better than me : p
About near death experiences.
As the experience states itself, the experience is near death. People who are clinically dead for a couple minutes, could have suffer brain damage. Their experiences may have been jumbled.
I like to help with the quantum physics thingy, but unfortunately, it looks to complex for my simplistic mind, sorrie : p
Wish I could take you through this more extensively. But you know blogging is not really the right medium for that.
ReplyDeleteYou asked for scientific evidence. I provided you with a list of areas of research from people with rather awesome qualifications from the most respectable institutions like Stanford, Harvard etc.
These people are scientists. Not quacks or housewives or fortune-tellers in Chinatown. Do you think their methodologies and hypotheses would really be so obviously flawed from a scientific perspective? You should be more objective and really consider what research they've done, how it was done etc.
Yet you've opted for quick dismissal because you refuse to consider redrawing your old map.
I understand that.
For a confirmed atheist to seriously consider the possibility of that God exists -
that is as painful as for a staunch believer (Christianity, Islam, whatever) to seriously consider the possibility that God does not.
I'm only inviting you to consider the possibilties. I know you may feel intimidated.
But think of it this way - if you do get around to doing your homework, and you do it diligently, and after all that, you still believe that there is no God/soul/spiritual dimension etc etc -
well then, you get some benefit too, right? After all, you become even more validated in your beliefs. Also you would have acquired more knowledge with which you can make far better rebuttals of the points raised by your religious friends.
As I have said, blogging is not exactly a convenient medium for this kind of discussion. But let me just briefly address your points.
Hypnotism is pretty standard, actually. It's routinely used by psychotherapists to deal with a wide range of psychiatric problems. It forms a basic part of the syllabus, the professional training etc, of all psychiatrists.
False memory plays a role in some past-life regression cases, possibly, especially if hypnosis is administered by a less-experienced psychotherapist. False memory however cannot account for the many PLR cases where there is independent, third-party verification. For example, in one case, a patient reported specific details of a past-life in a certain ancient Egyptian town. His account actually led researchers to make a new, major archaelogical find, specifically in the area he described. In other cases, patients hypnotised separately and having no knowledge of each other have independently corroborated each other's accounts of specific occurrences.
The suggestibility of children -
Dr Ian Stephenson's research centres on very young children precisely because he wants to focus on young children who haven't been exposed to influences of TV, movies, religious teachings etc. Principally, he's interested in young children who start talking about their past lives more or less as soon as they start learning to talk.
Near-death experience - yes, you're right; it is theorised that the death of the brain stem may lead to the perception of light surrounded by darkness (the "light at the end of the tunnel" commonly reported in NDE case). The explanation is weak, however, because it fails to account for many other aspects of the NDE experience.
Classic case -
blind old woman suffers heart attack; is brought for emergency operation;
later she reports an NDE; says that she floated out of her body; and watched as surgeons operated on her;
she was able to describe specific events; including how a gold pen had rolled out a surgeon's pocket and how one surgeon had a peculiar, idiosyncratic habit of constantly flicking his wrists;
descriptions all validated by the team of medical staff in the operating theatre.
Interesting thing is that the woman had been blind for the past 30 years. Yet saw all this.
I'm really just scratching the surface with you.
But I really invite you to be brave. Open your mind. Challenge yourself.
If you do not question your disbelief, then you are as foolish as your friends who do not question their beliefs. Neither form of ignorance is desirable.
Quantum physics - if you're really interested, let me know, I can give you more ideas about where to start looking. If you think that Mr Wang is an idiot, well, never mind.
I guess a good starting point for the quantum physics perspective is to consider the fact that you, Lbandit, do not really exist.
After all, you are made of atoms. And atoms are 99.99% empty space:
(a very small nucleus of protons and neutrons, with electrons swirling around at a very great distance from the nucleus).
Furthermore, the behaviour of subatomic particles (especially the collision of matter and antimatter) - whereby matter actually appears and disappears and reappears all the time, in an inherently unpredictable way -
means that if you exist, you must be existing in several dimensions, not just three.
If you pursue this line of inquiry further, you may come to God. Hehehe.
In case you think I'm crazy -
antimatter is a basic part of the whole Big Bang theory;
and Albert Einstein is our good friend who postulated the existence of the fourth dimension (time) and the possibility that many dimensions exist, beyond four.
You mistake me as someone who believes in atheism to the point that atheism itself becomes a religion. I do not assert that the spiritual realm cannot exist, i just find no compelling reason to believe in it.
ReplyDeleteThe reason i try to point out the flaws about religions is to hope a theist would adopt critical thinking. If a theist questions his religion logically and scientifically and becomes stronger in his faith, then i congratulate him all the same, for he is indeed a greater man than me. I have nothing against people who believe, so long as it does not cause more harm than good to themselves.
There are many things i cannot explain. And suggesting spiritualism does seem to explain many of the research. But all these evidence suggest existence of the spiritual realm, not some supreme/enlightened being or afterlife.
I do not make it my point to travel round the world, to make scientific reports to counter every single evidence of spirituality. I have neither such capability or talent. Neither do i wander the streets to distribute brochures nor do i collect weekly donations.
Dr Ian Stephenson's research did not use just any random child. But children whom were reported as showing symptoms of past life. How did the parents/guardians discover the symptoms? Did the method of inquiry involved suggestion. Did anything else happen from that time to the time when Dr Stephenson received the report and took an airplane to find the child?
Regarding the classic case. Spiritualism does seem like an adequate explanation for OOBE. Let's hypothesize. That suffering the heart attack, the blind old woman acheived briefly, my biased belief of super consciousness. She could see by emitting and recieving brain waves and did not need eyes to see. And when the woman recounted her experience, she used her baised belief of existence of spirits and inserted a false memory of floating out of the body.
Now, my hypothesis might seem ludicrous to you, a far fetched attempt at rationalizing. But is the probability any lesser than her spirit floating out of the body? You thought not, because you think that there are many other inexplicable cases in many other fields which in concert, suggest spiritualism.
Maybe a quack, or housewife or fortune teller from institue of chinatown like me should not approach scientific reports from respectable doctors and professors, from institutes more respectable than chinatown college, with skeptism.
If it is your insistent belief that i am unwilling to redraw old maps and being quick to dismiss new evidences without reading them up, then i really have not much to say that you want to hear.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying the scientists are bad or unscientific.
Well, firstly my apologies, if you are offended by my "redrawing old map" comment.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, I'm only scratching the surface with you - there's a lot more I have not touched upon.
I think I can respond to most of the points you have raised about the authenticity of the phenomena, but I won't because there's just too much for me to write.
I'm quite happy to accept your "superconsciousness" explanation of the blind old woman's case as being possibly true. I actually don't see any real difference.
In fact, Dr Deepak Chopra (oh, look, another Western-trained scientist, formerly Chief of Staff at the Boston Regional Medical Center, no less) has this theory about God existing as our collective brain waves.
Superconsciousness, after all, is just Carl Jung's intellectual attempt to describe God. In other disciplines (with no pretensions of science), the same concept is simply described as the Akashic record.
There's a little snag, though. The surgeon whose gold pen rolled out - he didn't know about it. Neither did the medical staff. The surgeon thought he'd lost the pen and he didn't know where.
It was a day or two later, when the patient regained consciousness and was well enough to speak, that she mentioned to the doctor that his missing gold pen was actually under the table in the operating theatre, and that it had rolled out during the surgery. They checked, and true enough it was there, right where she said it would be.
It's a bit hard for the surgeon to transmit brain waves about something he didn't know, I should imagine.
Then again, it's a small point. Moody and Elizabeth Kubler Ross have together documented something like 20,000 NDE cases. This "blind old woman" case is just one - nothing much hinges on it. In this case, the interesting little quirk just happens to be the fact that the NDE experiencer was blind, yet "saw" things which were independently verified - but there are numerous other NDE cases with some other interesting quirky element in them.
Dr Ian Stevenson - why don't you google and see for yourself? Stevenson in particular is well-known for his unusual scientific rigour. Other scientists have commented that it is extremely difficult to fault Stevenson's methodology. In fact, Stevenson moved into this area to study reincarnation precisely because he wished to avoid:
(1) hypnosis (and the possibility of hypnosis playing tricks on the mind); and
(2) mentally disturbed adults (the people who go to psychiatrists in the first place already have some psychiatric problem)
I can respond in greater detail to your doubts but again I'd have to really write a lot.
This comment of yours:
"But all these evidence suggest existence of the spiritual realm, not some supreme/enlightened being or afterlife ..."
... is tricky for various reasons. If I read you correctly, you accept that there are plenty of phenomena out there in the universe which mainstream science cannot adequately explain,
and your scepticism is directed at the notion of a "personal God" -
in other words, the idea of an Old Man Sitting Up There in The Sky; or perhaps the idea that "Jesus is my friend, yeah, I can talk to him every day".
I guess it's worth mentioning at this juncture that while the "personal God" is a key feature in Christianity, not all religions support this idea.
There is no concept of a "personal God" in Buddhism, for example, and its place there is only the concept of karma. Buddha himself is not a deity and never claimed to be one. And karma certainly never claimed to be your best friend.
However, a compelling overarching theory is found in one of Dr Deepak Chopra's books, "How to Know God". To grossly oversimplify -
he makes the argument that "God" is hardwired into the human brain (ie it is practically a natural instinct to seek God), but at the same time, there are evolutionary steps towards the human ability to perceive God;
and depending on where you are on the scale, you perceive God in different ways. For some, he comes as a personal God, for others, he's more like Nirvana - nothingness.
I'm not really doing justice to the elegance of Chopra's arguments here - so I think I'd better stop.
But if nothing else, do read one of Brian Weiss's books (easily available, including at MPH, Kinokuniya etc), and you'll see the evidence supporting the existence of a personal God. More precisely, the existence of many god-like entities, which Weiss refers to as "the Masters".
Weiss, by the way, is another of those people with glowing professional qualifications. Yale, Columbia etc. And he was a bit of a coward too. When he first discovered "past life regression", he hid his discoveries for years, afraid that he would jeopardise his job as the head of the psychiatric department in a major American hospital.
Btw, you ever watched the David Blaine show "Street Magic"? It's a "reality TV" type of show, where he walks around in the city, talking to bystanders, and then right there on the street, he does tricks like levitation; mindreading etc. Same chap who pulled that stunt about being stuck 40 days in a block of ice without food while suspended over a river in some US city.
It seems pretty amazing until you realise that his abilities are exactly what the swamis in India are reported to be able to do. Today, and centuries ago.
"But all these evidence suggest existence of the spiritual realm, not some supreme/enlightened being or afterlife ..."
ReplyDeleteBy that statement, i meant that all the scientists have provided for is evidence that a spiritual realm could exist.
From those evidence, i do not see how we could possibly derive an entire system/structure/nothingness out of it. Existence of spirits does not automatically represent itself as a karmic cycle. To me, it seems like taking a leap of faith.
The argument that people cannot percieve god, namely me, is not really a fair argument. The argument is made on one premise, that is some god, personal or no, exists. Of which its existence is debatable in the first place.
Huh? David Blaine was for real? I thought he was a trickster like David Copperfield.
David Copperfield insists that his show is all stage tricks. David Blaine insists that his own show is not.
ReplyDeleteOne, both or neither could be lying. But personally I find Blaine quite convincing, precisely because nothing he does is actually new or extraordinary (as far as psychic phenomena is concerned).
For example, in one episode, he bends hard, metal objects out of shape simply by moving his hands gently over them.
This is nothing new - old hat, really - the first famous documented cases of such phenomena were way back in the 1960s, when the Israeli psychic Uri Geller performed similar feats under controlled laboratory conditions.
Even in Singapore, we now have an 11-year-old girl living in Serangoon who can do it. See here.
But I digress. You are correct to say that such phenomena do not really support the existence of God.
Actually, if you examine the literature further, you find that there is a distinction drawn between what is merely "psychic"; and what is "spiritual" (although there are some grey, overlapping areas).
In particular, you'll find that the "spiritualists" are often quite unimpressed by the "psychics". The primary distinction lies here:
The psychics are basically people who have learned to use, or are just naturally better at using, certain innate abilities that ALL human beings have, but which are usually dormant in most of us. In other words, psychic ability is like, say, musical ability - everyone has it; some people naturally have more of it; some people naturally have very little; all of us should be able to improve at it if we take music lessons & practise.
(Btw, you can actually take lessons at Peninsula Plaza to become more psychic - see here.
The "spiritualists" however are not so much focused on using their own innate ability; but more on tapping the power of, or communicating with, something far greater than themselves. God, if you like. Or some smaller aspects of Him/It/Her.
My wife is quite psychic. But not at all spiritual. She is an atheist and does not go to church, temple, mosque etc, is not contemplative; or "weird"; or communicate with unusual entities. However, she receives premonitions of people's deaths. It is an ability she has had since she was a teenager.
In 1990, she woke screaming from a dream. Nothing was in the dream except total blackness, and then the sound of a huge, immense explosion (this woke her). Later, she learned that her uncle had died in the Middle East, around the time that she had the dream. Her uncle, a seaman, was asleep on his vessel (an oil tanker) when the Iraqi war broke out. The vessel, one of the first commercial casualties, was hit by a missile.
Last year, she had a dream of drowning in water, and having a great pain in her head. Two days later, her cousin, a swimming instructor and a very fit man, suffered an unexpected brain aneurysm while in a swimming pool. Essentially he collapsed in the pool and no one pulled him out until quite a few minutes later, by which time he had almost drowned.
Etc. There are other episodes - these are the two, more dramatic, premonitions. Last year she also sensed death around my father and started irrationally insisting that he go for a complete medical check-up. He was found with colon cancer and they operated in time to save him.
These however are psychic phenomena, not spiritual. There is no divine intervention here - it is purely my wife tapping into her own psychic ability.
Spiritual phenomena are quite different. Spiritual phenomena often involve psychic elements, but most psychic phenomena occur without spiritual elements. When spiritual phenomena occur, an external consciousness, not just the person's own, is at work.
It's my bedtime now. Tell you more another time, maybe.
That sounds right. I guess somewhere along the way, i kind of blurred the distinction between psychic phenomena and spiritualism.
ReplyDeletePersonally, i'm quite skeptic about David Blaine. In one of his acts, he takes an empty beer can touches it and turns it into an un-opened can of beer!
If i could create beer out of thin air, i'll never be sober enough to make any magic shows : D And why doesn't he sell beer instead? I guess maybe magic shows earn more quickly than creating and selling beer O_o
This is what I meant about David Blaine's performances. Again this is nothing new.
ReplyDeleteThe most famous example of this kind of magic (or whatever you want to call it) is found in the Bible.
It is the story of Jesus feeding 5000 people with five loaves of bread & two fish.
Now I begin to sound bizarre. The Bible of course is extremely well-known. Much less well-known are the stories of the ancient (and some not-so-ancient) swamis of India.
Yet despite the lack of cultural connection, you find descriptions of similar magic in the tales surrounding these swamis.
This actually makes a lot of sense, if you view that there is some scientific explanation for all this, that we simply have not found yet.
Since the laws of science are universal, then if one person can walk on water, others should be able to walk on water too. If one person can bend metal spoons just by concentrating, others should be able to do it.
The question lies merely in figuring out how.
And really, if this all sounds very fantastic and crazy - is it really any more fantastic and crazy than Einstein's idea that there are many, many dimensions (not just three or four) and we actually pop in and out of several dimensions all the time?