jo1952 wrote:emilysmith wrote:When describing spirituality, you are either making stuff up, or you are repeating stuff that someone else made up.
Until someone can explain how this intangible spirit interacts with our biology, all you have to support you is whatever fiction comes to mind. The reason it isn't testable is because it doesn't exist.
If a spirit can see, what mechanisms would it use to see? You can explain how a computer can see. You can even explain why a computer has trouble interpreting images compared to a human... who has parts of the brain that allow us to interpret images. Without that part of the brain, how could a spirit know what it was seeing?
Spirituality is emotion. Certainty is an emotional state. The more certain you are about something, the more emotional you are and the more likely it is that you are actually wrong.
This is all just stating the obvious.
Hello Emily!
I can see that you have a reasoning mind. So, let's start with what you state is the obvious. Can you explain to me how it is that you have a mind to begin with? The "mind" of the computer was created by man and placed into the computer which was also made by man. Man uses the building blocks he has found which already exist in his world. Now, man didn't create the mind that you have. Where did your mind come from? Where did the building blocks we find in our world come from?
Have you personally ever had the chance to study quantum mechanics?
Love,
jo
Good evening Jo :),
It depends on what you mean by mind. Let's look at a sea slug, for a moment, which only has 100,000 or so nerve cells... or neurons. If you apply an ice cube to one for a moment, it does nothing. If you wait a little while, then apply a small electric shock to it, it contracts. If you apply the ice cube, then shortly after apply the shock, it contracts after the shock. But, if you repeat this 20 times... the sea slug contracts after just being touched by the ice cube.
It may not have a mind, but it is able to learn and associate different events. A sea slug. So, when you ask me where the mind comes from, I conjure up images up the first notocord, the first eyes, and the gradually more and more complex creatures that all came before us. The mind arose gradually.
If you lined up the most simple nervous system gradually to the most complex, you can see how and which parts of the brain came to being first and how that may have affected the development of future organisms in a lineage. When looking at primates with smaller and smaller brains, you can compare which abilities they lack to which parts of the brain they lack.
The mind is made up of neurons, and those cells are made up of the various cell parts, which are made up by molecules which are made up by atoms. Atoms are static, for the most part, and the energy in our brains is generated by electrochemical reactions.
An electrochemical reaction is, simply put, the exchange of valence electrons. If you study microbiology, the relationships between the functions in the cells and the basic laws of chemistry start to tie together quite well. The reason i take it to this level is because that is as far as you can go. Valence electrons are the smallest unit of import when it comes to the workings of the mind. The problem this creates for people who believe in anything spiritual or metaphysical is that valence electrons operate according to the perfectly consistent laws of chemistry. We know a lot about how and why these particles move the way they do and, more importantly, the deterministic nature in which they operate makes it clear that they aren't being affected by some higher power.
If you gradually work up from there, there is no place in which a higher power can be seen interfering with our biological processes to generate thoughts, feelings, or the resulting behavior. The God of the Gaps has run out of places to hide.
Well, that may not be true, but we have yet to see anyone come up with a plausible explanation as to how something metaphysical may enact itself upon our biology.
More than that, the study of religious experiences under functional tomography scans shows exactly what is going on in people's brains and can explain what a person is feeling just by the state of the electrochemical activity in the brain.
When something happens in the base of your brain, it creates a chain reaction through feedback loops that effect what goes on elsewhere. The intensity, or lack thereof, will make its way from one part of the brain to another. So, when you are in a peaceful state, the part of your brain (in the base) that registers threat begins to push inhibitory chemicals (neurotransmitters) towards other parts of the brain. If this inhibition reaches the temporal lobe, you begin to lose your sense of time and space... the beginning of an out of body experience. If, for some reason the part of your brain that interprets hearing is triggered into excitatory state while the others are "quiet," then you have a transcendent experience where you hear voices. If, instead, the excitatory chain reaction is in the part of your brain that generates speech, you may speak in tongues. It is a little more complicated than that, but that should serve as a baseline so that you know where I am coming from.
Of course, if you haven't ever studied chemistry, it makes understanding a little more difficult.
When I was young, I didn't need to know any of that, though. It was as simple as seeing two people who have religious experiences and get two different messages from God. Many people are willing to kill and die for their religion, and they are all equally convinced that they are correct while everyone else is wrong. I have read estimates that 100 billion people have existed on this planet. How many of them believe what you believe? It is a tiny percentage, I assure you.
The people who share your beliefs are people who share your culture. It is culture that shapes people's religious beliefs and it is culture that shapes people's expectations of religion and of themselves. We act according to our expectations. We believe according to how we think we are supposed to believe.
When two cultures intermingle, they begin to share ideas and theology and from this exchange arises new religions. In the case of Mormonism, we can see the obvious syncretic inheritance of ideas from Swedenborg (the three kingdoms) and other charismatic subsets of Christianity at the time. In the past, cultural exchanges resulted in new incarnations of old gods. In Egypt, they let primitive people keep their Gods when they conquered them, just so long as they knew that the Pharoah was the all powerful one. That was how human culture operated back then.
But then came the Israelites, and when they were defeated, they refused to accept that someone else's God could be better than theirs. After the destruction of the Temple, their God took on a new life and the fault became the fault of the people because of immorality and disobedience, rather than the weakness of their old Canaanite god.
In short, between the implications of how culture is exchanged between populations and the tendency of human biology to operate within the confines of well understood natural laws, it seems less than not likely that the God of Abraham exists and interacts with us through some metaphysical process where everyone gets different answers and even turn to killing each other over disagreements on things that they are just making up to serve their own ends.
Take a bit to think about that. I am happy to go into further detail on any aspect of what I said here. I prefer not to be exhaustive, but if someone will actually read it, I will put the time into it... since I have a short respite from in real life responsibilities.