New Book, "The Illusion of God's Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing"

by Guest Sat Mar 05, 2016 1:03 pm

This new book is written by computational biologist John C. Wathey. LINK. According to one reviewer on Amazon, Wathey

...cuts to the heart of religion’s appeal: the strong emotional pull of belief and its promise to fill what has been called “the God-shaped vacuum in our hearts and minds.” As the author notes in his preface, the New Atheists have “largely ignored the real reason that most believers believe: their personal experience of the presence of God.” This book examines that subjective religious experience, offering a cogent description of its likely biological and psychological underpinnings.

It looks like a fantastic book. I would prefer the book was titled The Delusion of God's Presence, but that's just me. Regardless, gone is the cockamamie notion of the authenticating private subjective witness of a god in our lives (i.e., the god named holy spirit). Anyone who takes it seriously is indeed deluded. There are Christian apologists like Norman Geisler and Victor Reppert (I think) who don't agree with it, like me. What they should see is the lengths Christian apologists will go to defend their evangelical faith. And since that's obviously the case here, they should reflect on the lengths they themselves go to defend their evangelical faith.

In order to judge such a notion we must think in Bayesian terms. I wrote about this briefly in my book, The Outsider Test for Faith. (p. 194):

Richard Carrier explains that, with Bayes’s Theorem, “instead of myopically working out how we can explain all the evidence ‘with our theory,’ we start instead by asking how antecedently likely our theory even is, and then we ask how probable all the evidence is on our theory . . . and how probable all that evidence would be on some other theory.”15 Only then “can we work out whether our theory is actually the best one. If we instead just look to see if our theory fits the evidence, we will end up believing any theory we can make fit.” So, “the question must be which explanation, among all the viable alternatives, is actually the most likely. And that’s where Bayesian reasoning enters in.”16 This is the point of Bayesian reasoning. We must consider the prior probabilities and weigh them not just with the probability of the evidence for our theory, but also weigh them against the probability of the evidence for alternative theories.

So how likely is it that computational biologist John C. Wathey would find this evidence, if there really is this authenticating witness of a god called the holy spirit? Deluded minds have deluded ways of looking at this, I know all too well. But they aren't being intellectually honest about it. We would expect that any evidence to be found would confirm not disconfirm this particular god's witness. What we find is the opposite. It's pretty obvious to the rest of us that if it's truly a god's presence that is being felt, then we wouldn't find evidence located inside our evolved brains that explains why we have feel this god's presence. [Let the special pleading and gerrymandering around this evidence begin, which I've heard it all before.]

Furthermore, we would not expect that private subjective experiences by a few people should be the basis for objective verifiable truths about matters of historical investigation. We would not expect private subjective experiences to circumvent actual historical investigations into superstitious pre-scientific claims about sisters and brothers producing children who lived for 900 years, or a talking snake and donkey, or a man who was swallowed by a great fish, or a sun that didn't set, or a virgin birth, or levitating men, or someone arising from the grave with promise of coming again in the distant future. Even if this is possible we would additionally expect that the people who claim to have these veridical experiences of a spirit, who is on record as desiring a unified body of believers, would agree about everything essential to their faith, but they don't.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/new-book-illusion-of-gods-presence.html