It’s possible to feel weird things during these types of events. For example, I’ve experienced sleep paralysis which is a full body feeling in addition to things like visual and even auditory hallucinations.
These things usually only last a minute or so. Sometimes less. So calling on Jesus and having the feelings dissipate could be entirely coincidental.
Well, see my reply to John Harshman, what I experienced was not just seeing something that was not there! Nor would calling on Jesus, and having it stop, be something that would be expected to dispel this, if it was only a misperception.
I did mention also that I did describe my experiences to psychiatrists, and they ultimately had no suggestions, or diagnosis, or remedy. I did get help, I do get help, by calling on Jesus, and looking to him, which is unexpected, I would say, if what I experienced, and experience, is purely due to natural phenomena, if the natural world is all there is, as the materialists say.
Well, maybe once! Or twice! But for this to be my constant experience of pressure, day by day, and every waking moment, and getting deliverance, defies explanation as sheer coincidence.
To be clear, I was referring specifically to the sleep related incident you experienced which you said only happened once.
And I also said I don’t expect you will accept there may be natural reasons for what you are experiencing.
I’m sorry that mental health professionals weren’t able to help you with what you’ve experienced. Though I think that might be more of an indictment of mental health care in our current society more than anything else.
Alright, but I include that one experience as an example of demonic pressure that I conclude I have experienced in various other ways.
And I gave reasons why I think this explanation is improbable.
Well, thank you…
I don’t have a very high view of the effectiveness of counseling, I must confess. I’ve seen multiple people who seem to be in perpetual therapy. But what exactly is the therapeutic part, if unending visits are scheduled? You would hope for some healing, some progress, some remedy, if we call it therapy. Though medications do sometimes help with mental illness, as I have heard and seen. But I’ve found a way of getting real help! And I’m sticking with it.
For my part, I’m sorry that you don’t seem to consider God to be real, or able and willing to help. I recommend him, I’ve got good evidence he has helped me.
There are many reasons for an enlightened justice system, but philosophical considerations of free will are of little help. I have always wondered why if moral culpability does not exist for individuals, why should it for society as a whole? If a justice system is punitive, vengeful, and cruel and unusual, that is no less the outcome of prior states - there is no level of human action or interaction which is granted an exemption from the laws of the universe. To preserve moral compass and social order, regardless of free will, there needs to be allowed a sense of agency.
Hallucinations can involve any of the senses. One common hypnogogic hallucination is that of someone heavy sitting on one’s chest.
As mentioned already, the hallucinations tend to be brief, whether you call on Jesus or not.
It also seems very odd that you should be under constant demonic assault. Why you? An internal source seems more reasonable.
Let’s suppose I wrote this: “Does Lee Merrill do kumquat to visionary with December jackelopes?”
How would you answer that question? That’s sort of the situation I am in, when you expect me to respond to what you write.
Sure, no problem:
Oh, look. It’s the same source you just used yourself. You are a very impressive thinker, Lee.
Well, I did qualify my remark with “Taking your words at face value (for whatever that is worth).” It appears your ability to put into words whatever is happening in your brain is of too poor to really put much value in your words.
When, in fact, it illustrates just the opposite. QED.
Not at all. It would just mean one’s actions are the result of the sum total of all the factors that determine them. Sapolsky, I am quite certain, would believe that one’s actions can be altered by other, intervening physical factors. e.g. by slipping the judge a Snickers bar at 4:00 PM.
I’m sure pagan people in the past were equally convinced that the virgin they had sacrificed last spring was the reason the crops were so good this autumn.
The issue is not whether you actually experienced improvement in your condition. The question, rather, is how it could be demonstrated that this was due to supernatural intervention by a god. In the case of “cures” that result from praying to a god, that is a claim that can be tested in a randomized controlled trial. As I have already said, those tests have been done and failed to demonstrate a positive effect.
Really? Is that what you “have seen” in the article I directly linked for you? From the Cochrane database, the world’s single most authoritative resource for evidence based medicine?
So how does that work? Does God get all pissy and indignant if someone does a clinical trial and decides he’s just going to let little Timmy die of leukemia, after all? Please, enlighten us.
And, of course, your assertion that the scientific method cannot be applied to relationships is just plain wrong:
A few posts ago, @Faizal_Ali said he was such a psychiatrist, and I know you saw his post because you replied to it.
Yet you have now completely forgotten that your ‘challenge’ was met.
This is how you earned the nickname ‘Dory’.
But this is a known way to speak in English, I talk about “an atheist”, then I switch to saying “you”, but I’m still referring to said unspecified atheist, I’m addressing him or her personally, but not you personally! Here are another couple of astonishing conclusions from the definite claim that “there is no God or gods”, so then you (the unspecified atheist) have a way of detecting God? What would that be, exactly, some procedure or device? Please explain. And God cannot hide, if he wants to? How do you (the unspecified atheist) know something a supernatural being, should such exist, and whom you claim does not exist, must not be able to do?
How would saying I’m stupid, or even more pointedly, trying to be important, not be attacking my character? Or saying I’m lying, as you just did, which implies I’m not only stating a falsehood, but I also have a malicious intent. I think that’s quite plain, and certainly not incoherent.
Yet I do give reasons and evidence, and examine what people say in reply, like I’m doing now! But how do you infer I have a malicious intent?
But there is a fundamental principle stated in the introduction, the entire discussion that followed depended on hydrothermal vents being a good environment for OOL. They list references, yes, but I have good evidence, convincing evidence to the contrary. Once you conclude an argument starts with a false premise, you don’t need to read further and examine what they derive based on that.
I agree, but this does not somehow disprove my view, or my point that hydrothermal vents are not good places for isolated complex molecules to hang around, or develop in.
Correct, I agree! Yet if you isolate said complex molecules, they will quickly disintegrate, correct? And OOL does not start with organisms, it starts with molecules, which must get more complex, correct?
I don’t have metrics, I have reasons that I give, you said you had metrics, which I would be glad to be pointed to.
He had people working for him, I didn’t say he was on the faculty, though.
Well, he was when he did his lab work! That was under the Nobel Prize winner’s supervision.
I was giving reasons for my estimate, you asked for that. Now you are asking for more, for some reason, that’s called raising the bar, or moving the goalposts. But I don’t know of papers Axe published with a Nobel laureate, and I don’t see how lack of this knowledge indicates fear somehow.
I expect Fersht was aware of, and probably kept up with the papers published by people in his department. We were discussing Axe’s ability, and a hiring examination of his qualifications would therefore be relevant.
Not really, here is my question again, “he was a leader in his department, also, he was working for a Nobel Prize winner, who probably evaluated his work and credentials before hiring him, have you done something comparable?” So have you been a leader in your department, have you worked for someone as prominent as a Nobel laureate, at a leading institution such as Cambridge?
He says he’s back in the lab at Biola, I expect more results, and he is a founding editor and an author in the Biocomplexity journal, and his work and ideas have been featured in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature. But mainly I focus on what he has done, since he had to leave his lab when Intelligent Design became a hot topic (the actual reason given was limited lab resources), but presumably abilities don’t dissipate apart from getting elderly, which Axe isn’t.
I don’t see how frequent citing implies intense scrutiny, such as Axe’s paper has evoked.
No, that’s fine, I expect and have seen that papers generally get cited because they support the author’s point.
One can only point and laugh.
I’m willing to bet that was only in the form of news stories critical of his shoddy pseudoscience, and reporting on its social and political consequences. Would you care to cite the actual references so we can see for ourselves?
Considering these latest discoursive developments I think any further discussion is clearly fruitless.
You have cited ZERO evidence to date.
Because you are obviously lack the most basic understanding of fields like biology, psychiatry, and chemistry, yet you posture and preen as though you do, even when writing to experts in those fields.
And you avoid evidence in a pathological way, so there’s no evidence that you are seeking any truth about anything.
There was EVIDENCE that followed it. You pretended that responding incoherently to a sentence in the introduction was sufficient.
You have no evidence AFAIK. The only claim you made about “complex molecules” is obviously false.
You didn’t show that it was false. You asserted it with zero evidence. You also didn’t show that it was a premise for any argument. You didn’t even read the words in the paper, leading me to infer that you have a pathological fear of evidence.
It does. Thanks for admitting that it was merely your uninformed view, unconstrained by evidence.
No, that’s why you’re wrong. Doesn’t PCR involve isolated complex molecules? Isn’t it done hundreds of thousands of times a day?
So your claim that Axe ranks 9/10, or 90th percentile, in my field was a complete fabrication. Got it.
You claim to be a programmer, but you can’t figure out basic searches?
Who? Names, Lee.
You said he was a leader in his department, which was another fabrication. Why do you have no respect for the Ninth Commandment?
No.
No. The advisor would be a coauthor in that case, as he was on Axe’s other papers, which you are clearly afraid to read.
Because your reasons were absurd.
So you can’t do a simple search?
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1996 May 28;93(11):5590-4.
D D Axe 1 , N W Foster, A R Fersht
Let’s start with just one. I predict that you’ll avoid addressing this evidence.
That’s why he’s not a coauthor. This isn’t that complicated.
I don’t expect a single lab result, because he has produced no lab results in the last 21 years. I predict nothing but rhetoric. Why would that change?
So what?
Featured? You must have an odd definition of the term. Let’s review the EVIDENCE in the PNAS paper I showed you above, but you were incapable of finding on your own.
No lab resources were worth devoting it. If Axe disagrees, he has had ample resources to do more lab work in the 21 intervening years, but hasn’t. That says it all.
We can add that to the list of phenomena you ignore.
Does the notion of justice even make sense if free will doesn’t exist?
I don’t see why it wouldn’t. I think Sapolsky’s position is that it is unjust to punish people for actions that they could not control, which doesn’t really differ from how things are viewed under the current justice system. However, he seems to thinks no one controls what they do, therefore no one should be punished.
Metrics for such a claim are available, but what you have is confirmation seeking.
Starting with you noting that Axe worked at Cambridge. Yes, as a post doc and staff researcher. Not a bad entry on a CV on the way up, but of little weight in and of itself. This is far less selective than any tenure track position. 1/10
Published in roc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
Here it is. 1996 - Active barnase variants with completely random hydrophobic cores
That the requirements for attainment of a functional core are relatively lax has important implications for protein evolution. The considerable optimization power of biological selection requires a pre-existing structure exhibiting a phenotypically significant level of activity. The presence or absence of such starting structures is, therefore, critical in determining the evolutionary course of any system undergoing replication with random mutation. If protein folds required unique core sequences for function, starting structures for evolutionary optimization of noncore residues would be profoundly rare: for a 13-residue core, only 1 in 2013 random sequences would qualify. Relative to this the core permissiveness demonstrated here amounts to an increase by 12 orders of magnitude in the prevalence of starting structures. The implication of this permissiveness for protein design is that it should indeed be possible to achieve low-level enzymatic activity from de novo designs that disregard the packing problem.
Well that doesn’t sound very ID. I would guess this reflects the post doc work at Cambridge. But getting published in top tier journal, and getting 39 citations, maybe bump it to a 3/10.
To compare to the upper end of the scale, let’s compare to the supervising author on that paper, Alan R. Fersht. Full professor at Cambridge. Was knighted for his work on proteins. Elected to Royal Society. Over 500 publications, including a standard graduate textbook. Citations in the tens of thousands. Now you are playing with the big boys.
So a 3/10 for Axe is generous. He is not a recognized authority, but he should know enough to know better.
Not ID at all. It basically contradicts the generalized extrapolation from the 2004 paper, which is why, despite their canonization of Axe, IDcreationists never cite this one.
Not only that, it’s much more credible because Axe measured barnase enzyme activity. I predict that the most that Lee will do is quote-mine without ever looking at the evidence in the paper.
Far too generous IMO.
OK, when would you like to start? Nothing you wrote after that looks like drilling to someone who spent most of his career studying how mutations affect protein function.
Particularly this:
That’s just objectively, spectacularly false.
Are specific folding patterns required for any particular function?
And this. At what point in your drilling did you see any data on the shape, much less the specific shape, of the protein?
No, that was a contrivance. Axe didn’t measure anything resembling that.
How so? If Axe believed that it was applicable, wouldn’t he have done that with other proteins?
From what you’ve written, your reasoning seems to be based on not really understanding the experience or what is possible from sleep related experiences, as well as a hefty dose of confirmation bias.
Like I said, I don’t think you’ll be willing to attribute any of this to natural causes so arguing about it isn’t really going to change anything.
My own experience with sleep related phenomena is that there is nothing supernatural about them.
Firstly, you have not been “pointing out” what “people, even here” “claim” Lee, you have been misrepresenting what “people, even here” say.
I MADE NO SUCH “CLAIM” of an “unreasoning cause” when I decided I had no interest in Habermas and Moreland’s book. You simply tried to put those words in my mouth.
I based my decision on (i) their lack of expertise in the subject, and (ii) the high likelihood that the content would be based upon motivated reasoning, rather than scientific curiosity. Bother criteria are continuous measures, and so neither rely upon your dichotomy.
I therefore outright reject your claim.
Secondly, even if I agreed to your characterisation, it would still not constitute a “reason”. As I have pointed out above, it is an argumentum ad populum fallacy. People very frequently follow ‘rules of thumb’, and even “principles” that are, at their core, logically fallacious. An obvious example would be the legal principle:
falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus
That people believe X, is not evidence that X is true.
You need to provide evidence WHY “reason cannot arise from unreason”, NOT simply claim that people believe this.
For the reasons I have stated above, my view is that it is no reason whatsoever.
And I found that to be a stupid comment.
Why wouldn’t it “fly”? Because your “brains cells” are part of you, and the part of you whose job it is to make decisions. It is no more reasonable than a claim than “I didn’t punch him, my left fist did”. Take away all your brain cells and you are an inanimate corpse.
Stricken as assuming facts not in evidence.
If it were “generally recognized” you should be able to provide wide-ranging authoritative documentation of it (and I would point out that “recognised by apologists” =/= “generally recognized”).
As I have pointed out “generally recognized” does not mean it cannot be fallacious.
I would also point out that the existence of the field of Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience means that your so-called “principle” is not universally recognised.
And I rebutted above.
No Lee, I am baldly stating that you have no evidence whatsoever. Just fallacious claims based upon misrepresentation.
No Lee. You “give” ASSERTIONS that you mistakenly think are good evidence.
You ASSERT “that people, even here, use this principle”.
No Lee, when you state “I think” or "“my view is”, you are making an assertion not an argument.
I have already addressed you pitiful argument above. I see no reason to address the assertions you litter your comments with separately.
They were not “other fallacies” Lee. They were examples, corroboration and thus evidence of the claim I was making – hence the colon linking my initial claim to them. As other have pointed out, you do not read for comprehension.
That they were evidence of my claim renders false your claim that I failed to provide evidence for it.
No Lee.
FIRST you have to clearly and rigorously define what you consider these two “options” to be.
The meaning you have given to “unreason” to date appears to be implicit, ad hoc and inconstant.
Given that I do not believe that “unreason” exists as a coherent category, I would be stupid to attempt to show that it overlaps with “reason”, without a clear definition.
Wrong.
By giving examples of various forms of imperfect reason that were intermediate between “reason” and “unreason”.
It shows a continuum, not a dichotomy.
Let me correct that for you Lee:
But all this does not address my [bald unsubstantiated assertion] that there are completely unreasoning causes of thoughts, such as dementia …
This assertion is not simply unsubstantiated Lee, it is false. I know this from personal experience. People with dementia have lucid periods (my late father suffered from dementia, but was more lucid than I’d seen him in years, shortly before the end). By you apparent (half-baked) definitions, this is reason coming out of unreason.
This further supports my contention that reason is a continuum not a dichotomy.
No Lee, it is not “irrelevant”. It is further evidence that there is no clear ‘black and white’ boundary between what you term “reason” and “unreason” – it is all shades of grey. And what is considered an acceptable or an unacceptable shade will depend on context.
I would note that this “challenge” is not evidence that “psychiatrists do look for unreasoning causes for peoples’ complaints”. It is simply burden shifting.
You already have an answer to your challenge: @Faizal_Ali.
I also mentioned that psychiatrists do look for unreasoning causes for peoples’ complaints!
Stricken in its entirety as assuming facts not in evidence.
No Lee – I already said “anything even approximating to ‘unreasoning’ causes”. Further example that Lee can’t read for comprehension.
I’m very sure that they’d make a note at least approximating to “phobia” or paranoia, even if they don’t use those exact words.
Yes Lee, I can. Your claim is “incorrect” because it misrepresents the reasoning behind their statements. It is you putting words in their mouths. I know this because I am one of the people you misrepresented – and I know how I reached my conclusion.
Like nearly everything else you have written on this thread Lee, it is nothing but unsubstantiated assertion.
And I point to people doing this very thing in this forum, again and again. So this is not just my word, I’m giving evidence.
Stricken in its entirety as unfounded bullshit.
OED gives three different definitions of “unreason” Lee:
“Unreasonable action or intention; injustice, impropriety.”
“Absence of reason; indisposition or inability to act or think rationally or reasonably.”
“That which is contrary to, or devoid of, reason.”
We therefore lack a single, unified defintion, and are left with a whole load of ambiguity. Evolutionary mechanisms may be “devoid” of reason, but they are not “contrary” to it. People with dementia aren’t pervassively “devoid” of reason – they are capable of reason some of the time. People who take “unreasonable action or intention” or act with “injustice, impropriety” are not incapable of reason.
These varying definitions clearly demonstrate that there isn’t a single coherent, homogeneous category called “unreason” – let alone that we can form the stark, insurmountable dichotomy that you claim.
You stated that “madness or delirium … illustrates directly the connection we all make between unreasoning causes, and reasoning that can be rejected.” You are therefore explicitly stating that “madness or delirium” is an unreasoning cause.
You then state that “people with mental illness knowing how to get to the kitchen just fine” – which is allowing an unreasoning cause to have a reasoning effect.
It seems we must add ‘rendering something moot’ to the concepts that Lee is incapable of understanding. 