Anti-Personhood Rally at Oklahoma State Capitol, Feb 28, 2012

I was there.
See my review here.

Sense & sensibility

Former Christian turned atheist Byron said:

All we have to determine truth about the external world in a naturalistic perspective are the five physical senses and our ability to reason. Our five senses along with our reason cannot operate perfectly, or without limitation, yet this does not invalidate their use in ordinary life, and for the pursuit of science. And this is where group accountability comes in, because on more important matters, we make reference not only to our own ability to gather and analyze data, but also to others collectively, whose agreement in oversight lends our own views some additional authority. It is not a mistake, therefore to ask for some material proof or evidence to consider objectively, especially such as can be reviewed analytically and critiqued by multiple observers.

Because God is by the definition I learned omniscient and omnipotent, God is also fully knowledgeable and capable of presenting sufficient and overwhelming evidence to convince all those He targets to do so, at least in the material world. It is not an unreasonable expectation, at least in the context of naturalism, to expect such a divine response if God truly wishes for one to believe. Although God is also by definition supernatural, then the reasonable expectation of believers is that God would prefer supernatural as opposed to natural means to reveal Himself.

If God operates in the supernatural realm alone, then I cannot place any limits or bound His operation by any desires I have, especially in seeking revelation of Himself. So unless God chooses to reveal Himself supernaturally or naturally (I suspect you could say the Scriptural revelations are combinations of both) to the believer, then God cannot be known. I also cannot deny the charge of Romans 1 if that is the case, because God has left behind some evidence in nature of His supernatural existence and operation. But the problem with that is, I cannot be shown by the material senses and reason that a supernatural realm even exists in the first place, let alone constitutes a superior reality as a frame of reference. So I feel that any accusation of moral failure for failing to perceive such is ultimately unjustified.

1. If it's true our senses are normally too unreliable (e.g. if Plantinga's EAAN is true), then I don't see how it will help if we have a group of individuals in a concerted effort to find the truth with their likewise faulty senses. I don't see how you justify the leap. It'd be like the blind leading the blind, wouldn't it?

2. As an aside, we have more than five senses. For instance, there's proprioception, nociception, thermoception, and equilibrioception (which is technically more than one sense), among others.

3. Just because we can't sense God with our normal senses doesn't mean we can never sense God.

a. For one thing, God could bypass our senses and communicate directly with our minds.

b. Also, we can sense God through sensing other things with our senses. For example, we cannot directly sense time with our senses. There is no physical organ responsible for sensing time itself in the same way there are physical organs responsible for sight, smell, taste, etc. However, we can still sense the passage of time through what we see and hear, from whence we can infer its existence.

4. On a related note, how do we know you're a person, Byron? Perhaps you're a cleverly designed android which perfectly mimics a human being. Far better than the mechas in A.I., the replicants in Blade Runner, Cameron in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, or the skin job cylons in the new BSG. We can sense your corporeal properties, but we can't directly sense your mind or consciousness. Since we can't sense such hallmarks of personhood, could we therefore justifiably assert you are not a person?

5. You say you don't believe in God because you can't sense him. But this argument is a double-edged sword. Some people say they do believe in God because they can sense him. As such, the arguments would seem to cancel one another out.

That said, the fact that you can't sense God isn't epistemically on equal footing with the fact that someone else can sense God since sensing God is a positive form of evidence for his existence while the inability to sense God is neutral on the existence or nonexistence of God.

Phineas Gage

In particular, [Marilynne] Robinson says, these "parascientists" [e.g. E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett] deliberately slight "the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left." At the very least, "an honest inquirer" into the nature of religion "might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job." We are not, she maintains, simply the instrument of selfish genes. Indeed, she suspects that the "modern malaise," our sense of emptiness and alienation, can be attributed not to the "death of God" but rather to the widely promulgated, and reductionist, view of the self as wholly biological.

Robinson assails Wilson and company most powerfully by accusing them of faulty, narrow-minded thinking. Take their frequent use of the story of Phineas Gage, the railway worker famous for surviving an accident in which a large iron rod was driven through his skull. Afterwards, according to contemporary accounts, his behavior changed dramatically and he was "fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane." For the parascientists, this proves that personality and character "are localized in a specific region of the brain [e.g. cerebral cortex]," a fact, adds Robinson, "that, by their lights, somehow compromises the idea of individual character and undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature."

But Robinson asks us to actually think about Phineas Gage. How would you feel and react if you had had your upper jaw shattered, lost an eye and suffered severe disfigurement? Gage "was twenty-five at the time of the accident. Did he have dependents? Did he have hopes? These questions seem to me of more than novelistic interest in understanding the rage and confusion that emerged in him as he recovered." In the parascientific writings about Gage, she asserts, "there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate." In essence, these scholars "participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind."

(Source.)