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Are all supernatural and religious experiences delusions?

Debate Information

This debate is open to anyone.

Rules: This debate will consist of three rounds. The first round will be to propose a thesis of ones position on this question and to provide any evidence in support of that position. The second round will be to cross examine the opponent's position, and to provide any counter evidence or demonstrate how it is in fallacy. The final round will be a rebuttal to the cross examination, to demonstrate any misconceptions, correct any errors, and answer questions in the cross examination.
  1. This debate will consist of three rounds of 24 hours each.
  2. The first round will be to propose a thesis of ones' position on this question and to provide any evidence and constructive arguments in support of that position.
  3. The second round will be to cross examine the opponent's position by asking any fair, clear questions relevant to the debate. No new constructive arguments are to be provided during this time.
  4. The final round will be a rebuttal to the cross examination, to answer the questions asked and if necessary correct any misconceptions or errors in the cross examination. No new constructive arguments are to be provided during this time.
  5. Each person participating in the debate must advocate for their position for the duration of the debate and must advocate for everything provided by that position.
  6. Any fallacies in the opponents argument must be clearly stated and the type of fallacy must be demonstrated.
  7. There should be no harassing or name calling.
  8. External evidence can be provided from any links, published papers, graphic images, or quotes from relevant authorities.
  9. video evidence such as youTube or Vimeo may not have a duration longer than 20% of the round time (6:00 for a 30 minute round time)
  10. Any deviation from the procedure provided in steps 1-4 or failing to follow the rules in steps 5-10 will result in a forfeit of the debate.
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At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
Through a long process of evolution this life 
developed into the human race.
Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .

All of that so we can argue about nothing.



Debra AI Prediction

For
Predicted To Win
61%
Likely
39%
Unlikely

Details +


For:

53% (17 Points)


Against:

47% (15 Points)



Votes: 2


Voting Format: Moderate Voting

Rounds: 3

Time Per Round: 24 Hours Per Round


Voting Period: 24 Hours


Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Voting



Post Argument Now Debate Details +



    Arguments


  • Round 1 | Position: For
    Happy_KillbotHappy_Killbot 5557 Pts   -  

    Throughout history and in virtually all cultures and civilizations, there have been stories and rumors of people engaging with or witnessing supernatural entities. It is therefore tempting to believe that there is some truth to these stories, until we look at the details. I will argue that none of these events are true in the strictest most literal sense, and rather are based on delusions or are simply meant to be metaphysical stories. Although it is impossible to go through each of these stories individually, it is evident when viewed as a whole that they are most likely all false.

    1) The variety in stories as a result of cultural changes suggests that these events never actually happened, or else there would be more consistency in the events of the stories.

    For example, the ancient Egyptian story of Khonsemhab involves an unnamed narrator who is haunted by an angry spirit who is displeased at the state of his tomb, only to call on the help of Khonsemhab to aid the spirit by promising to repair the damage. If this was the case, we should still see this spirit wandering the desert today, since his tomb is now in worse shape than ever.

    The Roman story of the author and statesman Pliny is closer to our modern stories, he writes that he hears chains rattling in his walls and reports seeing an old man with a beard. This is already far removed from the previous, because there is no direct communication with this entity, and the story involves a man who needed only receive a proper burial, as the story goes a man was found bound in chains buried in the yard.

    Our modern stories involve much more elaborate and complex things, such as possession, unexplained movement of objects or images, and often involve more than just the spirits of the dead, but also things like demons and trips to other realms. The sudden change in the subject of the story, moving from simply not getting a proper or dignified burial to the subject of abject evil constitutes a major shift in the telling of these stories, no doubt a result of Christian influence.

    We find that what most people witness is in line with what they already believe from their own local religion or culture. If we look at ancient ghost stories in comparison to modern ones, we find many stark differences that can only be attributed to cultural shift as a result of the societies maturing.

    2) Many modern people who claim to have had supernatural or religious experiences say and do things that are not always strictly in line with the teachings of any one religion.

    There are countless crimes committed where people plead that god told them to do it. Deanna Laney had murdered her two sons, Joshua 8, and Luke 6, and attempted to kill her 15-month old child Aaron. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, having believed that god told her to do what she did. There are many more circumstances similar to this one, where the person in question has done unspeakable things in the name of god, believing that they must do it or else, sometimes even hearing voices and claiming to see Jesus.

    3) Many religious or supernatural experiences are made up by admission of those telling the stories, but not until after many have come to believe them as truth.

    On a less depressing note, the boy who claimed to have gone to the Christian heaven, who’s story was written into a best-selling book and later a movie, has famously recanted his entire story and the book was pulled from shelves. The reason he claims to have done this was for the attention. This story received critique among not only atheists and agnostics, but also from Christians who pointed out that the story violates the bible, in particular John 3:13 - "No one has ascended into Heaven except the one who descends from Heaven, the son of man" Thus this story would contradict the bible should it be true.

    4) There is growing neurological research which suggests underlying cause for religious and supernatural beliefs.

    There is measurement in-variance across diverse samples of religious persons and cultures. This means that spirituality or religiosity can be quantitatively measured in individuals. The theory is that religiosity evolved out of our need to detect agency in the environment as a means of locating potential threats and determining what prey might do. Those who are hypersensitive to this type of stimulus might detect agents where in reality there are none, forming the foundations for the beliefs that would latter evolve into religious ones, for example attributing reality to creation by a deity.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5070870/

    In addition, there is a part of the brain that deals with agency, and we can activate this region to trigger supernatural experiences, near death, or out of body experiences in those that are sensitive to them. Dr. Michael Persinger has created a helmet that contains a number of electro-magnets which are positioned in such a way to trigger these experiences by activating the appropriate regions of the brain.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O_aGlm9QjU

    5) Due to the lack of reproducibility in all circumstances, it is always possible that all supernatural or religious experiences did not happen in reality.

    In science, everything has to be reproducible in order for us to say that it is true. For example, if you drop a ball and it goes up instead of dropping to the ground, even just one time, then we can say that it is false that things always fall. It is therefore useful to think that things always fall because we can expect that when you drop something, we can expect it to behave in a predictable way.

    The same is not true for supernatural and religious experiences.

    Let’s assume for a moment that ghosts were real, and when you die your spirit is detached from your body which has limited agency in reality. If this was true, then there should be all sorts of implications that could be potentially useful, for example if a detached spirit could look around from above, that would have obvious applications for things like search and rescue, reconnaissance, and of course recovery of information after someone had died. If there was such a thing as a soul and ghosts, then all of these things should be possible and already technologically feasible. However, the lack of development for these technologies indicates that there is no truth here, only delusion.

    At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
    Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
    Through a long process of evolution this life 
    developed into the human race.
    Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .

    All of that so we can argue about nothing.
  • Round 1 | Position: For
    PlaffelvohfenPlaffelvohfen 3985 Pts   -  
    This can be tricky... And as much as I'd like to argue for, I can't on technicalities...

    Clinically, delusions are only diagnosed if they’re not consistent with the person’s existing belief system and views. It's not about whether the experience itself is real or not, nor is it about the validity of the interpretation of the experience, it's really about consistency with one's worldview... A delusion is a false belief that is not accounted for by the person’s cultural or religious background or his or her level of intelligence. Delusion is never a mere object which can be objectively detected and described, because it evolves and exists within subjective and interpersonal dimensions only, however “pathological” these dimensions may be. 

    Holding unjustified beliefs is not delusional per se, it can be misguided/uneducated belief, one can be fooled into holding certain beliefs or the claimed belief can be unfalsifiable. Say someone believes in the existence of ghosts, in itself that is not clinically delusional. Believing, with a high degree of certainty, that you actually interact with them would be... Now, some religious people are  delusional you'll agree, but so are some atheists, mental disorders knows no prejudice... 

    On the experience itself, it's quite real I assure you, but it's akin to a psychedelic experience, I can attest to this, I've had both (yet I'm still an atheist and not delusional, at least usually .. ;) ). These experiences are achievable, as you accurately pointed out, through direct physical tempering with the brain but also by meditation, drug use or can also be in reaction to some mental trauma like witnessing a gruesome murder, etc. The problem comes when interpreting these experiences and recovering from them, because the experience can induce delusional thought patterns...

    Notice, I've only addressed the notion of Delusion, not religious or supernatural beliefs as forms of "mental disorders" to which delusions can be a symptom of, and there maybe more to say from this perspective...
    " Adversus absurdum, contumaciter ac ridens! "
  • Round 1 | Position: Against
    MayCaesarMayCaesar 5970 Pts   -  
    I think it is important to understand how vague the concept of "delusion" is. What really is a delusion? In general, we can define it as discrepancy between one's perception of reality and this reality itself. However, there are some issues with this definition, namely:
    1. One's perception of reality is always colored by a series of lenses developed as a result of their experiences, physiology, etc. Given this, there will always be *some* discrepancy between one's perception of reality and the reality, hence every perception we have is, to some extent, a delusion - making the term pretty useless.
    2. What is "reality"? Since we always perceive the reality through some lenses giving us bias, we cannot really know what reality itself is, or if it even exists. Science tries to go around this issue by allowing different people to conduct the same experiments and compare their results - and when the results are independent on who performs them, we proclaim that a fragment of the reality has been determined. However, even the fragment we receive as a result of this process depends on our interpretation of it (and there is, in principle, infinity of possible interpretations, given that we never know absolutely everything about the world - and even if we did, we still could probably explain the observations in many different ways).
    In conclusion, "delusion" is a somewhat ill-determined term, and calling some experiences delusions and other experiences non-delusions is problematic.

    Next point I would like to make is that, even though our perceptions, as stated before, are always tinted by the lenses we see the world through, they are not necessarily wrong. Often these lenses are merely convenient models we hold in our heads, helping us simplify and explain various phenomena in our lives. 
    Take the concept of "love" as an example. Someone could say that there is nothing special about it; it is just chemical reactions that develop when we spend a lot of time with the right human being. However, seeing it like this is quite limiting and impractical. Instead, we see love as this invisible connection between two individuals, this almost mystical "aura" that grows stronger when the two individuals are in close proximity. We romanticize it, we prescribe it divine powers, we put it above almost all other feelings and experiences one can have in life... Is this all a delusion? I do not think so: many of us do understand that it is all fundamentally a fiction, but we like this fiction and consciously choose to believe in it.

    While it is hard personally for me to imagine believing in god seriously, there are people out there who see the god as fiction which they choose to believe in. There are also people who do not see it as fiction, however their belief in it is so strong that it effectively changes their reality, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy; from their perspective, they live in the world with a god in it, and the evidence in their eyes is so strong that it is as obvious to them that god exists as it is to you that you exist. At what point does it stop being a self-fulfilling prophecy and starts being a delusion? I do not know the answer, or even if this question makes sense.

    I would also like to add in conclusion a more practical note: seeing other people's experiences that we interpret differently from them as delusions is dangerous, in that it covertly states that our own experiences are not delusions. This makes us blind to the bias in our own perceptions and inclines us to relax our critical thinking. In a sense, the most delusional person is the one who believes that everyone is delusional but them. I prefer to keep an open mind and never allow myself to think that my perceptions are more objective than those of someone else, even when I deal with the most obvious cases such as mental hospital patients. There have been countless examples in human history when someone who everyone believed was insane turned out to be a genius, who subsequently made major scientific or philosophical discoveries. Never discount someone simply because their point of view seems outlandish; the more outlandish it is, the more there could be to learn from it.
    This is why on this website I try to have discussions with everyone, even with people who seem to just be playing a character or be completely deranged: such people are the ones most likely to say something that will challenge your most basic preconceptions, and even if the challenge does not punch a hole in your system of beliefs, it nevertheless will get you thinking about the fundamentals your world view is based on, strengthening its foundation.
    Plaffelvohfen
  • Round 2 | Position: For
    Happy_KillbotHappy_Killbot 5557 Pts   -  

    @plaffelvohfen While I agree the clinical definition of delusion is not consistent with simply having beliefs, would beliefs which no one else can agree with, or which contradict established facts be considered delusional?

    If someone claims to have had a religious experience which no one else witnessed, and there is no evidence for, why should we assume that this event occurred?

    You mention that that the experience is real, but can be attributed to non-supernatural factors, giving the example of psychedelics and direct tampering. If these experiences can be induced, does that mean that there is no supernatural component to these experiences, and suggests that all supernatural experiences could be explained through physical means?

    @MayCaesar the opening statements of your argument focus on the vagueness of the term delusion, personal biases, and question the assumption of an objective reality. If there are things that we can all agree upon, such as scientific discovery, then these things are useful in that if anyone knows them, they will always be true. Are delusions, or what we would call delusions, ever useful in that they can be used to gain further capabilities through the use of the knowledge?

    I would agree that belief doesn’t automatically imply delusion, however if we assume that there is a point at which belief stops being so and starts being delusion, could we quantify that point?

    Would you consider someone delusional if their worldview was not based on agreed upon truth, for example if they believed they were a movie star when clearly, they are not? To give a religious example, wouldn’t it be delusional to believe the earth to be 6,000 years old when there is overwhelming evidence it is much, much older?

    I would agree that those who do not question their own beliefs put themselves in a dangerous position where they are less likely to detect bias in their own positions. However, I have to ask, if those who are the most delusional are the ones who think that everyone but them is delusional, then how can we conclude that delusion is a somewhat ill-defined term?

    At some point in the distant past, the universe went through a phase of cosmic inflation,
    Stars formed, planets coalesced, and on at least one of them life took root.
    Through a long process of evolution this life 
    developed into the human race.
    Humans conquered fire, built complex societies and advanced technology .

    All of that so we can argue about nothing.
  • Round 2 | Position: Against
    PlaffelvohfenPlaffelvohfen 3985 Pts   -  

    @plaffelvohfen While I agree the clinical definition of delusion is not consistent with simply having beliefs, would beliefs which no one else can agree with, or which contradict established facts be considered delusional?

    Well, that could be what is called an overvalued idea... I do think that many religious beliefs can be delusional ontologically (virgin birth, transubstantiation, etc) but unless one actually acts on those beliefs, one cannot be said to be delusional himself..  :/
    If someone claims to have had a religious experience which no one else witnessed, and there is no evidence for, why should we assume that this event occurred?
    Because there is no good reason not to... Someone saying "I had a religious experience alone at home", is exactly the same as saying "I did some shrooms alone at home"... Why would you doubt it occurred?? People experience things all the time and that is all one can say about them... It's not about the content of the experience, but the form...  

    Say we make an experiment with 3 people (S1, S2, S3)... S1 has a religious experience, S2 has a psychedelic experience with psilocybin, S3's experience is surgically induced... 

    S1 recounts his experience to you saying "I was filled with the presence of the Lord, felt elated through every fiber of my being, I felt so much love I fell down crying like I never cried before... I saw a floating figure of light and I could hear its thoughts, it beckoned me and embraced me in the warmth of his essence, I think I was in Heaven..."
    S2 recounts his experience saying "I literally felt the curvature of the planet while I was lying on the roof looking at the moon, I was one with the whole planet and I felt so small and limited... I could see the fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field, like rainbowed waves... I sensed Mars and Jupiter and all the other planets gravity field !!"
    S3 recount his as a typical alien abduction scenario...

    From this, we cannot deny they experienced something, whatever it was.. And we cannot assert that any of the 3 subjects are delusional because those experience are all accounted for in their existing belief structure...   

    S1 existing belief, is the reality of an unfalsifiable god... As sad as it is, it's enough to prevent saying they're delusional in their belief in God as all those reported experiences are consistent with a belief in a god... Same can be said for S2 and S3, the things they describe (not the experience of those things), exist or could exist and would not contradict their existing belief structure...

    Now, say S1 gets obsessed with recalling those "thoughts" he pretends he could hear, in order to put them on paper because he says it's the most important mission of his life, that it will save the world... He would now be delusional... Say S2 gets obsessed with blocking the Earth's magnetic field waves from touching him, puts a lot of effort in making aluminum clothes and such, he would then be delusional.. S3 goes into debt to install a $100k surveillance system to protect him from aliens, he's now delusional...

    People that act on false beliefs can be said to be delusional, just holding the belief is not enough...
    You mention that that the experience is real, but can be attributed to non-supernatural factors, giving the example of psychedelics and direct tampering. If these experiences can be induced, does that mean that there is no supernatural component to these experiences, and suggests that all supernatural experiences could be explained through physical means?
    There is no supernatural components to any of these experience, you are correct... That is not to say that they happen physically... All experiences are "meta", for lack of a better word but that's not supernatural...
    " Adversus absurdum, contumaciter ac ridens! "
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