Atheists Disprove God’s Existence Again!

Atheists Disprove God’s Existence Again! December 18, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y02UlkYjSi0

The Lowdown: A Scientist managed to replicate religious experience with electromagnetic waves applied to different parts of the brain. He goes on to tell the world that this proves there is no God. It was an absolute pleasure watching the Reddit crowd blow up over this one, and to see my atheist friends post it on their Facebook walls with such grave, epitaphic solemnities as “let mankind know knowledge instead of ignorance” and “science has done it at last!” (This time it’s for sure, apparently.)

It gives me the opportunity to clear up — for their sakes — a common misconception about the Christian religion, or perhaps just to assert an uncommon conception: The belief of a Christian hinges upon a Miracle — the Resurrection — and not upon miracles. This is important to realize, for there is an unspoken assumption made by these bored and boring scientists, that if the presence of God can be simulated, then religious experience is not miraculous, and thus God is not real.

Which, of course, deserves this educated and mature rebuttal:

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Followed by this:

The logic that simulated religious experience disproves God would only hold water if an essential doctrine of Christianity was that God does not work through the physical world — our brains — but is confined to undetectable spiritual planes. This is not an essential doctrine of Christianity. In fact, it is a rejection of The Only Freaking Central Doctrine of Christianity — that God became man, and thus deigns not only to work through matter and flesh, but to be matter and flesh.

Not a spirit-God-thing, sorry.

Once again, the Atheist expects far more from God than the Christian. The Atheist demands magic. The Christian is comfortable with chemicals. The Atheist demands that God operate entirely outside of our bodies. The Christian is comfortable with religious experience being just that — an experience, and thus experimental. He knows himself to be an inseparable union of body and soul, and that the God-Man, of all beings, would never interact with just one of these two. If God touches my soul, he touches my brain. Sure, and why not, and duh, and I would hardly expect otherwise.

But the refutation of a stupid idea need be more than a reassertion of those forever forgotten facts; what Christians actually believe. Our Scientist’s logic sucks to begin with. Let us say there was such a thing as sex. Let us say that, scandalously, a large part of the population claimed to have it, and worse, claimed it to be quite an elevating experience, attributing to it all sorts of supernatural terms — “love”, “spiritual union” etc. etc. Let us then go on to say that, at the same time as all this sex, there lived a Scientist. Now our Scientist performs an experiment in which he stimulates all the necessary parts of the brain involved in sex. After much hard work, a painful divorce, and difficult dealings with awkward volunteers, he managed to perfectly simulate the sexual act by the power of electro-magnetic waves. He then publishes YouTube videos claiming the following, “The experience of sex in its entirety can be simulated by electromagnetic waves. Thus all claims of spiritual union etc. etc. are false. Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that there is no sex.”

Now put in this context, it sounds ridiculous, because the reality of sex is self-evident. God is not. But the same false assumption is made nonetheless: Because a thing can be simulated, it can only ever be a simulation.

This is ridiculous. We can chemically simulate every emotion under the sun; does this mean emotions don’t exist as anything but simulations? We can simulate hunger, flying, love, courage, drowning, dreaming, and dying; do these things become unrealities as a result? Of course not. This much seems apparent, that a simulation does not disprove a thing — it rather helps prove it. We have parts of our brain that, when stimulated, can make us nervous. Well, there is such a thing as being nervous. We have parts of our brain that, when stimulated, make us believe that there is a world beyond what we can perceive. Well then, it would seem to follow that there is a world we cannot perceive.

Otherwise the claim must be that a large portion of our brain is idiotic. The idea that we developed this part of our brain out of a fear of death is almost too stupid to mention here. But I will, because I like appearing intelligent without really trying. A happy afterlife is a relatively recent concept within Judeo-Christian religion. The Ancient Jews did not have a doctrine of Heaven. That came later. So immediately, the idea that the conception of a God came from a need to avoid the fear of Death and Dark and Nothingness is reduced to wishful thinking. Obedience of the harsh law of God came before any concept of a Divine Reward. Good luck explaining that away.

The simulation of religious experience only suggests that there is such a thing as religious experience. So as tends to happen, the fervent work of atheists further convinces me in the existence of God. We have, built into our very being, a concept of God. Religious belief is part of human nature.


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