Evidence through sense perception: A reliable way to detect God's existence?
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3173-evidence-through-sense-perception-a-reliable-way-to-detect-god-s-existence
When I started believing in God, as a teenager, it was maybe a naive faith. Today, however, I see that that approach was a valid one. The belief in God can be warranted as a prior belief, as a presupposition, and the perception of design in nature bolsters that belief. Things are as they are because there is a creator. Logically, to believe in design one can start with God. It is justified to start and assume God and trust his revelation, and then say he did this or that because certain things that exist, therefore there is a God who made them. We can start with God as an assumption, and end with HIM as the conclusion. That assumption explains everything after a careful examination of the natural world that confirms it.
Many atheists are skeptics and say that they do not believe because they have not seen compelling evidence. But:
1. The fact that we can only sense the natural physical world and not the supernatural does not mean by default, that the natural world is all there is.
2. With our senses, we can perceive only a fraction of the physical reality. Not even 0,0000000000000000000000000001%. We are also limited to experience the four dimensions we live in. There can be higher dimensions. It can be, that the more we unravel in the natural world, that it leads us more and more to infer God as the best explanation of our existence.
3. In order to trust our senses, we need to know that they are reliable, which depends on several axioms, like the ability of sound reasoning, to think logically and rationally. In order to conclude that God did not create the created order, we need to presuppose that these faculties are the product of evolution. Is that a warranted belief, or based on pseudo-scientific just-so evolutionary narratives and storytelling?
4. If there is no God that reveals himself to us, how can we know anything with a degree of certainty?
5. The fact that God does not manifest himself in the natural world in a way that proves his existence to all of us humans does not mean by default that he does not exist. He can have good reasons for that.
6. Testimonies of supernatural experiences cannot be discarded a prior as nonsensical.
1. Commonly, atheists claim that there is no evidence of God's existence. What they often mean is God is not empirically showing himself to the world, and, logically, therefore, God's existence is unwarranted, and there is no reason to believe that he exists. Essentially, they rely on their own capability of reasoning, and sense perception. But is sensory perception a reliable way to find the truth? In special when we talk about ultimate reality? Or is there more to consider, or to rely on? Is it justified to say: "Hence, as it is impossible for me to see or feel anything without an actual sensation of that thing, so it is impossible for me to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it."?
2. Research estimates that eighty to eighty-five percent of our perception, learning, cognition, and activities are mediated through vision 1 The ultimate purpose of the visual process is to arrive at an appropriate cognitive response. Vision takes precedence over all other senses. Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. 2 So, unconsciously, atheists expect foremost to see God in order to acknowledge his existence. But the fact that our senses are able to sense a fraction of the natural world, also means, that they are limited to sense the four dimensions of this universe. There can be more.
3. Descartes: “Surely whatever I had admitted until now as most true I received either from the senses or through the senses. However, I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive; and it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.” 3
We believe and presuppose that our senses are basically reliable and we can draw correct conclusions about the universe. Unless the source of our own reliable senses is not as well reliable, unchanging in nature, how can chaos, and unreliability be the source of reliable senses? Why are they reliable and unchanging when there is no physical necessity for that state of affairs? The fundamental forces operating in the universe should be expected to be chaotic, popping in and out, or oscillate in a stochastic, unpredictable manner.
We are warranted to expect that our memory and senses are reliable since they have been designed by God as stated in Scripture. God created us in His image, and since he is the supreme intelligence and all-knowing, we are justified to believe that we have been created by God, able to gain knowledge and to reason. If our thoughts were chaotic and random, not using logic and rationality, we would not be able to make sense of anything that happens in the universe at all.
Objective logic cannot be based on our subjective minds, a non-static universe, or immaterial abstractions outside of a mind. In order to understand our existence, we need to presuppose an orderly universe, governed by physical laws. Atheists have to assume it without having an explanation for why it is so. An atheist has no answers to why the initial conditions, and why physical laws exist at all. Atheists have to presuppose the intelligibility of the created order without having a justification and grounding of that state of affairs. 4
4. If there is no God that reveals himself to us, there is no reference point for us to know what is ultimately true and real. It can be anything. We can exist in a matrix, we can be the computer simulation of a 15-year-old kid in a parallel universe. If our biological features, and more importantly our cognitive machinery evolved from some evolutionary forces of nature, how can we trust our brain, our thinking, and our senses? the very thinking, belief, or trust in naturalism which are the products of blind or unguided forces of nature?? Of course, unbelievers can resort to the " I don't know, and that is a perfectly justified position". But I think that is not true, when we analyze the world around us.
5. If God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him. God has only revealed Himself enough to give us the choice of whether or not to believe? Pascal says, “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” If you prefer being an atheist, God values your free will more than His desires for you. If you are really after truth, then have an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if you don’t like the conclusion.
6. Many atheists discard testimonies of people that had a supernatural experience or near-death experiences as non-trustworthy, unreliable, and not worth being taken seriously. How do they justify that? They can't.
Many reports are detailed, consistent, and are worthy of serious consideration.
It is justified to start with God's revelation in the Bible. The presupposition that God is, is also justified by using reason, logic, analyzing the evidence given to us in nature, and intuition. God grounds everything. That is 1. Existence itself 2. The meaning of life 3. The value of human life 4. Moral values 5. Knowing what is objectively ( ontologically) true in regards to reality 6. Sound reasoning 7. Logic 8. Intelligibility 9. Consciousness 10. Uniformity in nature. Without HIM, none of all this can be explained in a consistent manner. We can only know about ultimate reality, God, and his nature if he reveals it to us. Science, done right, leads us to ultimate questions, to the grounding that grounds everything else, but that is not grounded in anything else. This reality, the laws of physics, the math that operates in the world, can be discovered, described, but not predicted. And, since these parameters are secured, stable, unchanging, and just right to permit life, they confirm that God is before all things, and in him, all things are held together.
1. Thomas Politzer, O.D. Vision Is Our Dominant Sense July 26, 2018
https://www.brainline.org/article/vision-our-dominant-sense
2. Lena Groeger Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time February 28, 2012
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-sense-world-sveral-senses-at-time/
3. Epistemology: How do you know that you know what you know?
https://fs.blog/2016/12/epistemology-know-know-know/
4. Presuppositionalism
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3116-presuppositionalism
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3173-evidence-through-sense-perception-a-reliable-way-to-detect-god-s-existence
When I started believing in God, as a teenager, it was maybe a naive faith. Today, however, I see that that approach was a valid one. The belief in God can be warranted as a prior belief, as a presupposition, and the perception of design in nature bolsters that belief. Things are as they are because there is a creator. Logically, to believe in design one can start with God. It is justified to start and assume God and trust his revelation, and then say he did this or that because certain things that exist, therefore there is a God who made them. We can start with God as an assumption, and end with HIM as the conclusion. That assumption explains everything after a careful examination of the natural world that confirms it.
Many atheists are skeptics and say that they do not believe because they have not seen compelling evidence. But:
1. The fact that we can only sense the natural physical world and not the supernatural does not mean by default, that the natural world is all there is.
2. With our senses, we can perceive only a fraction of the physical reality. Not even 0,0000000000000000000000000001%. We are also limited to experience the four dimensions we live in. There can be higher dimensions. It can be, that the more we unravel in the natural world, that it leads us more and more to infer God as the best explanation of our existence.
3. In order to trust our senses, we need to know that they are reliable, which depends on several axioms, like the ability of sound reasoning, to think logically and rationally. In order to conclude that God did not create the created order, we need to presuppose that these faculties are the product of evolution. Is that a warranted belief, or based on pseudo-scientific just-so evolutionary narratives and storytelling?
4. If there is no God that reveals himself to us, how can we know anything with a degree of certainty?
5. The fact that God does not manifest himself in the natural world in a way that proves his existence to all of us humans does not mean by default that he does not exist. He can have good reasons for that.
6. Testimonies of supernatural experiences cannot be discarded a prior as nonsensical.
1. Commonly, atheists claim that there is no evidence of God's existence. What they often mean is God is not empirically showing himself to the world, and, logically, therefore, God's existence is unwarranted, and there is no reason to believe that he exists. Essentially, they rely on their own capability of reasoning, and sense perception. But is sensory perception a reliable way to find the truth? In special when we talk about ultimate reality? Or is there more to consider, or to rely on? Is it justified to say: "Hence, as it is impossible for me to see or feel anything without an actual sensation of that thing, so it is impossible for me to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from the sensation or perception of it."?
2. Research estimates that eighty to eighty-five percent of our perception, learning, cognition, and activities are mediated through vision 1 The ultimate purpose of the visual process is to arrive at an appropriate cognitive response. Vision takes precedence over all other senses. Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. 2 So, unconsciously, atheists expect foremost to see God in order to acknowledge his existence. But the fact that our senses are able to sense a fraction of the natural world, also means, that they are limited to sense the four dimensions of this universe. There can be more.
3. Descartes: “Surely whatever I had admitted until now as most true I received either from the senses or through the senses. However, I have noticed that the senses are sometimes deceptive; and it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.” 3
We believe and presuppose that our senses are basically reliable and we can draw correct conclusions about the universe. Unless the source of our own reliable senses is not as well reliable, unchanging in nature, how can chaos, and unreliability be the source of reliable senses? Why are they reliable and unchanging when there is no physical necessity for that state of affairs? The fundamental forces operating in the universe should be expected to be chaotic, popping in and out, or oscillate in a stochastic, unpredictable manner.
We are warranted to expect that our memory and senses are reliable since they have been designed by God as stated in Scripture. God created us in His image, and since he is the supreme intelligence and all-knowing, we are justified to believe that we have been created by God, able to gain knowledge and to reason. If our thoughts were chaotic and random, not using logic and rationality, we would not be able to make sense of anything that happens in the universe at all.
Objective logic cannot be based on our subjective minds, a non-static universe, or immaterial abstractions outside of a mind. In order to understand our existence, we need to presuppose an orderly universe, governed by physical laws. Atheists have to assume it without having an explanation for why it is so. An atheist has no answers to why the initial conditions, and why physical laws exist at all. Atheists have to presuppose the intelligibility of the created order without having a justification and grounding of that state of affairs. 4
4. If there is no God that reveals himself to us, there is no reference point for us to know what is ultimately true and real. It can be anything. We can exist in a matrix, we can be the computer simulation of a 15-year-old kid in a parallel universe. If our biological features, and more importantly our cognitive machinery evolved from some evolutionary forces of nature, how can we trust our brain, our thinking, and our senses? the very thinking, belief, or trust in naturalism which are the products of blind or unguided forces of nature?? Of course, unbelievers can resort to the " I don't know, and that is a perfectly justified position". But I think that is not true, when we analyze the world around us.
5. If God stays hidden to a degree, He gives people the free will to either respond to His tugging at their hearts or remain autonomous from Him. God has only revealed Himself enough to give us the choice of whether or not to believe? Pascal says, “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” If you prefer being an atheist, God values your free will more than His desires for you. If you are really after truth, then have an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if you don’t like the conclusion.
6. Many atheists discard testimonies of people that had a supernatural experience or near-death experiences as non-trustworthy, unreliable, and not worth being taken seriously. How do they justify that? They can't.
Many reports are detailed, consistent, and are worthy of serious consideration.
It is justified to start with God's revelation in the Bible. The presupposition that God is, is also justified by using reason, logic, analyzing the evidence given to us in nature, and intuition. God grounds everything. That is 1. Existence itself 2. The meaning of life 3. The value of human life 4. Moral values 5. Knowing what is objectively ( ontologically) true in regards to reality 6. Sound reasoning 7. Logic 8. Intelligibility 9. Consciousness 10. Uniformity in nature. Without HIM, none of all this can be explained in a consistent manner. We can only know about ultimate reality, God, and his nature if he reveals it to us. Science, done right, leads us to ultimate questions, to the grounding that grounds everything else, but that is not grounded in anything else. This reality, the laws of physics, the math that operates in the world, can be discovered, described, but not predicted. And, since these parameters are secured, stable, unchanging, and just right to permit life, they confirm that God is before all things, and in him, all things are held together.
1. Thomas Politzer, O.D. Vision Is Our Dominant Sense July 26, 2018
https://www.brainline.org/article/vision-our-dominant-sense
2. Lena Groeger Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time February 28, 2012
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/making-sense-world-sveral-senses-at-time/
3. Epistemology: How do you know that you know what you know?
https://fs.blog/2016/12/epistemology-know-know-know/
4. Presuppositionalism
https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t3116-presuppositionalism
