Originally Posted by
Grendel
Godel's Incompleteness, i.e., a system can't prove its own correctness or consistency within its own confines. Ergo, a lot of things we think aren't evidence for a god existing actually might be, and it's prohibitive to verify them one way or another.
The catch: when all else is equal, there's simply no positive reason to believe in a god, unless an individual has had an experience that can't be more simply explained by anything else. But anomalies of the mind happen all the time. There is little evidence for existence of a god that is not transcendental to physicality, that we can undeniably identify in the material world, and so our knowledge of what a god is can only be conferred by perceived transcendental experiences. However, since we know anomalies of the mind are common, we have no reason to believe a transcendental religious experience is not merely an anomaly of the mind's function, unless we are the ones experiencing it. We know of the existence of our own minds because we are them, and we experience both the physical and transcendental directly through them; but we hear of the transcendental experiences of others only through the conduit of physicality, and so the only way to give another person's transcendental experiences parity with one's own, is to also accept that physicality is just as real as the transcendental.
But most of the information we perceive in physicality is fairly self-contained to the physical world, and has far more visible connections to other objects within physicality than to the transcendental. The transcendental, our access to a god, is accessible only by tiny conduits from our physical experience, and since all our knowledge of the nature of god is thus dependent on the legitimacy of these conduits - that is, the condition that they are not simply byproducts of our experience in physicality - the odds of a god existing, on terms of the physical world, are likely very low.
An ascended mind may conclude that the grounds for physicality's legitimacy are in every way as shaky as those for the transcendent world's legitimacy, but for the average person, as a default state, physical experiences are harder to deny on a day-to-day basis than transcendental ones. If you've never had a transcendent experience, you can deny it without effort, but if you are experiencing pain from the physical world, it takes effort, in a vacuum, to deny it; you can deny it, but if you are passive, it will affect you whether or not you deliberately acknowledge it. For a few people, this may apply to the transcendent as well, but from what I know, this is not the case for the majority of people.
To have a Spirit stronger than one's Flesh, to acknowledge the primacy of God over the World beneath him, is a property of the privileged few among minds rather than the many, and the wise and experienced rather than the commoner. One may claim that they are entirely a child of God in this world, and that physicality is as illusory to them as God is to us; and we, having the common experience of physicality, may attribute his perceptions to a delusion of the mind. He may claim not to see us, yet we continue to see him. But conversely, if one claims they are entirely a child of the World, and no perception of God can reach him at all, what then? One may be rejected by God by no fault of their own as we understand fault, and yet, nothing they do may ever give them access to God. A child of the World cannot serve God or find refuge in God, and thus it makes no sense for him to live as if that God exists.
To put it simply, the question of God vs. the World is an issue of practice, rather than truth. Even assuming God does exist, he is a dead end for many that live, and for these people, no energy should be spent on him. To them, he is as good as a shadow, even assuming he is real; for many interpretations of his nature holds that he deliberately eludes the minds of many, and so a belief in him will never be pragmatic for the masses.
Arguments from the nature of the mind's ability to perceive the world can be made to defend the likelihood of a god, but they are hardly evidence of the existence of any specific god as past cultures knew him, that is, as the Abrahamic god or a Hindu god. On the other hand, arguments both from specific and nonspecific understandings of god's nature have been used by those that claim to understand him, as justification for fettering or persecuting those who will never be his children, in the physical world.
And that's just annoying.
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