Religion

Hello philosophers , recently in a debate with Christians , I made a point that if one claims a relationship with a God or being that can't be seen , heard or touched that they are suffering from a delusion; is this an unfair statement and if so why ?

Comments

It's fair if it's a good

It's fair if it's a good argument. But is it? Is your premise true?

Your Christian friends could have replied that when they think about the number three, say, or any other abstract entity, they have a relationship with it.

Yet one cannot see, hear, or touch such a thing.

Nor does the other entity have to be abstract. One could reasonably claim to have in a conversation a relationship with another mind, but minds, even though they are concrete, "can't be seen, heard or touched", and people who make such claims are not suffering from a delusion.

The technical problem with your argument is that it is question begging. You didn't provide any evidence against the religious claim, but instead you simply asserted it was wrong/insane without further argument. In the same way, I have heard some Christians simply assert that unbelief is a result of sin. In both cases no/little evidence is provided for the key premise to the argument.

Roughly your argument would run:

Immaterial things do not exist

Anyone who interacts with something that doesn't exist is deluded

Therefore, anyone who claims to interact with God is deluded

But, obviously no Christian is going to accept your first critical premise. Nor would the overwhelming number of cross cultural or historic thinkers. Those who would reject the premise assuming immaterial things don't exist not only include religious thinkers, but anyone who believes in an immaterial soul. So to have a remotely convincing argument you need to prove that immaterial things don't exist.

Just to add a bit to what my fellow panelists have said (all of which seems right to me.)

Even if God can't be seen or heard or touched in ordinary sensory ways, many believers would claim that they have experiences of God. There's a vast literature on this topic, but one interesting recent contribution is by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann: her book When God Talks Back gives a detailed account of how some people, as they understand it, learn to experience God. You can read a brief synopsis HERE (Scroll way down if the page appears not to load properly.)

You might say that these people are mistaken, and you might (or might not) be right. You might say that they are deluded, but unless you simply mean "mistaken," the word "deluded" doesn't add anything. There's no reason to believe that such believers are mentally ill by any reasonable criterion.

As it happens, I'm not a theist. But over the years, I've come to the conclusion that many atheists have a mistaken picture of the religious lives of believers. This leads to a good deal of misunderstanding.

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