Are Gods physical?

[ytrewq]

In a previous thread I was astounded to hear the claim that Gods are not physical, presumably meaning they do not consist of physical matter. How any theist could actually claim to know that is a mystery, but never mind. The question being asked here is :-

Are Gods made from physical matter, and if they are not, then what are they made from.

If they are able to think and do stuff, then presumably they must be made of something.

By physical matter, I mean the physical stuff within our Universe from which everything else is made from, which includes atoms, sub-atomic particles, and to be fair I suppose we must include dark matter as well.

But there are other classes of things that undeniably exist, that are not physical matter as such, that perhaps Gods could be made of. Here is a list of stuff that definitely exists, and thus Gods might potentially be made of :-

(a) Physical matter, including atoms, sub-atomic particles, and dark matter

(b) Electromagnetic radiation and other forms of radiation, energy and fields. For example, light and radio waves.

(c) Human (or animal) feelings, emotions, thoughts, love, hate jealousy, intelligence, stupidity, truth, dishonesty, spirituality and so on. All of these can be said to exist, but not in a physical form.

(d) Similar to (c), morals, legal or scientific laws, stories, information, principles, and so on. As with (c), all of these can be said to exist, but not in a physical form, although the media that encodes them may be physical, such as a book or CD.

OK. So what are Gods made from? Certainly not anything in the (c) or (d) category, which do not physically exist in their own right and are not capable of performing physical feats on their own. That is, it makes no sense to say that a God (or anything else) is made from love, or justice or logic or spirituality. These are attributes of something that physically exists.

I have heard it said that Gods are not physical, but spiritual. Spiritual is an adjective, an attribute of something that exists, so it makes no sense to say that a God is made of spirituality, any more than saying it is made of love. So sure, Gods probably are very spiritual things, but that says nothing of what they are made from, which is the topic of this thread.

So what is left? Within the realms of human knowledge, and Im not interested in just making stuff up, then I must conclude that Gods (if they exist) are made of the same stuff that everything else in the Universe is made of, being categories (a) and (b).

Anyone agree or disagree with the above?

[Mithrae]

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Maybe the monks had security cameras and mirrors installed to spy on any such enquirers?

Regardless how much I respected and trusted a friend, if someone told me that tale my reaction would be to doubt its veracity. Testimonials and anecdotes are prone to error even if well intentioned -- and, of course, cannot be verified.

I've had great friends who I'd nevertheless take with a grain of salt even if they say they met a nice girl (what's the lying equivalent of kleptomania, I'm sure there's a word for it), and others whose intentions and integrity I'd trust for even the most far-fetched claims but question their perception/interpretation. There've been probably nigh on a dozen folk who've told me about paranormal experiences with varying degrees of wow factor, but while some were downright dubious and others are at best a maybe/maybe not kind of deal, this (and perhaps another quite distant second, ironically also non-Christian) is the only one I both took seriously while I knew them and still holds up under the scepticism of dispassionate hindsight.

Obviously as anonymous second-hand anecdote it's not going to impress anyone else But then odds are nothing would, so I figured why not just post an example which if true would meet ytrewq's criteria regardless?

[ytrewq]

So what would count as evidence that something supernatural or paranormal was going on during meditation? Potentially, a near infinity of things. For example, regularly predicting something that could not possibly have been know by other means. It could also be an observation of something that could not possibly been seen from the location of the person's eyes. And so on. There are an infinite number of ways that a supernatural/paranormal aspect of meditation could be demonstrated, but the fact of the matter is that no one ever has, and this includes a lack of evidence for the perception that one's consciousness is or can be outside of one's body and brain.

Does anyone disagree with what I wrote here?

We've already seen that - for some folk at least - basically any alternative explanation no matter how unsubstantiated, ad hoc or even physically impossible will be considered "obvious" in comparison to the supposedly 'paranormal' one.?

Can you answer the question?

If you are referring to me re "some folk", then I refer you to my posting #241. And yes Mithrae, every possible attempt should be made to find an alternative to a paranormal explanation, and even then, it's even OK to say "I don't know", which in no way implies that the answer is paranormal. Please read my posting #241.

[ytrewq]

[Replying to post 248 by Mithrae]

As a fundamentalist Christian lad in high school my best friend ironically was a Buddhist. I knew him for almost a decade all up; very trustworthy and smart fellow (he went on to study law and could probably still run rings around me in debate Neutral ... though I had him beat in maths at least!). Obviously we discussed religion a fair bit, and at some point we got round to exchanging personal 'miracle' stories. As much hope as I invested into them at the time, my personal 'miracles' were really just coincidences, providence at best. It actually became a bit of a running joke later on. But he told me about an occasion when he'd been back in his homeland, how his family had gone to visit a mountain monastery and he'd written a list of questions to ask the monks there; twenty I think, or maybe just a dozen or so. Apparently he went to talk to one of the monks, and without even asking him anything the monk just started answering all of the questions, one by one.

Maybe the monks had security cameras and mirrors installed to spy on any such enquirers? Maybe he'd hinted at his doubts to his mother, and she'd sneaked a peak at his list while he slept and conveyed the intelligence to the monastery beforehand? Maybe in the course of ordinary conversation the monk had touched on some of the key areas of concern and, despite his intelligence, lost in the grandeur of the monastery and the dimness of hindsight my friend inflated that into the story he told me?

Or maybe the monk perceived his concerns by means beyond the fysicalist paradigm?

Thank you for sharing the story. Like you, I do not know the explanation and, like you, I could suggest possible explanations, and we should also note that the story is 3rd hand.

But I think it infinitesimally unlikely that there was anything paranormal going on. Claims like this are a dime a dozen, but you will not find one, anywhere, that can be repeated and verified and that's the bottom line.

Don't you think the said Monk might like a few hundred thousand dollars, if not for himself, then at least to benefit the monastery? Mithrae, I have been around a long time, and have chased up exactly these sorts of claims when younger, and I have seen it all before. Such claims are like trying to reach the base of a rainbow, the closer you try to get, the further the claim recedes.

I was also an amateur magician when younger, so I know how easy it is to deceive people. Do you remember Uri Geller and his spoons bent by means beyond the physical? Many very intelligent people believe(d) his claims, because it was literally a case of seeing is believing. I remember seeing the guy on TV as a kid. Journalists and audience members stood on the stage in front of the cameras, and gently rubbed spoons with their fingers, being told to concentrate hard on bending the spoon by sheer willpower alone, and the freaking spoons really did bend before their eyes, some violently into extraordinary contorted shapes. What do you think about that Mithrae? The account that I have given is true. I thought he was a conman, but admittedly a very clever one. This claim easily eclipses your Monk.

Do you honestly believe that the Monk claim represents a means beyond the fysicalist paradigm?

I don't, and until you can find a single verifiable paranormal claim, then the evidence remains firmly on my side.

[ytrewq]

[Replying to post 239 by Mithrae]

To be honest, I found your #36 to be very vague and "fluffy", plus you touched on many different things.

Is there a single, well defined question or claim from #36 that we can discuss? Then if we resolve that, we can move onto the next claim or question.

But please, no meaningless statements like "God is consciousness", where after pages of discussion I am still none the wiser as to what the statement means.


Well I must say, after the past dozen or so pages of discussion I really wasn't expecting a whole lot, but still something better than this.

I don't know what you mean. Which particular sentence should I have "done better" at? I was genuinely trying to be helpful. To me, your statement really are often "fluffy" in that when I boil them down, I have no idea what they mean, and an example of that (though it was not your statement) is saying that "God is consciousness". We still didn't figure out what that meant after many pages of discussion, and I still have no idea what it means, do you? I was not being rude or flippant, I was being honest and trying to find some solid, unambiguous statement(s) that we could discuss.

[ytrewq]

Obviously as anonymous second-hand anecdote it's not going to impress anyone else But then odds are nothing would, so I figured why not just post an example which if true would meet ytrewq's criteria regardless?

Even though I think the chance of it being true is exceedingly small, I find all such stories interesting, and thank you for sharing it with us.

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 246 by Mithrae]

Those are good points (which ytrewq also raised), and I would say that they are among the most compelling reasons to reject any kind of substance dualism - the view that mind or soul or consciousness are a fundamentally different type of stuff than physical stuff - because in such a view it is simply incoherent to talk about the two interacting with each other at all.

Exactly right. Here is what I want to get established off the bat.
It is well known and understood how humans and other creatures and even technology perceive the world, their environment. We have eyes that are used to detect light being reflected/emitted off of objects, and brains to process the signal. Someone who is colour blind does not have the same rods and cones in their eyes as a non-colour blind person does - doctors have shown that this difference is what accounts for the difference in vision.
Someone who has no tongue is unable to taste things. Someone who has a stroke and the part of their brain that is associated with language dies then becomes unable to speak.

Can I assume you would NOT disagree with all of this? Assuming yes, let's carry on...

Looking at alleged out-of-body experiences from the latter perspective, it would seem that under normal circumstances human consciousness perceives reality roughly from the volume of space occupied by a human body and within the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect; but under some circumstances, when the association with the body is weakened, that same human consciousness perceives reality from outside the body and not limited to the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect.

Now here's the problem. We here on this thread are talking about alleged incidences where a consciousness is outside the body. How is this possible, given what I said just above? In real life, if I take out your eyes, you become blind. Unable to see. You lack the requisite organs to perceive the environment aroud you via light. So then if I take the out-of-body claim seriously for a moment, this should be the same thing, right? One should NOT be able to perceive their environment the same way they would as if they had eyes.
It seems to me that those who claim OBEs want to have their cake and eat it too. They would, in any other period of their lives, acknowledge that when loses their sensory organs, they become blind, or deaf, or are inhibited in other areas. However, when it comes to OBEs, where they say they are outside their body and thus, lose their sensory organs...they are not being consistent.

I'm thinking of it as, instead of being a person who is a carbon-based body, you've become a person who is the volume of space outside that body - you are everything within that region of space (at least for all intents and purposes).

Now you''re violating logic. Now you're saying that I, rikuoamero, who potentially has an OBE, am now the thing that is NOT rikuoamero. A = !A.

If you're floating outside your body, presumably it's going to take a lot longer than a couple of minutes to work out how to filter and decipher all the radio waves and gamma waves and neutrinos and dark matter occupying or passing through the volume of space from which you're currently perceiving!

How is it an OBE consciousness is even picking up all these things at all? How is on figuring out how to do filtering without a brain or similar processing organ?
You do know that in the real world, both mechanically and biologically, one needs receptors to pick up various frequencies of the light and electromagnetic spectrum? If one is just a consciousness...then what you say above does not apply.

The tiny spectra of visible light and audible frequencies are familiar; we would surely expect that a human consciousness, suddenly occupying space outside the body and without its perceptual limitations, would nevertheless focus on and most easily interpret and remember those familiar inputs.

Do OBEs report this? Do they report being able to detect any and all other frequencies of the EM spectrum, even if only at first? Do they "hear" radio stations being broadcast? Do they "see" X-rays?
This is what I find most illogical about OBE claimants: it's like they're saying they got new eyes that when they describe them to me, I realize it means they should now be able to see X-rays and gamma rays...except they never report seeing such things. This then makes me think the entire claim is bovine faeces.

Imagining that consciousness outside the body should be a blank and silent void is purely a consequence of imagining that consciousness must be bound to, receive input from and be limited by a particular type of 'shell'

Which is what we know it to be. Please answer this question: what would happen if I took ALL your sensory organs? As gory as it might sound (and I apologize for that), what do you think would happen if I took your eyes, cut off your ears, nose and tongue and then carefully skinned you and deadened your nerves?
The end result of that should be the same thing sense-wise as an OBE...and yet the OBE claims to still have sensory perception of some kind.

perhaps the more remarkable aspect of (alleged) OBEs is the fact that the subjects are apparently able to filter out some meaningful content at all from what could be an overwhelming sudden barrage of input.

How? We know in the real world what happens with real objects and sense organs having a massive amout of input. Someone who's eyes are more sensitive than the average person can have their eyes examined and we can check the difference, to account for their better vision.

I'll respond to the text in green later, as I literally start work in two minutes. See ya.

[ytrewq]

[Replying to post 255 by rikuoamero]

An excellent posting. As soon as you apply common sense to the whole out-of-body consciousness thing, it falls in a heap, and is quite literally absurd.

As I have pointed out, and you confirm, it is clearly a "supernatural" belief, for it is completely at odds with all very well known and established science, common experience, and IMHO common sense.

Now here is some more logic, which you are clearly good at. As you and I know, it's absurd to think that a mysterious, massless, never detected, unknown to science out-of-body "thing" could perform the functions of our eyes, for example, so we would expect that out of body experience would not be able to report back visual information (or anything) that was not already known. And sure enough, no one in meditation or OBE has ever been able to recall or produce visual observations beyond what could be seen with their own eyes.

To be sure, OBE's feel like something is outside the body, but there is no evidence that anything at all is actually outside of the body.

And why on earth would the ability to have something outside the body only be available when we are sick or almost dead or meditating. That's just crazy. Does our consciousness somehow "leak out" only at that time? But why would that be? If for real, then this out of body thing would be incredibly useful for survival, would it not, and thus would develop so as to be available all the time. And if it really could see and hear, which is impossible within scientific knowledge anyway, then why would we need eyes and ears at all, and why are they so brilliantly evolved and developed? Being able to detect stuff anywhere outside our body would be so much more useful, so why develop such hopelessly less flexible and useful sensory receptors on our body?

And how does this mysterious out-of-body thing communicate with our brain and memory, which it most certainly must if it's real? Most certainly not by any means known to science, so now we have another supernatural requirement. You gotta be kidding me.

Evidently consciousness outside our body has no mass, for we would easily detect it if it did. Which asks a lot of awkward questions. How does something without mass do anything at all? It's hard to see how something without mass can detect anything, or perform processing, or communicate with our brain and memory.

It just does not matter how you cut it. IMHO, to seriously consider that our consciousness exists outside of our body is absurd. There is no other word for it IMO.

[Swami]

Lets open with some passages from some Eastern scriptures:

Buddhist text
The Samaaphala Sutta, "The Fruit of Contemplative Life'
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitak ... .than.html (a monk in meditation)

With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to creating a mind-made body. From this body he creates another body, endowed with form, made of the mind, complete in all its parts, not inferior in its faculties.

Yogic/Hindu text
Yoga Vasistha (one of the major Hindu texts) Book III On Creation- Chapter 21 " Saraswati Explains the Practice of Meditation, Astral Travel* http://yogavasishta.org/book3a-ch1-60.html

Saraswati continues speaking to Leela:" 1 Soon after death occasions the lack of physical senses, the sight of the world appears to the soul as if he were seeing it with open eyes when he was living.2 Before him is presented the circle of the sky and its sides with the cycle of its seasons and times. He is shown the deeds of his pious and mundane acts, as if they were to continue to eternity.3 Objects never before seen or thought of also offer themselves to his view, like the sight of his own death in a dream, as if they were the prints in his memory.
39 By constant practice of meditation, we become settled in this belief of unity, and we rest in the Supreme Spirit.40 Then we find our bodies to be an aerial substance that mixes with the air, and at last, with these our mortal frames, we are able to come to the sight of Brahma.
41 Being endowed with pure, enlightened and spiritual frames (astral or subtle bodies), like those of Brahma and the gods, the holy saints are placed in some part of the divine essence.
45It is possible to labor and build castles in the air. In the same way, it is possible through the practice of yoga, and in no other way, to behold God, either with this body or without it.

This to me sounds like (pun not intended) that you are using the paradigm of sound being a series of vibrations in the air, which are picked up by the ear-drum, which then sends electrical signals to the brain, which then interprets them.
So answer me this - how did she hear the conversation then? If, as she says, her consciousness was outside her body, this would presumably then mean she did not have access to her sensory organs, primarily her eyes and ears.

I'll answer this questions in light of my experience and reading on Eastern texts. I will say I know what happens while out-of-body but I don't know how it happen and I'll explain why this is not a problem since there are examples of this in science.

In my experience and worldview, Pam Reynolds likely had a spontaneous (as opposed to induced) OBE. The OBE is a type of mental projection or extension that functions like a body itself in that it has its own faculties to perceive the material world. I consider the option that it's an extension because many report seeing a silver cord that connects their mental or astral body to their physical body. If the cord serves as a connection then this presumably leaves room for information to be exchanged/processed between the two.

I'll answer to potential objections.
Does scientific facts about perception disprove OBE perception?
No. Scientists already accept a form of perception that does not involve the senses while not understanding how it works, i.e. 'introspection'. With introspection, you acquire information about your mind and this also involves sensory like information in the case of mental images. There's at least one example of perception without our senses.

Does this conflict with my view?
No. There is a difference between consciousness in OBE state and consciousness on the God level. In the former scenario, the consciousness while outside of the body, may still be connected to it whereas God level consciousness is not bound to either of the two.


Also worth noting that all of what I've been describing here can be experienced by ANYONE. All you need is consciousness and meditation - both of which scientists possess although many Western scientists are too close-minded to implement Eastern practices.

What did she report her 'vision' to be like, in this out of body mode? Was it seeing forward, with some peripheral vision, like she normally would have while in body? But how can that be? Out-of-body mode has no eyes. There's nothing picking up the light being reflected from objects. There's nothing reacting to the vibrations in the air. There's no nerves sending electrical impulses and no brain to interpret them.

My responses above apply here as well. I can also say that I've had several OBEs so far. At times, my vision is blurry, and at other times it's just like my bodily perception. I've also read about some having x-ray like vision, seeing through walls, and even having panoramic or 360 degree vision. Others report it takes practice almost like learning to use it.

As I keep bringing up, this is all experiential, but it's something that ANYONE can experience for themselves. To date, no one has given me a good reason to not try meditation, and get into the "Pentecostal" (spiritual gifts filled) wing of it so-to-speak.

What I would expect an out of body experience to be like, (presuming they're real) would be a literal blank and silent void.

I actually focus on this black silent void when trying to quiet my mind of all thoughts. This is usually a good way to get into transcendent experiences which I consider distinct from OBEs.

I'll address some other issues in the next post.

[Swami]

Continuing on from my last post....

When in a meditative state, we have the perception of great depth and knowledge but not the demonstrated reality of it. No one has ever received knowledge in a meditative state that they did not our could not have already known.

This is often used as an objection for OBEs and NDEs. I would say that kids OBEs is good evidence against your claim:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

Investigation of near-death experiences in very young children is important because at an early age they are less likely to have established religious beliefs, cultural understandings about death, or even an awareness of what death is. Very young children would be very unlikely to have heard about near-death experiences or understand them.

The NDERF study found that the content of NDEs in children age five and younger appeared to be the same as the content of NDEs in older children and adults.

Not sure if it was you or Riko who brought up OBE perception with blind people. Here's some relevant info:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

There have been a few case reports of near-death experiences in the blind. The largest study of this was by Dr. Kenneth Ring.15 This Investigation included 31 blind or substantially visually impaired individuals who had NDEs or out-of-body experiences. Of the 31 individuals in the study, 10 were not facing life-threatening events at the time of their experiences, and thus their experiences were not NDEs. There were 14 individuals who were blind from birth in this study, and nine of them described vision during their experiences. This investigation presented case reports of those born totally blind that described in NDEs that were highly visual with content consistent with typical NDEs.

[Mithrae]

Can I assume you would NOT disagree with all of this? Assuming yes, let's carry on...

Looking at alleged out-of-body experiences from the latter perspective, it would seem that under normal circumstances human consciousness perceives reality roughly from the volume of space occupied by a human body and within the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect; but under some circumstances, when the association with the body is weakened, that same human consciousness perceives reality from outside the body and not limited to the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect.

Now here's the problem. We here on this thread are talking about alleged incidences where a consciousness is outside the body. How is this possible, given what I said just above? In real life, if I take out your eyes, you become blind. Unable to see. You lack the requisite organs to perceive the environment aroud you via light. So then if I take the out-of-body claim seriously for a moment, this should be the same thing, right? One should NOT be able to perceive their environment the same way they would as if they had eyes.
It seems to me that those who claim OBEs want to have their cake and eat it too. They would, in any other period of their lives, acknowledge that when loses their sensory organs, they become blind, or deaf, or are inhibited in other areas. However, when it comes to OBEs, where they say they are outside their body and thus, lose their sensory organs...they are not being consistent.

I'm thinking of it as, instead of being a person who is a carbon-based body, you've become a person who is the volume of space outside that body - you are everything within that region of space (at least for all intents and purposes).

Now you''re violating logic. Now you're saying that I, rikuoamero, who potentially has an OBE, am now the thing that is NOT rikuoamero. A = !A.

It's violating your philosophical views, not logic. There is a difference. Heck even most materialists lean towards the view that personal identity relates to a person's consciousness - their memories, personality and so on - rather than (or at least moreso than) their body. There's whole movies or TV series built around the scenario of if/when we can scan, digitize and transfer all relevant neural content to a cloned body.

If you're floating outside your body, presumably it's going to take a lot longer than a couple of minutes to work out how to filter and decipher all the radio waves and gamma waves and neutrinos and dark matter occupying or passing through the volume of space from which you're currently perceiving!

How is it an OBE consciousness is even picking up all these things at all? How is on figuring out how to do filtering without a brain or similar processing organ?
You do know that in the real world, both mechanically and biologically, one needs receptors to pick up various frequencies of the light and electromagnetic spectrum? If one is just a consciousness...then what you say above does not apply.

Only if you're unable to think past your philosophical objection above.

The tiny spectra of visible light and audible frequencies are familiar; we would surely expect that a human consciousness, suddenly occupying space outside the body and without its perceptual limitations, would nevertheless focus on and most easily interpret and remember those familiar inputs.

Do OBEs report this? Do they report being able to detect any and all other frequencies of the EM spectrum, even if only at first? Do they "hear" radio stations being broadcast? Do they "see" X-rays?
This is what I find most illogical about OBE claimants: it's like they're saying they got new eyes that when they describe them to me, I realize it means they should now be able to see X-rays and gamma rays...except they never report seeing such things. This then makes me think the entire claim is bovine faeces.

Never? How many alleged OBEs have you looked at before reaching that conclusion? I would expect few if any to coherently convey such information because a) as explained above it presumably would not be coherent even to the subject herself, nothing more than a blur of white noise sensations and b) even imagining some monk who'd spent decades learning and practicing some kind of OBE meditation, it'd still be virtually impossible to to coherently communicate that kind of information to others, like describing vision to someone born blind.