I don't mind the use of illusion as a distraction to cope with trauma because we humans still have to function. I just find it problematic as an ongoing framework, which is delusion. None of the belief in a Christian God makes sense objectively. It can only be used by a mind that is suffering from some fear, anxiety, or trauma.
We could state, factually, that conscious knowledge of death is itself traumatic such that creatures that are conscious of their impending, or inevitable death, experience the requisite trauma that leads to either the reality, or the placebo, of god-consciousness (as a real, or useful, approach to the trauma).
We've noted that the animal, or reptile-brain, isn't generally thought to possess a conscious, or self-conscious, knowledge of death, God, immortality, or morality. Those things are associated with the higher, later, development associated with the cerebral cortex.
So in that context came the suggestion that self-conscious atheism (atheism hatched in a fully functioning cerebral cortex) appears to be something of an anomaly since it hearkens back to the natural state of thought prior to the evolution of the cerebral cortex and self-consciousness of self, death, morality, and, say, mathematical reason. God-consciousness appears to be one of the abstract concepts, like math, and good versus evil, directly associated with the cerebral cortex such that implying that the abstract concept of God comes from the animal brain doesn't appear to make factual, historical, or scientific sense?
And yet there's a more powerful argument against the atheist's worldview and his devaluation of god-consciousness since the claim that there's no "objective" reason to believe in God, or the Christian God, is self-refuting by reason of a rather simple refutation of Neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is based on a pre-Kantian form of objectivism that's now known by most well-educated persons to be utterly false. For instance, in Jeff Hawkins' book (noted and quoted throughout this thread) he concedes to the factuality of the Kantian understanding of the world. In a section called, Qualia, he says:
The nerve fibers that enter the brain from the eyes, ears, and skin look the same. Not only do they look identical, they transmit information using identical-looking [electrical] spikes. If you look at the inputs to the brain, you can't discern what they represent. Yet, vision feels like one thing and hearing feels like something different, and neither feels like spikes. When you look at a pastoral scene you don't sense the tat-tat-tat of electrical spikes entering your brain; you see hills and color and shadows.
"Qualia" is the name for how sensory inputs are perceived, how they feel. Qualia are puzzling. Given that all sensations are created by identical spikes, why does seeing feel different than touching? And why do some input spikes result in the sensation of pain and others don't? These may seem like silly questions, but if you imagine that the brain is sitting in the skull and its inputs are just spikes, then you can get a sense of the mystery. Where do our perceived sensations come from? The origin of qualia is considered one of the mysteries of consciousness.
A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, p. 138-139.
What Kant, and later Popper and Eccles pointed out, is the fact that all the brain receives is electrical impulses, spikes if you will, none of which look or smell or taste like anything whatsoever. What we see, smell, or taste, doesn't exist outside of a brain, but are things created inside the brain. Hawkins says the origins of the qualia, i.e., smell, taste, color, and Kant adds shape, space, and time, aren't properties of the world outside the brain, but merely what the brain does with the electrical spikes it collects from the outside world.
Take sight for instance, the design of the human eye, in conjunction with the human brain, uses only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic impulses from the outside world that could be transformed into vision. The human eye, and its brain, see only a tiny sliver of what exists outside the eye and the brain.
This suggests some kind of determination, genetic or otherwise, concerning what parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are useful in the creation of human qualia, and which aren't. But more importantly it decimates the Neo-Darwinian concept that the world experienced by a living organism exist out there in an objective sense, or in the manner we human's experience that world.
What exists are spikes, electromagnetic pulses, and such, that our brains use to manufacture a subjective experience of a world manufactured in, and by, the dictates of the brain, rather than a world that looks like the one in the brain, existing outside the brain.
I argued in chapter I that an organism is not coded in its genes because the environment in which development occurs must be taken into account. But the argument of Chapter II suggests that, paradoxically, the environment is coded in the organisms' genes, since the activities of the organism construct the environment. . . The picture of evolution that postulates an autonomous external world of `niches’ into which organisms must fit by adaptation misses what is most characteristic of the history of life.
Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix, p. 64-100.
God is just as objectively real, true, as is the experience of sight, smell, and taste. God is just as untrue as smell, taste, and sight. Problem being that the Neo-Darwinists believes large green trees are objectively real, while God is not, when God is just as objectively real as any sight, taste, or sound, devised in the brain. Bishop Berkeley actually implied that the same subjective ability the brain uses to produce the qualia "green" when certain electromagnetic spikes of electricity are present, likewise, for some, i.e., the wise, produces the qualia "God" whenever anything enters the brain:
It is therefore plain, that nothing can be more evident to any one that is capable of the least reflexion, than the existence of God, or a spirit who is intimately present to our minds, producing in them all that variety or ideas or sensations, which continually affect us, on whom we have an absolute and entire dependence, in short, `in whom we live, and move, and have our being’ [Acts 17:28]. That the discovery of this great truth which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.
Bishop Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Principle # 149.
John
