Magickal Counterargument To Atheism, I think I've figured one out Options

One of the things which has really held me back, as far as attempting any magical work of my own is concerned, and continues to do so, is at least a partial, intermittent tendency to try and hold my belief system subject to Richard Dawkins' approval. At first, it seemed like he was unavoidably, inescapably right; he seemed unassailably impossible to argue with.

I finally realised something, though; and that is that I virtually never read about anyone claiming anything on here that they don't also maintain that they've actually done. It strikes me that in a very real sense, a lot of the people in this forum are actual scientists themselves, in terms of the continual experimentation with evocation and other similar areas.

The other thing I realised is that contrary to direct experience, most atheistic arguments against God's existence (or the existence of any reality outside the physical) is based primarily on theoretical/logical abstractions, rather than direct experience. Dawkins talks about whether natural selection can or can't be used to discredit creationism, as one example, but it's still completely theoretical and hypothetical, and the reason why is because none of us have a time machine to allow us to go back 4.5 billion years and conclusively observe what actually happened, and so because of that, we can argue about that point theoretically as much as we want, but we still don't really know.

As a direct contrast to that, when people talk about evocation, as an example, they usually give direct experentially based reports of their experiments. One of the things that bothers me about contemporary science is that when its' advocates discredit certain things as unscientific, they generally disregard their own rules. The main rule I'm talking about here is repeatability.

If Darkmage or Imperial Arts write an account, for example, of calling up Marbas or Vassago, and mention Marbas or Vassago as manifesting in a certain way, if I then go to the Goetia myself, perform the same experiment myself in the presence of others, and depending on either an astral or physical manifestation, get verification from said other witnesses as to the consistency of the manifestation, particularly if I have not told them what to expect first, then that to me counts as valid scientific repeatability. It is empirical in the original definition of the word; I am relying directly upon the evidence of my five senses; in this case, primarily sight and hearing, probably.

I get the distinct impression that that is why Imperial in particular seems to be so very careful about doing everything by the book, where the Goetia is concerned; because he is considering it repeatable, but because, when you're exploring a process that you don't necessarily understand the mechanism behind, that someone else has recorded, if you change things, and the process then doesn't work, you have no way of knowing which specific alteration(s) to the process caused failure. Thus, if something is to be repeatable, if you don't completely understand the mechanism behind it, the only way to ensure consistent results is to reproduce said process to the letter.

Imperial does that, and according to his testimony, he gets specific results. Dawkins might counter that I have no way of knowing whether or not Imperial is lying about his results. My counter to that is that I have a perfectly sound means of finding that out, or if not finding out whether or not he is lying, at least finding out to my own satisfaction, whether or not his results are repeatable for me personally. The Goetia and all of the necessary reagents are equally potentially available to me, and I can, if I so choose, go and perform my own experiment and attempt to reproduce Imperial's results. If I am able to do so, then I have collaboratively and empirically proven, in the only ontologically possible and valid way, that the mechanism behind the Goetia does in fact produce concrete, repeatable results. Magic, I am realising, can and does hold up to empirical scrutiny.

Dawkins might also respond that any sighting of an apparition/evoked spirit would automatically count as delusion by default, and mass delusion in the case of supporting witnesses. I would argue in response to that, that logically speaking, a person is just as subject to visual hallucination when they look into a microscope and see bacteria, as they are when they see manifested entities.

It is therefore impossible, in my own mind, for science to claim that acorporeal reality demonstrably does not exist, purely on the basis of it not being detectable by external/mechanistic means. What atheists are forgetting when they make that claim, is that even mechanistic support for the existence of something ultimately falls back to being reliant on the physical senses; you still need to look at a computer screen or microscope for such, and as I have already said, I refuse to accept that the senses of a sane witness are necessarily any less reliable in their own house or loungeroom (the environment for evocation) than they are within a laboratory.

This post has been edited by Petrus: Feb 11 2009, 06:55 AM

i have been lots of places and talked to lots of intelligences, and i have met many gods, mouldy old gods, and even wanna-be gods, yet i have never met "god"

first off, you need to define who/what "god" is - the ancient idea of a "god" is some sort of a conduit of magical power (accessible, inaccessible, good, bad, ugly, whatever), and the judeo-christian version that most mean when they speak of "god" is really no different than any other version

to say 'there is no god' is to say there is nothing around that fulfils the searcher's definition of "god' - one's definition creates the reality, and suddenly something provides the fulfilment of the definition you have in your head, or it doesn't

for example, if you say god=good, then by definition, all things not good subjectively are therefore not god, but another person's view of goodness and therefore god-ness clouds the definition and is the beginning of conflict

if we define that "god" is our creator (which i believe, regardless of what that "god" ends up being), then we must answer to that god only if we add into the definition that our god cares about what we do - sins are inventions of definitions, without the definition, there is no sin

to change our definition to 'becoming aware of and advancing one's life-mission', is to be in accordance with god as creator when you are doing it, regardless of the definition of that god (since we know that life-missions exist, then so must a "god" who assigned it and that we must answer to if we fail it

the old gods gave rewards to those who served them properly and were 'pure' , as in the fable 2 idea of pure (not corrupt, not someone that takes advantage of whatever comes along, but of one stripe or type or mind) - you could easily tell when someone had failed their god because their hair turned gray and they got old suddenly

as far as creation and evolution is concerned, if you were going to make something physical, would you give it the means to adapt to changes in the environment, or not? = creation + evolution = the brilliance of god

-es