What I refer to as religious persons in this plea: those who believe in a God, which is or has a mind, who is rational, and who strives for our progression. Buddhists and other non-theistic religious people, and non-religious people, are all welcome to read what's written below, but this is not a plea to you.
Who denies the need for a creation of things? That is, where do things come from? The atheistic response has commonly been that the physical world sprung forth from nothing, and did so arbitrarily. The arbitrary existence is a thing that does not exist with the ability to create existence. Not satisfactory.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, suppose they believe that something has "always" existed - the universe, space, time… whatever it may be, it has existed since the beginning by arbitrary decree. My response: what is space? what is the universe? It is commonly held by many people - religious and irreligious alike - that space constitutes "material" independent of what we see. That is, while we perceive things, they are also things outside our perception. But this is an impossibility - a statement that A is not A, a statement that A - one's perception of a guitar, which is all they can ever know - is also B - a "material" guitar independent of your perception! Indeed, since each of us perceives only perceptions of a guitar, and each perception is different, the "material" guitar being perceivable by no one, the materialist claims that A, your perception of a guitar, is also B, a material guitar, is also C, his perception of a guitar, &c. As soon as one claims they are different things - the perception different from the material guitar - this separate B is entirely superfluous. There is not and could never be evidence of it.
Now suppose the alternative - all things are ideas: forms in your mind. Each of us perceives on his own wavelength, which is bombarded by his own ideas, and other ideas: the guitar not of one's creation, and an imagined guitar that is. This is a plausible explanation because it reduces things to minimal terms. The visualized idea of a guitar is in no way different from the perception of a guitar - each of its properties is no different from those same properties imagined, with the proper strength of mind. It stands to reason that we should accept the guitar for what it is: a compilation of forms.
Of the forms we see, few our own making. Everything we don't make must come from someone else - a being powerful enough to create vivid ideas and impose them in others' minds. He has created a world for us where progress is the name of the game, and our empowerment and growth is the consistent result.
My purpose in this was to suggest that each of us argue for God. The intellectual debate sways everyone's mind, and when the religious cop out, it looks bad. Atheists are ready in a moment to claim God has no evidence, then they turn around and believe in an imperceivable matter than makes up the entire universe, which is inexplicably different from the perceptions of it. It isn't even a coherent position. The simple explanation - the Occam's razor explanation - is that only what is perceived exists. As all we perceive are ideas, and ourselves, these are the only existent things. We know by the nature of an idea - a form - that it must be thought - formed - that there is a creator.
This is not complicated logic. Reduce things to their basic form. The self - the consciousness - does it exist in space? No. It is not an idea. Is time a substance? No. It is not an idea. Time is the vehicle for action making, as space - the realm of ideas - only changes when a new thought is produced. Space and time require the self - not the other way around. The self - the consciousness - is not bound by any confines - it is the a priori, the most prior thing. It exists - and unlike ideas, which can be unthought and so unmade, unlike ideas, which exist in space and are produced by action, the self is confined by nothing. It exists in an atemporal state - an eternal state.
These ideas are not new, and they're not mine. The philosophers of greatest contribution to the intellectual sphere - Kant, Descartes, Plato and Socrates - the logic of these men is not changed by new discoveries in science; science answers to philosophy - It is the historical parent, and always gets the last word. Hume's problem of induction renders an explanation of the universe through the scientific method impossible, for science is no establisher of axioms. If nothing is certain, nothing is probable - as a 99% chance of a 99% chance of a 99% chance… is infinitesimal. No matter how many times you perform a lab experiment, it will never reveal an answer independent of an axiom.
In his paper, The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (to which I do not ascribe), reality theorist (and America's smartest man) Christopher Langan puts it this way:
"The problem of induction is very real; it is manifest in Heisenberg uncertainty and the cosmic horizon problem, finite limitations of scientific tools of microscopic and macroscopic observation, and is why no general theory of reality can ever be reliably constructed by the standard empirical methods of science. Unfortunately, many scientists have either dismissed this problem or quietly given up on the search for a truly general theory, in neither case serving the long-term interests of science. In fact, the problem of induction merely implies that a global theory of reality can only be established by the rational methods of mathematics, specifically including those of logic."
God is not scientific, and never can be - as we discussed, he does not exist in space (and neither do we - our consciousnesses). But it is logical to establish that things are forms and that forms must be formed - a better explanation than, certainly, the imperceivable and superfluous "material." There is no strict deduction in these regards - only that which is simplest and best fits the evidence. As enlightenment philosopher Kant notes:
"Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition."
He who contends that God cannot be as he is not perceived by he specifically must then deny the existence of any other mind. By this reasoning, one should believe only in himself - that he is surrounded by mere ideas with, somehow, no origin, or else "matter." Either way, he concludes that the humans he sees are no different from trees with legs, for isn't it simpler to assume that they don't have minds than that they do?
Note the important difference between God and matter - God is not perceived by us, but is perceived by himself - he is perceivable as a self-conscious being, just like each of us. Matter is not, and cannot, be perceived by anyone - it is imperceivable. The Church of Matter is worse than hypocrites, totally oblivious to their own problems, then constantly on the attack that destroys them. Crowd idiocy, the lot of it.
God exists because he is perceived, but we know his existence by his products. Ideas need a thinker, forms need a former - plain and simple. I think other minds are known to us by the signature they bear in mindshare. People often speak of the beauty of God's creation - the beauty that makes them know it's God. Likewise, an idea by another will have a distinctly different flavor - a uniqueness that lets us sense the existence of a mind. As they communicate, they impose their thoughts in our minds in a subtle way.
Accepting that a consciousness produces, each on its own wavelength, God's power is deducing minds from these productions, finding one's wavelength and imposing his thoughts. The thoughts are such on each person that a world is formed. Communication of this world to each solidifies that God's mind is like ours - he tests based on progression and elucidates truths. Other minds do this also, but picking up on the wavelength of those productions reveals - on a level not conceived - the infinite - that these minds are different, as thought they bore a different "signature." One can produce thoughts on to another wavelength, as does God, but each produces from his own wavelength, God included.
I've constructed, and without too many words, an explanation for the universe that stands on simple tenets and is reasoned. Let the Materialists claim there are holes - theirs is the explanation with the greatest hole of all - imperceivable nonsense. That goes for the religious and irreligious materialists, who join together in one church where the audacious are almost always heathens.
These are the sorts of constructions that people need to explain in defense of religion. We need to be on the attack against the vicious doctrine of the Materialists - the doctrine that all must succumb to the imperceivable reality. They give no explanation for their ethics - they are ethical only insofar as their hypocritical stupor remains, and what when it leaves? It is a dangerous philosophy - a dangerous church - that stands on necessarily false tenets. The Aztecs were vicious in their sacrificing to false gods. Atheism demands the sacrifice to a tabula rasa of arbitrarily determined things and events, so they often claim - for if it isn't purposed, surely it's a blank slate! Follow your philosophy to its conclusion, atheist, or quit - your material grants you no oughts, you have no evidence of other minds. You either believe that you're stuck as the only man in a dreamworld - the faithless Occam's razor - or you have serious comprehension problems.
My plea to you, the religious man or woman, is to exploit these obvious contradictions. Make people think about what they say - hold them by a thread over the lone self in his dream world, then ask if they're ready to accept an imperfect explanation of the universe. Ask if they're ready to quit the nonsense of what they deem is "proof" and what isn't. Ask if they're willing to accept logic - the problem of induction, the chooser of philosophy as king and with science as its subject. Ask if they're ready to explain what they believe, rather than what they don't. Ask if they're ready to internalize the complicatedness of the problems surrounding the issue of what all this stuff *is*, if they're willing to accept that perhaps, perhaps, God is not to be isolated in a vacuum, but pondered into the big picture.
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