It is reasonable to Believe in A Personal God

Thank you again, yvxz, for a rigorous debate. You are a very challenging opponent, and I am learning a lot about the art of debate from having you as an opponent! My opponent stated that in my rebuttal I need to demonstrate two things. 1] He stated that I will need to show that we can investigate non-natural phenomenon, otherwise a belief in a personal God will be unreasonable. I assert that what he calls non-natural is in fact natural, in that people have been hearing voices who they transcribe to being voices from the divine, since history has been recorded, therefore it is not non-natural. Researchers are in fact investigating what is known as supernatural phenomenon. Just because they haven't found any concrete evidence for what they have been exploring doesn't mean that the supernatural realm is non-existent. Therefore, belief in such a realm and the ability to be contacted via hearing voices and believing they are from a personal God, is no more unreasonable than to deny such phenomenon exists. Until evidence exists that there without a doubt is no divine being that is able to contact humans thru them hearing voices, such a belief is not at all unreasonable. 2] Con asserts, "That it would be more reasonable to conclude that one who believes they have been the recipient of divine communication interactions has been actually interacted with by God, than that they were having a schizophrenic episode," I will thoroughly address in this round. Con's only explanation for someone claiming to be on the receiving end of communication with the divine is mental illness. To assert that someone who has internal communication with what they perceive as divine is mentally ill, is preposterous. Even Oxford Journals, a reputable peer reviewed journal on the topic of schizophrenia recognizes the extent that culture and religious beliefs plays in the diagnosis of something as serious as schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and Culture Con states, "A belief is reasonable, if it appears to comport with reality." For billions of humans who live outside of western cultural norms, beliefs in the supernatural phenomenon of hearing voices do comport with reality. The human mind is as complex and diverse as the experiences that individuals experience within their cultural framework. Being on the receiving end of communication with God is realistic to those who expect to experience such within a culture that values such receivers. Con then goes on to declare,"This is demonstrated through evidence and logic." What he fails to take into consideration is that western scientific approaches to supernatural phenomenon, including those who hear voices that they assign to being the voice of God, are just beginning to be given credence, as researches make discoveries into the ways that hearers of voices, in cultures who do not stigmatize those who experience such, are able to function in comparison to hearers of voices in cultures who label it as an illness and ignore the significance of the messages. I'm not suggesting that all voices of those who experience hearing them are of divine origin, and the fact that they are not all of divine origin disproves cons claim that those who are receivers of communication from God are mentally ill. Evidence and logic cannot be applied to every aspect of existence. Some things cannot be explained by evidence and logic, and just because something can't be explained doesn't mean it is unreasonable. Given the following four quotations from oxfordjournals.org it is easy to conclude that not all voice hearers can be explained by mental illness. "It is only in the 20th century, as Leudar and Thomas31 point out, that hallucinations have been described as exclusively the sign of an illness. As a result, the term “hallucination” can carry stigma. Nonetheless, events that appear technically to be hallucinations and that conform to popular expectations of the presence of God are still often reported as religious events in popular Western media." The article also has this to say on the subject, "Al-Issa32 has suggested that Euro-American culture itself dampens the rate of hallucinations because the shared culture strives to clarify and distinguish whether a given experience is real or imaginary, and when individuals seem not to be able to make such a distinction by reporting something that seems to be a hallucination, they are likely to be labeled as out of contact with reality and therefore pathological. In contrast, he argued, many non-Western societies do not make such a rigid distinction between reality and fantasy. One might expect, then, that hallucinations would be more readily reported outside of the Western setting." "In sum, the evidence suggests that the voice-hearing experience is deeply shaped by local patterns of understanding the self, the mind, and the fundamental nature of reality. Jenkins11 captures this richness in arguing that the subjective experience of psychosis and schizophrenia provides a “paradigm case for understanding fundamental human processes” and that “hearing voices” is undeniably a fundamental self-process that is thoroughly infused with cultural meaning." "Hallucinations research, like most experimental work in psychology and neuroscience, is WEIRD.57 That is, a majority of participants and subjects in mainstream studies live in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies, as do the researchers who study them. This limits what is known scientifically and clinically about the ways in which hallucinations are experienced, interpreted and valued across cultures, and places renewed emphasis on the importance of ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as on increasing the number of countries and cultural groups involved in research." http://schizophreniabulletin.oxfordjournals.org... Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann also concludes that cultural influences for voice hearers is a factor in how the voices are conveyed to the receiver. The variances in the tone and the messages that those in India and Ghana receive verses the tone and messages that Americans receive suggests that the messages are directed according to culture. Those who live in environments who devalue the messages of voices are more apt to be on the receiving end of negative messages. http://news.stanford.edu... This wasn't suggested in the Stanford article, but to me this suggests that supernatural forces are able to convey messages that are in sync with the culture an individual exists in. Whether I am correct in my interpretation or not, the fact that there is a clear difference in the types of messages those who hear voices receive, shows that voice hearing isn't a cut and dry topic that can be easily studied or explained, much less automatically passed off as a mental illness. It shows that more research is needed, not that it is unreasonable to believe that hearing voices is from a divine source. The fact that researchers in psychiatry are treating incidences of hearing voices with consideration as far as the cultural and religious significance of those who experience of such voices, shows that even in a clinical setting, being on the receiving end of communication with God, or the divine in itself is not considered to be unreasonable. Merely claiming to hear voices isn't enough to diagnose someone with schizophrenia. What’s the difference between schizophrenia and voice hearing? Possibly only a label. Intervoice, a website dedicated to those who experience hearing voices cites that only 1 in 3 people who hear voices are in need of psychiatric care. "Whilst one in three people who hear voices become a psychiatric patient – two in three people can cope well and are in no need of psychiatric care. No diagnosis can be given because these 2 out of 3 people who hear voices are quite healthy and function well." The cite also lists facts about other statistics of voice hearers. http://www.intervoiceonline.org...; Eleanor Longden began hearing voices her freshman year of College. She has learned to cope with them by not feeling as thought they were to be a source of shame. She doesn't consider them to be an illness but a part of herself. "While the experiences that get labeled as symptoms of schizophrenia –and the distress associated with them — are very real, the idea that there’s a discrete, biologically-based condition called schizophrenia is being contested all over the world. While voice hearing is linked with a range of different psychiatric conditions (including many non-psychotic ones), many people with no history of mental health problems hear voices. It’s also widely recognized as part of different spiritual and cultural experiences." http://blog.ted.com... Could it be that schizophrenia was a label slapped on to individuals who had a deeper connection to their inner workings and/or the unseen aspects of the world and that the way that those who experience hearing voices were labeled as ill caused them to experience more negative self reflections? One thing that many of the articles I read about people who experience hearing voices, is that they claim to be able to distinguish the voice of God as non- intrusive / non-demanding, while other voices can be benevolent or malevolent. The fact that not all voices of those who are labeled with schizophrenia seem to derive from God disproves cons contention that those who claim that God communicates with them are having schizophrenic episodes. I look forward to further conversation with yvxz on this very engaging resolution.