It is not a question of just accepting things because they are proposed....that is a case of what I observe to be atheist paranoia...that one is and can be forced to believe something.
I merely say that such a God Is reasonably philosophically accommodated. If you wish to chase Him out of that accommodation then I would move something else is going on.
I don't need to chase him out, because there's no reason to posit a god in the first place. Whilst, philosophically, there is nothing to disprove the suggestion of god, there's equally nothing to disprove the suggestion of celestial teapots, pixies, leprechauns, unicorns, Vishnu, Wise Coyote, Ameratsu, Zeus or the Marches of the Creator Beings during the Dreamtime.
Not sure I agree with your definition of history that it is a pattern. You would need to expand on that.
What we call history is an interpretation of the interaction of various forces - selected and identified according to our particular cultural biases, personal knowledge, publicly available information and our preconceptions. That creates a 'pattern' in our understanding of how time A came to be time B. Elements of the pattern we place emphasis on, and if sufficient people agree with that emphasis that becomes a general consensus, and when similar events occur people try to imprint the pattern over the new events to predict the outcome.
In terms of having to be a philosophical materialist or assuming it for science. I would move that that is not at all necessary since I am merely using a tool on a specific Job i.e. matter/ energy. That is no more significant than using Brobat to clean my toilet....in what way there do I become a 'philosophical Brobatist'. In any case nothing about any result in science necessarily leads to philosophical naturalism. E= MC squared...not E=PN.
If, as a scientist, you aren't assuming philosophical naturalism, you are removing the assumption of cause and effect - without that cause and effect, science doesn't work. Implicit in conducting science is assuming philosophical naturalism.
Science is not a tool in the sense of a hammer, it's a tool in the sense of a methodology. Methodologies have implicit assumptions that have to be employed in order for the methodology to work. A hammer has physical requirements.
The grounds for religion are not necessarily ignorance and fear. But the question ''why is there anything anyway?'', ''Why am I here?'','' Is the self really an illusion'' and scores of other questions.
The origins of religion, it seems most likely, were an evolution of simple superstitions over the origin of unexplainable phenomena such as lightning, flash-floods etc. Deeper questions like 'why is there anything anyway' or 'why are we here' not only came later, but are question begging: what makes you think there's a reason?
'Is the self really an illusion', depending on your interpretation of the question, is excellently answered in Bruce Hood's psychology/neurology introductory work 'The Self Illusion'.
On a final note how is someone who fights existentially to establish in themselves that they don't actually exist going to have room for actual existential experience?
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at, there.
What do you mean by hallucination? Since the use of God as an illusion has faced the pertinent point that illusions are of illusions of things which do exist.
A hallucination in the medical understanding of having sensory experiences that aren't actually triggered by the associated sensory organs, or by any sensory organs at all, or that don't directly associate with sensory input of the time.
Illusions do not have to be illusions of things that exist - MC Escher or Salvador Dali more than adequately demonstrate that.
Finally confirmation bias. Confirmation by what? Confirmation of what? since much religious experience does not seem to depend on the empirical senses.
Religious experience doesn't depend on the empirical senses in all instances - though there are some that make the claim - but many religious people having come to the religious experience then attempt to demonstrate rationally that it's necessarily correct. In those instances, confirmation bias is readily in evidence.
O.
