Rehash god/proof debate

Unveiled Artist said:

If a person was interested in spirituality as you understand it,would it be possible to give evidence to those with genuine interest?

Sometimes we may not discuss spiritual evidence for fear that others will discredit it rather than the inability to describe it.

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A spiritual teacher would maybe be able to do so.

mikkel_the_dane said:

Well, I notice you are not explaining what knowledge is to you. So again.

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Well, I can only do that by examples, since knowing what knowledge is, would be circular, and requires the assumption that you know what basic logic is, which you cannot possibly do since you are a skeptic.

For instance, I know that one proposition cannot be true and false at the same time. Or that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in any frame.

And I know nature exists, because that is what I experience and see every day, and I make the assumption I have a reliable epistemology.

Ciao

- viole

viole said:

Well, I can only do that by examples, since knowing what knowledge is, would be circular, and requires the assumption that you know what basic logic is, which you cannot possibly do since you are a skeptic.

For instance, I know that one proposition cannot be true and false at the same time. Or that the speed of light in vacuum is constant in any frame.

And I know nature exists, because that is what I experience and see every day, and I make the assumption I have a reliable epistemology.

Ciao

- viole

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I have the belief that my beliefs appear to work. It ends in effect in the same place as the bold one.

I am not the earth.

O science by men of science theories earth is their machine god.

nce burning in hell became sealed.

God said men sealed evil in a jail.

Man scientist put in gaol...jail sun theist.

Cause effect equalled answer.

Men not Satan not in Gods jail.

We are not science God.

No proof of not the science God as it is not science.

Pretty basic advice.

Unveiled Artist said:

Can it not be verified for yourself?

That's what experiential evidence is.

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What sort of "experiential evidence" would:

- support the existence of God if true, and
- has been (or even could be) verified as true?

Unveiled Artist said:

Typical? Usually spiritual awakenings aren't typical. That's why they are highlighted as profound and changes a person's life dramatically.

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OK, then what is a "spiritual awakening" and how does it differ from your basic life lesson?

And if it is a profound experience, perhaps it is just a major step in someone's life from poor judgment to good judgment. There have been many people who have lived via goals and plans and never had any need to have a profound change in life.

Whether they attribute that to a deity or not is irrelevant. The OP was focused on the evidence of god being through one's profound experiences and why non-believers can't see its an experiential point of view not a deity/casper/tooth fairy one.

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So it seems you want to examine how and why people have a crisis in life and learn some profound lesson from it?

I would suggest that if they think some supernatural force made it happen that they have more to learn.

F1fan said:

OK, then what is a "spiritual awakening" and how does it differ from your basic life lesson?

And if it is a profound experience, perhaps it is just a major step in someone's life from poor judgment to good judgment. There have been many people who have lived via goals and plans and never had any need to have a profound change in life.


So it seems you want to examine how and why people have a crisis in life and learn some profound lesson from it?

I would suggest that if they think some supernatural force made it happen that they have more to learn.

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Have you had a profound experience.in your life that changed your views and behavior?

Kooky said:

I wasn't facetious when I said we can do both. I just wouldn't find it a particularly productive avenue for a scientist to dismiss the evidence for evolution because that approach tends to produce really terrible science.

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But you seem to have no trouble dismissing the testimony of billions of people (not all are ignorant savages either, you know). There's even people in Mensa who believe the scriptures.

You are free to believe whatever you want, but the same goes for everyone else; if you grant yourself the right to disqualify historical European ritualistic practices as superstitious nonsense, then it is only fair that you grant others the right to judge your own beliefs in a similar manner.

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Yes. That's why I've not said a word about other people's beliefs.

As for invalidating others' experiences - experience is fundamentally subjective in nature; as such, I don't think it's fair to expect people to trust in the facticity of your beliefs when they have not had these experiences, cannot find understanding in the terminology you use to describe them, and - for whatever reason - don't put trust in the same regimes of truth (your spiritual leaders, organizations, fellow believers) as you do.

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I wasn't trying to say everyone should have the same experiences, since, as you said, experiences are subjective. Nor was I saying that I expect other people to trust anything I say. I have said repeatedly here at RF that belief in anything is totally optional.

What I was saying is that it is a fact that billions of people have testified to the fact that their lives were changed by the Bible. Whether one gives that any weight is another matter entirely. I would think it somewhat short sighted to ignore the experience of that many people, but we're free to decide for ourselves.

One thing is certain, billions of people started out like yourself, i.e. not believing, and they ended up believing because of their experience.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

What bearing do any of those billion Christians' testimony have on the existence of God?

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A better question might be what did all of those people experience that caused them to go from unbelief to belief? God does not require our validation to exist.

rrobs said:

A better question might be what did all of those people experience that caused them to go from unbelief to belief?

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Let's start with the one I asked first.

God does not require our validation to exist.

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OTOH, a human being's belief in God most certainly does need validation to be rational.

rrobs said:

But you seem to have no trouble dismissing the testimony of billions of people (not all are ignorant savages either, you know). There's even people in Mensa who believe the scriptures.

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I can honestly tell you that I have never met a single person in my life who told me they had literally met their God, let alone a person with evidence of that happening. So we are not talking about dismissing court trial level "testimonies" here, but vague insinuations by a bunch of people I never met, whose worldview very rarely, if ever, intersects with mine.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of physical, independently verifiable evidence that suggests a supergenerational process of genetic change within species. The Archaeopteryx fossile has been around for ages at this point, for example, whereas I just recently heard of polar-brown bear hybridization from a friend of mine who was doing a paper on that phenomenon.


And for the record, I am not dismissing them.
I am simply not taking them as verifiable facts, which they are not, because they are neither verifiable nor, bluntly, factual.

Yes. That's why I've not said a word about other people's beliefs.

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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by my interpretation of your posts, your line of argumentation so far has consistet of variants of "we have to acknowledge the beliefs of a billion Christians because there are so many of them" - you are literally building your entire argument around other people's beliefs, and all but demanding that I validate them as factual because there are so many who seemingly agree with you because they all use the same label for their highly subjective experiences.

(And we haven't even gotten into the issue whether any of these billions of people have experiences that are actually similar and actually come from the same source - as far as I can tell, this is an assumption on your part, not a position arrived at through the rigorous analysis of these billions of individual, subjective stories.)

One thing is certain, billions of people started out like yourself, i.e. not believing, and they ended up believing because of their experience.

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And many people didn't.

9-10ths_Penguin said:

Let's start with the one I asked first.

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Fair enough. Here's the question: "What bearing do any of those billion Christians' testimony have on the existence of God?"

Scientifically, none. However I find it interesting that their testimony can be summarily discounted.

I might also point out that many in prison are there because of witness testimony. Apparently the law gives weight to witness testimony.

There's my answer for better or for worse. So here's the question I asked if you want to comment:


Again, I think it short sighted to dismiss the real life experiences of billions of people. That's a lot of evidence (real, actual experiences) to ignore. While they don't empirically prove God exists, I don't think all those accounts have no meaning whatsoever. They would certainly lead to inferential conclusions at the very least.

OTOH, a human being's belief in God most certainly does need validation to be rational.

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When God healed me from melanoma. It was there one day and gone the next. Is that rational? By normal standards, no. And yet, there it was. I experienced getting healed by God and not the doctors. I know because I was there.

Kooky said:

I can honestly tell you that I have never met a single person in my life who told me they had literally met their God, let alone a person with evidence of that happening. So we are not talking about dismissing court trial level "testimonies" here, but vague insinuations by a bunch of people I never met, whose worldview very rarely, if ever, intersects with mine.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of physical, independently verifiable evidence that suggests a supergenerational process of genetic change within species. The Archaeopteryx fossile has been around for ages at this point, for example, whereas I just recently heard of polar-brown bear hybridization from a friend of mine who was doing a paper on that phenomenon.

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I must agree that we have evidence that may suggest a supergererational process. However, we've never actually seen life come from non-life. Suggestions are all we have.

As far as the hybrid bear goes, I would guess the hybrid is still a bear. According to Genesis, bears have always been bears. There are many different bears, but their all in the same genus, Urisdae. Genesis does allow for mutations and evoliution, but only within a genus. God created all plants and animals after their "kind" (Septuagent Greek genus). It also says each has seed within itself. A bear seed (sperm) will always produce another bear, albeit a bear with different traits than the original (thus allowing for evolution with a genus), but a bear nonetheless.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but by my interpretation of your posts, your line of argumentation so far has consistet of variants of "we have to acknowledge the beliefs of a billion Christians because there are so many of them" - you are literally building your entire argument around other people's beliefs, and all but demanding that I validate them as factual because there are so many who seemingly agree with you because they all use the same label for their highly subjective experiences.

(And we haven't even gotten into the issue whether any of these billions of people have experiences that are actually similar and actually come from the same source - as far as I can tell, this is an assumption on your part, not a position arrived at through the rigorous analysis of these billions of individual, subjective stories.)

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Technically, no, I haven't rigorously examined the individual experiences of billions of people. But then neither have you, so why are we talking as though either one of us knows what we are talking about? I think it a bit nit picky to come from that argument, but since we did, what other conclusion can we come to?

rrobs said:

I must agree that we have evidence that may suggest a supergererational process. However, we've never actually seen life come from non-life. Suggestions are all we have.

As far as the hybrid bear goes, I would guess the hybrid is still a bear. According to Genesis, bears have always been bears. There are many different bears, but their all in the same genus, Urisdae. Genesis does allow for mutations and evoliution, but only within a genus. God created all plants and animals after their "kind" (Septuagent Greek genus). It also says each has seed within itself. A bear seed (sperm) will always produce another bear, albeit a bear with different traits than the original (thus allowing for evolution with a genus), but a bear nonetheless.

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Please excuse me, but I don't really have any inclination at all to get into the weeds of yet another debate over evolution. My point wasn't to start such a debate once again - rather, I wanted to lay out in front of you why it is subjectively easier for me to assume its vericity - specifically, I wanted to argue the distinction between subjective experience on one hand, and verifiable evidence on the other.

I wanted to use the theory of evolution, in this argument, to illustrate the epistemic conundrum I think you are facing here:

At least as I see it, we cannot verify the facticity of your experiences with the divine because by their very nature these experiences are highly subjective: There is no outside, physical component we could point to (as with the evolutionary fossil record), and no third party observers could verify your personal experiences; all we can go by is your account of what you think happened.

But even there, we run into the difficulty of communicating the nature of these experiences as truly divine (if they are divine at all) as we are dealing with a phenomenon that is, by definition, breaching the limits of human understanding and conceptual capacity.

So what you have here is an experience that you are completely convinced is proof of the divine, but which, by its subjective and liminal nature, cannot actually function as a means for others to verify that belief. While I never had any such experience myself, I can emphatize with how frustrating such a situation may feel.

Unveiled Artist said:

Have you had a profound experience.in your life that changed your views and behavior?

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Have you?

I can't say I have, so I'd be interested to hear what's that like.

Kooky said:

Have you?

I can't say I have, so I'd be interested to hear what's that like.

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I haven't. I've had little experiences I'd call spiritual or whatever but not insofar it changed my life completely. Little breakthroughs. I understand the god/spiritual concept or experience but not when described by deity.

Tiberius said:

Actually, you don't need to produce an NDE, you just need to produce an Out of Body Experience (OBE). And this can be done quite easily. First Out-of-body Experience Induced In Laboratory Setting

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That's hardly a scientific paper. Where is the control group. Where is the statistically valid sample. Where is the replication by another group of researchers. It has the same defect you challenged me with:

Tiberius said:

What you provided were stories that were not controlled in any way.

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Unveiled Artist said:

Have you had a profound experience.in your life that changed your views and behavior?

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Yeah. I'm a competitive cyclist and I was on a long 100 mile training ride in August in 1993. It was overheated, dehydrated, and low on blood sugar and still had 35 miles to go. I was hallucinating which is common. Vision, hearing, and thinking is distorted. It's kinda like being high on pot a bit. My mind was wandering, and I became aware that I've never looked into philosophy. My mind was having random thoughts and I was pondering how different people perceive things in their own way. So I had an epiphany.

I made it home, I recovered. And I started buying books and reading. Theology, philosophy, science. So this began my quest ti=o understand how things are, my search for truth. I wasn't a theist but I found religion completely inadequate. the more I read the more it pointed to some sort of psychological phenomenon. That is when I decided to study psychology, especially the psychology of religion. This gave me tools ti understand why many people believe what they do. I often understand theists better then they understand themselves.

So to clarify, I did have a sort of physical and mental breakdown/crisis, and from this came a realization. Being exhausted via sport is much like a sweat lodge and opens the door to realizations about the self that isn't apparent on a day to day basis. Our day to day operation is loaded with mundane tasks and responsibilities, and we often absorbed by these. It's when we have a sort of breakdown of this "responsible task master" that we have better clarity about the self.

Me having no motivation to seek religious interpretations and meanings means I'm free to be objective and follow a path that is more consistent with reality.

rrobs said:

But you seem to have no trouble dismissing the testimony of billions of people (not all are ignorant savages either, you know). There's even people in Mensa who believe the scriptures.

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Billions of people mimicking the cultural beliefs and behaviors of their fellow citizens.

If billions were independently arriving at some belief THAT would be amazing.

Unveiled Artist said:

Have you had a profound experience.in your life that changed your views and behavior?

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So how about answering my questions:

OK, then what is a "spiritual awakening" and how does it differ from your basic life lesson?

So it seems you want to examine how and why people have a crisis in life and learn some profound lesson from it?