You certainly haven’t asked me to accept God, but you have asked us to accept your subjective experiences as evidence for God.
Yes, we cannot claim to prove that all varieties of Gods don’t exist. But what we can say is a lot stronger than just “not proven.” Not proven, and also very unlikely.
In your view is the existence of abducting aliens just “not proven” or can we say something stronger about them.
Just about any objective evidence can be scientific. In fact, psychologists would consider your subjective experiences as scientific also, in the sense that they can be used as data to help understand how our mind works.
We are not talking systems of logic here, but rather rules of evidence. Extraordinary claims, such as the existence of the supernatural, require more than subjective experiences - especially since we know how these experiences can be created without external input. You might as well claim that what people see on LSD trips is evidence for the existence of magic carpets.
Sure. Back in the Middle Ages people believed in demons, so the same experiences that today are considered as evidence for alien abductions was evidence for succubi. There is nothing wrong with personality determined beliefs. We just have to be careful about concluding that what we tend to have happen really does.
You’ve just contradicted yourself. Your examples demonstrate that these subjective experiences could be verified, by making predictions and having them come true. That they never have been verified is different from them being unverifiable.
I’m sensitive about this because of all those who claim that faith requires God not give us any decent evidence.
Pauling got pushback as someone from outside trying to get involved in a field he didn’t really know about. The arguments within a field are more interesting.
Paine knew nothing about the stars. He was talking about the structure of the solar system - which we do understand.
Covered above. Evidence doesn’t come with tags saying scientific and not scientific. You just need to be aware of what the evidence implies and how far you can trust it.
I reject your god and substitute mine instead.
Huh? No, I think you are misreading me. I said that God never seems to make revelations to people that are verifiable. God only seems to provide subjective revelations, and I do not think those are verifiable, and thus they are of little interest.
I do accept subjective revelation as “evidence,” but only in the very weak sense that any hearsay evidence is evidence. If I say, “My friend said that his friend helped plan a bank robbery,” it is evidence…just of very little worth. If a guy says, “God talked to me,” that is evidence…but of similarly little worth.
If we are talking about the same Thomas Paine, I don’t think that he understood all there was to know about the solar system. Have we learned nothing about it since the Eighteenth Century?
But I knew from the beginning that my experiences were not scientifically verifiable yet. I assume that what I saw and experienced probably came from my own brain. Maybe a part of my brain was “turned on” like that of a blind person who is made to see for the first time. I don’t think it was “supernatural.” I think it was natural and reality based. I think it could happen to anyone and even be somewhat different from my own experience. I had not heard of it happening to anyone before my experience. Now people are coming out of the woodwork with parallel experiences. Maybe this is what Maslow meant by “peak experiences.” I was familiar with Maslow’s use of that term before my experience, but I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. And the use of the term did not occur to me for at least a couple of years.
How far can I trust it? I experienced this more profoundly than anything else I’ve observed in my life. I can’t say that I have evidence for most of those experiences either. But most of those I consider to be reality based.
I’ve had experience with some pretty powerful drugs in the hospital, but the only thing that they had in common with my experiences, I think, was a sense of bliss.
Are you sure that God told lots of people to use prayer as a cure for cancer? Do you have information that is not just a generalization or speculation? I acknowledge that people often pray for a cure. Some live, some die.
I had lung cancer for eight years without knowing it. None of my doctors (including a pulmonary specialist and a surgeon) had heard of such a thing. Do I know if my cure was in response to my prayers? No. But after the tumor and a lobe of my lungs were removed, I didn’t have to have chemo or radiation. I had to wait five months for the surgery, but I never cried about the cancer once. I do believe that my strength during those months came from a deep trust that dying was okay too. And that part did come from my previous experience.
There is a plethora of things neither scientists nor either of us can explain about the “laws of physics.” Would you have thought that observation can change how a particle or wave behaves? Don’t lean too heavily on the accepted laws of physics when considering quantum physics or another person’s private experiences.
Voyager, I can’t tell you how pleased I am to know that Linus Pauling had the goods after all and that the criticism was from outside. I’ve been stewing over that for twenty years or more.
There’s also plenty of things we understand just fine, and “gods” violate pretty much everything we know.
But God may not violate what isn’t known yet. Use your logic.
God violates what is already known. And God is logically inconsistent, among his other flaws.
Schoolbook example of a ‘God of the Gaps’ argument.
This God has gone from the ALMIGHTY creator of the universe that talked with Abraham and Moses, that smote opponents, sent angels hither and dither, who was so obviously present it would be ridiculous to posit he wasn’t real.
This ‘God’ has dwindled to something that cowers in the dark corners we haven’t explored yet. All of a sudden he doesn’t want to show himself to humanity? We should believe he exists not because we can see him, but because…errrm…that would somehow spoil everything?
You use your logic.
Everywhere we looked we didn’t find God. Everything was perfectly explainable without needing a god to do magic.
OK, not exactly everything, there’s indeed still a lot to learn, but by now the pattern should be becoming clear.
We will not find a god in those areas we have still to explore.
And you arrive at that conclusion because we haven’t found “him” yet? That’s not logical.
In my personal beliefs, I don’t think of God as being something we can find and recognize as a 3-D figure. Have you been reading all of the thread?
My religious beliefs are not necessarily logical and I don’t claim that they are. But I can still see flaws in the thinking of others. You and Der Trihs have shown not logic when you say that we haven’t found God so far, therefore, we won’t.
If you don’t believe in God, I have no problem at all with that. Just please be rational in your anti-God reasoning.
Science hasn’t begun to scratch the surface of the cosmos.
The Bible is logically inconsistent. God is unexplainable and unknown in a scientific way. That doesn’t mean that “he” is logically inconsistent. I can’t imagine “the Great Cosmic Glue” having flaws, but I do believe that the incarnation in the form of man had human qualities and would make mistakes.
Halt!
Right. So, rationally, you can’t believe the Bible.
But it is on the Bible that the whole idea of the Jewish God is based!
If you do not believe in the bible there is no reason to assume the Jewish god exists. Logic.
So why keep inserting him into the gaps in our knowledge?
That, indeed has not proven there is absolutely 100% sure nothing godlike
but we know, he did not create the earth, nor humans, nor does he make the sun come up, smite bad people with the plague, etc, etc etc.
All you can say, at best, is “who knows what is still out there in space”.
But stop conflating that with the old concept of “God”.
You may be correct in all of this. Understand that what I mean by this is the same thing I mean if I tell someone “you may be correct that Santa Claus is real”. To many atheists like me, the character known as “God” is thrown into that same big basket o’ fictional mythological characters as Santa, Zeus, Thor, the angel Moroni, and the Galactic Overlord Xenu. As far as evidence and plausibility concerned, they’re all the same to many atheists. Sure, maybe they exist- and maybe we all live in the matrix.
We understand it today, he did not. (Sorry for the tension in the tenses.) He was using a god of the gaps argument for deism - since we can’t explain the solar system’s structure, a god must have done it. Today we can, and I’m guessing that if he came back he’d be an atheist today.
But I knew from the beginning that my experiences were not scientifically verifiable yet. I assume that what I saw and experienced probably came from my own brain. Maybe a part of my brain was “turned on” like that of a blind person who is made to see for the first time. I don’t think it was “supernatural.” I think it was natural and reality based. I think it could happen to anyone and even be somewhat different from my own experience. I had not heard of it happening to anyone before my experience. Now people are coming out of the woodwork with parallel experiences. Maybe this is what Maslow meant by “peak experiences.” I was familiar with Maslow’s use of that term before my experience, but I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. And the use of the term did not occur to me for at least a couple of years.
How far can I trust it? I experienced this more profoundly than anything else I’ve observed in my life. I can’t say that I have evidence for most of those experiences either. But most of those I consider to be reality based.
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If you had been hooked up to a brain monitor during your experience, I bet that it could have been verified. But we wouldn’t know without your report what experience you had. As far as verification of the truth of the experience, you’d think that someone who had one would have been able to report on things that could be verified - a horse race, the solution to a problem, something. That would demonstrate that the experience was not just internal, but involved connection to something outside.
I don’t have these experiences, but I absolutely accept that people do.
Well, the people “outside” were the people who actually knew about the field. Pauling was a chemist, and perhaps fell prey to the notion that getting a Nobel Prize means you know everything about everything. I am biased because my wife is a biologist, and biologists in general didn’t think too much of him. And I believe his ideas about Vitamin C have been pretty much falsified, though I admit I haven’t read about it for years and years.
At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century a lot of clerics got involved with science partly because it was a fad. partly because they had time on their hands, but also because they were sure that scientific investigation would find evidence of God’s direct intervention in the world. They didn’t. Now we can’t prove that God isn’t lurking somewhere, but given the evidence of the past 200 years that seems to be the way to bet.
When I was a kid and went to services we read a nice poem in Hebrew about God having no form. I suppose it was written fairly late, since God does have a form in Genesis. But we know about lots of things we can’t grasp, such as the Big Bang. While we certainly can’t directly observe the Big Bang today, we can surely see its impact on many things, such as the distribution of hydrogen and helium in the universe.
What I don’t understand is this: given that you agree there is no scientific (which means verifiable) evidence of God, where do you get your knowledge of God from? Is it just that God helps you make sense of the universe? Is it subjective experiences? And how much have you been influenced by Western religion, and the Bible, even though you can accept none of that stuff happened.
Well, when you read enough testimonials and witnesses, you start to see a pattern.
(In my opinion, God has never told anyone anything, as God doesn’t exist. My specific claim, better phrased, is that lots of people have said that Gold told them to pray and their diseases would be cured.)
If prayer really worked effectively, this would show in statistical studies, and would be the basis for the most up-to-date research. It would be absolutely fascinating! Some would look for material causes (“the act of prayer releases endorphins…”) and others would attribute it to supernatural causes (“God miraculously intervenes…”) It would certainly constitute evidence!