Well, people say they don’t believe in God all the time, that’s entirely unremarkable. If a fish told me that it didn’t believe in something, that would definitely cause me to rethink my belief system! (probably starting with the belief “I don’t experience auditory hallucinations”)
What, like with hallucinogens?
Chars
Headaches are not supernatural. If you have a eadache, something is happening inside your body that could, given the right equipment, be physically measured. There will be evidence that a headache is occurring and if the phenomenon was studied in great enough detail, it would be possible to examine a person and say ‘this person appears to be experiencing a headache’, without them volunteering their opinion on the matter.
The qualia of ‘pain’ in this context is subjective, but thats the same as the qualia of ‘pressure’ you might feel if you take your own pulse. It’s a thing you are experiencing, but it’s also a thing in its own right with measurable physical attributes.
I would never considering doing so. I can’t imagine what the point of such an exercise would be. But then, I’m a very odd Christian. I didn’t come to this religion by reason or belief, and neither figures in my practice of it. To me, Christianity is just the costume which some of us use to clothe our understanding of the divine. It means little; even the concept of the Godhead is pathetically inadequate to the reality.
But to reductionists, none of what I said makes any sense.
(I think you might have missed some explanations of mine above.)
Exactly. It does not mean concluding one has a headache from evidence to the effect.
Not what I mean. I’m not experience a sensation of ‘knowing that I have a headache’, which I agree could be faulty in its content—an illusion, again. I’m experiencing a headache, that’s it. In the same vein, I could ‘experience god’, or acquire knowledge of that sort via yet another means that is unique to divine beings.
Then again, you stand before the conclusion that believing anything is unreasonable: you’d need evidence for your evidence for your evidence for… etc.
Yes: that one channel of non-evidential knowledge seems limited to our own experience. But I’m not aware of any argument that no other such channels could exist, ones perhaps reserved to the realm of the divine in the way this one is reserved to that of subjective experience. I strongly believe that nothing of the sort exists and would be glad for any sound argument to that effect, but I can’t envision what such an argument might look like.
And on another note, on many belief systems, we’re not necessarily separate from god, so knowing our own inner nature and knowing god may not, in fact, be that different.
Ultimately, having absolute belief in anything other than your own existence IS unreasonable, since we can never completely reject the brain-in-a-jar hypothesis.
That’s because it is an internal experience. Evidence is not a valid concept on this context. How much does purple weigh?
Pain is a sensation you can experience. So is green. So is the smell of sulfur.
It is theoretically possible that there is some unique experience - “God” - that is somehow related to the Divine. Or it’s possible that there is no divinity, but you could still have that same exact experience and it would convince your monkey brain that you experienced the divine.
It is also theoretically possible that there is a unique color that no one has ever seen, known as “Blurple”. It doesn’t correspond to any wavelengths of light, which is why no one has seen it, but our brains are capable of that sensation, and it’s the nicest color ever.
None of that seems particularly profound or meaningful.
What? I have no idea what you are saying there.
I’m not talking about absolute belief, however, but any belief at all. There’s no Bayesian updating if there’s no evidence to support or contradict a given hypothesis. And the above still concedes my point: there, the belief in one’s existence is one not due to evidence.
Of course it is.
The fact that you experience things is evidence of existence. It isn’t evidence that your experience is representative of the real world, but it is evidence that you are a being that exists and can experience things.
OK, let’s back up. Do you think we know things about our experiences? Do you think we need evidence for that knowledge?
Again, that confuses the fact of the experience with its content. I’m not talking about knowledge about what we have experience of, but about knowledge of that experience itself. So I’m not considering some particular ‘god’-experience, I say that knowledge of god may be like knowledge of experience, in that it’s not based on evidence.
Well, take the experiment-example again. You see the detector flash red or green, and you take that as evidence for (or against) a particular hypothesis. But now suppose that you’d need evidence, first, to support the hypothesis that you’re seeing red vs. green. Then either that evidence is itself knowable without further evidence—and such things exist, which is my position. Or, it needs evidence in turn—but then, you’ve just bumped the can down the road: evidence1 supports your experimental hypothesis, evidence2 your knowledge of evidence1, evidence3 your knowledge of evidence2, and so on, never bottoming out.
In sum: some non-evidential knowledge is necessary to enable the possibility of evidential knowledge.
Again, this is just circular: I need to know that I exist before I can use that knowledge as evidence for my belief that I exist. Otherwise, how could I use it as evidence?
Anyway, it seems we’re getting nowhere on this. It’s a quite simple point: if nothing can be known without evidence, then anything pointed to as evidence needs further evidence, and we’ll never know anything. But I’m afraid I can’t give any evidence for that.
You can’t be sure that a light is flashing red in the same sense that you can be sure you exist. It’s possible you’re dreaming and the light doesn’t exist at all, or that you’ve suddenly developed some sort of visual hallucinations. In the real world, of course, we discount these sorts of extremely unlikely possibilities and assume that the likeliest explanation is true, and it works out well almost all the time.
The only thing we can know for certain through direct experiential knowledge is that we exist, since by definition something that doesn’t exist can’t believe that it exists; there has to be something doing the believing. Everything else we know we derive from evidence obtained from our potentially fallible sensory organs, so that sort of knowledge is necessarily less certain than the knowledge of our own existence, even if the different levels of certainty are irrelevant for all practical purposes.
How much does purple weigh? What color are five kilograms?
This question makes no sense.
When I have an experience, I have an experience; I know I am having that experience. These are most often essentially the same thing, although there are exceptions. For example, the phenomenon of “blindsight”, where a person who is cortically blind may react to things that he sees without the conscious experience of having seen the stimulus.
Did a person with blindsight experience the ball tossed towards them? I would argue that they (where “they” are “their conscious mind”) did not, but they (where “they” is “the system of conscious and unconscious systems that make up a human being”) did. And the first “they” had the disconcerting experience of raising their arm without knowing why to grab a ball put of the air without knowing it was coming.
Sure, that could be true. We have no reason to think so
though. That may also be true of knowledge of kittens, knowledge of chocolate fudge brownies, or knowledge of karate. Or it may not.
It could be a headache caused by a bullet. But a bullet is not a headache. It’s the pain that’s a headache.
I strongly suspect that when they asked how I felt at least part of my answer would be ‘I have an awful headache.’
That drove Nietzsche into despair too:
“Die »Vernunft« in der Sprache: o was für eine alte betrügerische Weibsperson! Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben…” (Götzendämerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, 2. Die ‘Vernunft’ in der Filosophie, Aphorismus 5) translation:
“»Reason« in language: oh what a deceitful old woman! I fear we cannot get rid of God because we still believe in grammar…” Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer Part 2: ‘Reason’ in Philosophy, Aphorism 5
I think it was Spinoza who already asked the right the question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” For this thread that could be restated as: “Do you need god to answer that question?” To which I would add: “If yes, why?” For the record: I don’t know the answer to the question, but I refuse to resort to the god-hypothesis. It feels cheap and lazy to me.
Anyway: Funny where the missing-in-inaction OP has led us. I am beginning to suspect he did not mean the opening question seriously at all and he may be laughing at how far his teasing has brought us. That is cheap and lazy too.
I’ll take that challenge!
You need to understand that before I found the Lord, I was a complete social misfit. Because I was too damned smart for my own good, I was moved from first grade to second grade three weeks into my first year of school (this was before public kindergarten), found myself an outsider there, and that pretty much defined the next decade: on good days, I was just a reject; on bad days, I was bullied. I had the occasional friend, but they were few and far between. Most years, I had zero friends. None.
I still can only look back at the change that happened when I found the Lord, grin, and say, “impossible.” How was it that I suddenly began to see what was beautiful in the people around me when all had been opaque to me before, and how was it that I found myself reaching out and connecting with people, making friendships that lasted years?
Yeah, I’d still call that a miracle, more than half a century later. My point here isn’t that my tale should be regarded as proof of a miracle: if you weren’t there to observe the change (or have it freakin’ happen to you! 
), of course this proves nothing. It doesn’t and shouldn’t prove to anyone else that God even exists, let alone that this actually happened. I’m just taking up the challenge about advanced technology or aliens. Whatever this was - if this was a miracle - it had nothing to do with either of those things.
When you “found the Lord” did you do it all on your own, or did it involve a church/religious group that held out a hand when you were at your lowest, with little self-esteem?
Had He been behind the couch all along? He’s always in the last place you look!