How to Authentically Experience God

[Kyuuketsuki]

Which brings us right back to the question I asked in another thread, Is it therefore valid to assume there is no god (in exactly the same way as we assume that the moon is not made of green cheese and that little green men in flying saucers are not constantly "buzzing " our Earth) until actual evidence is supplied?

Same answer. Yes yes yes! It is entirely valid to assume no as well as yes. It has to be.

Which implicitly means you are not here to convert or to persuade others of the value of your views ... I will now wait to see whether that is true.

Until that point is addressed there is, for the rationalist, no moving on because nothing you can say about your god matters ... IOW, if the answer to my question is yes, it's a pointless philosophical conversation dealing with things that debatably might be but most likely are not.

As I've said yes does that close it then? I agree, without proof we remain in philosophical territory.

And since philosophy alone has never demonstrated anything that means you can never demonstrate the supposed reality of your god. I assume you will no longer make claims about your god in this forum?

Again that is a dodge ... I am not being literalist here, I am saying that any claim advanced has no more right to be excepted from the usual means of evaluation than any other. Unless you can justify why that exception is so it is nothing more than special pleading.

I didn't say you were being literalist. I said you were using literalist statements as the subject, that I myself don't accept.

And I'm saying I wasn't ... I'm saying that ANY claim (no matter what it is) can be evaluated to some degree by conventional empirical means (IOW by science) even if it is to conclude there is no evidence and therefore not worth anything more than the claim that there is a cream cake at the centre of the Earth.

I'm trying to answer you here. Yes, those statements (which I don't agree with) I'd agree require special pleading.

Which is a logical fallacy.

Not really (and I'm not even sure I said that) ... what I think is wrong is any implication that realms claimed by religion are IN ANY WAY AT ALL not the domain of science.

Can you be specific? I agree that we can't restrict science by saying that you can never know. Just that science at the moment doesn't have the means to do it.

Nothing, in principle, is beyond the investigative reach of science. Is that specific enough for you?

Kyu