Argument Against Religious Experience as Validation

[Foxaèr]

The personal experience of something real cannot be invalidated by an atheist claiming it never happened.

Sure it can, especially since what the theist experiences is nothing more than delusion.

[Lion IRC]

The personal experience of something real cannot be invalidated by an atheist claiming it never happened.

...what the theist experiences is nothing more than delusion.

Is not!

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See how easy it is to simply gainsay.
And lazy!

[Foxaèr]

Is not!

If it was not delusion, then everyone would be able to experience god. Since the only way to experience god seems to be to forgo with reason and logic, then god is in fact a figment of man's imagination.

[Doubting Thomas]

I would like to experience a couple of Playboy centerfold models in my bed some night, but it would just be a delusion.

[Ryantology]

The personal experience of something real cannot be invalidated by an atheist claiming it never happened.

This scenario never actually happens because you don't have personal experiences of anything real.

How would you know that a persons experience of sensus divinatus was false or fake?

How would you know it was true or real?

The fact that theists of various religions interpret their experience in differing ways does NOT mean that none of them are real. (Science doesn't always produce unanimous agreement on the data either.)

Science doesn't dogmatically require adherence to a single viewpoint. Your religion does. Your scripture insists that there is only one god and it's yours. The fact that, while a majority of humanity believes in gods, only a minority believe in yours is quite telling. It's a fact that Christians have to engage in the craziest sort of mental gymnastics to justify why most people get revelations from someone other than the Christian god.

When the atheist says...I never heard God or sensed a divine experience, I'm not skeptical of THEIR claim. I believe them!

And we're to blame for it, no doubt.

Great intellectual approach you have going there. That typifies the emotional basis for so much of what passes for counter-apologetics. Atheists get angry at the argument from intelligent design. Why? It's a purely intellectual question of cosmology.

We're not angry about it, except when it is passed off as legitimate science. You're free to believe in stupid bullshit if you want to.

Science is based on the experience of scientists reporting stuff to others who weren't there. We either have to believe their reported testimony or put it to the test by repetition. I can't fly to the moon, so I have simply take on faith what is said by others who claim to have been there.

Not all faith is equal. You don't need blind faith to accept the moon landing. There's tons of evidence out there, and unlike with your religion, it doesn't matter whether you believe it happened or not before you examine the evidence.

Because, unlike Christian claims, there actually is evidence to examine.

You say....oh but Lion IRC, divine experience isn't repeatable like science.

But it is. William Lane Craig is not the only person to have had first-hand direct experience of what Christians call God.

Craig has never demonstrated that he had first-hand experience with a god, and neither has anybody else. If you have more than one person making a claim they can't demonstrate to be true, it's not a repeatable experiment; it's a shared delusion.

[justin]

Just babble bullshit. I fucking hate William lane craig. Fuuuuuccckkk i hope he gets nailed by a church bus.

[MindForgedManacle]

WLC isn't saying that you should be convinced by the Witness of The Holy Spirit. He is saying that he is.

And my point is that such is fundamentally indefensible as Craig uses it. He calls it the "defeater to defeat all defeaters", and thus even if in some 'historically contingent circumstances' all of the available evidence turned against Christianity, he could reject because of this.

The personal experience of something real cannot be invalidated by an atheist claiming it never happened. How would you know that a persons experience of sensus divinatus was false or fake?

And now I know you completely failed to comprehend my argument, despite my explicit unpacking. I specifically said that I do NOT doubt that believers have these experiences they believe to be the witness of the Holy Spirit; when I was a Christianity, I had them. My point was that a personal experience alone, of anything, tells you nothing of the cause, nature or workings of that experience. And further, Christians can likewise not say that other kinds of theists (Muslims, Wiccans, etc.) don't have these experiences. The best you can do is say they're misunderstanding the nature of that experience. But therein lies the problem and the insipid arrogance: You presume that you and ONLY you Christians understand the nature and cause of that apparently divine experience, something you cannot even begin to justify.

The fact that theists of various religions interpret their experience in differing ways does NOT mean that none of them are real. (Science doesn't always produce unanimous agreement on the data either.)

I neither said nor implied that. I specifically said (and have just repeated) that there is no particular way (that has been demonstrated in any case) to determine who is actually right about the nature or cause of this apparent sense of the divine.

When the atheist says...I never heard God or sensed a divine experience, I'm not skeptical of THEIR claim. I believe them!

I never said I doubted people had these experiences, YOU ARE LYING. My OP explicitly denies this. What I said is that claims like Craig's to know of the nature, cause or workings of those proposed feeling of the divine is indefensibly dishonest. And this is the case with all experiences that are only known through a personal experience of feeling it.

Great intellectual approach you have going there. That typifies the emotional basis for so much of what passes for counter-apologetics. Atheists get angry at the argument from intelligent design. Why? It's a purely intellectual question of cosmology. The Kalam argument isn't an argument for one particular religion but anti-theists go nuts trying to refute even the possibility that intentional causation might be a real factor in the origin of events 13.7 billion years ago.

You are a twit. I was referring to the fact that I find making a deductive argument at the end of a post a bit pretensious (which is ironic, seeing as I do it all the time). Atheists get mad about intelligent design arguments because pretty much all of the are absurd and dishonest from start to finish. Biological intelligent design has essentially been destroyed, and cosmological intelligent design is largely pure speculation on a topic the scientists in question don't have an adequate understanding of, and further there's no way for theists to establish a case for it until we know if there are other universes.

And if you think God exists atemporally, an intentional creation isn't possible by definition.

This fails outright at the first premise.

Science is based on the experience of scientists reporting stuff to others who weren't there. We either have to believe their reported testimony or put it to the test by repetition. I can't fly to the moon, so I have simply take on faith what is said by others who claim to have been there.

Completely false analogy and the only way you could have done this is if you ignore and misrepresent the entirety of the previous part of the post (which you did in fact do). Firstly, science isn't based on the pure, personal experience of a phenomena and that alone. Scientists can predict the behavior of the phenomenon in question, demonstrate it to others, and have their methodology and conclusions scrutinized from start to finish. It isn't based merely on reporting of naught but the personal experience of a particular individual(s), but demonstrations and applications.

And you can see actual film of people on the Moon, so there's that, um, 'faith'.

You say oh but Lion IRC, divine experience isn't repeatable like science.

But it is. William Lane Craig is not the only person to have had first-hand direct experience of what Christians call God.

And that misses the entire point of my critique... again.

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I see your failure, however from our last discussion I know you will just use word twisting gymnastics so you want have to admit you're wrong.

GC

You're projecting again. Your utter failure to make anything resembling a cogent and non-contradictory case for your faith has been demonstrated ad nauseum.

[MindForgedManacle]

Just babble bullshit. I fucking hate William lane craig. Fuuuuuccckkk i hope he gets nailed by a church bus.

...That's too much. Especially since he's already suffering from sort of muscular degenerative diseaae.

[justin]

Just babble bullshit. I fucking hate William lane craig. Fuuuuuccckkk i hope he gets nailed by a church bus.

...That's too much. Especially since he's already suffering from sort of muscular degenerative diseaae.

So fucking what? Don't expect any sympathy from me for that dickhead. I loathe that man.

[Lion IRC]

...That's too much. Especially since he's already suffering from sort of muscular degenerative diseaae.

So fucking what? Don't expect any sympathy from me for that dickhead. I loathe that man.

Good old fashioned haters doing what they do best - betraying what really lies beneath their atheist agenda.

I would NEVER wish harm on a counter-apologist.