Witness Evidence

[bennyboy]

As soon as you quit observing it... It's a memory....one that according to some, maybe highly flawed memory.  What is being proposed here, crumbles a good many arguments on this board.   Ohh... You think this is possible.... Perhaps your memory was influenced by something you read and its now just a false memory?  You would not even realize you are mistaken?

You are right about this. The struggle to separate fantasy from reality is a full-time job, even though for the most part we do it automatically. That's why people take notes right away rather than waiting, and why they look to confirm via reliable witnesses WITH GOOD METHODS, that their results are correct.

If I ran an expriment and it seemed I'd achieved cold fusion, I'd check my notes, re-run the experiment, ask others to re-run it, check their methods to make sure they were collecting information properly, etc.

And then we have theists. They've made a "discovery" which, if true, would be infinitely more important even than the discovery of cold fusion. And how do they check it? Wishy-thinking, false attributions, and an appeal to numbers of people who ALSO fail to collect information in a useful and meaningful way. And that's your problem: you are relying on the testimony of witnesses who either do not know how to witness correctly, or are very deliberately doing it wrong. The entire population of Christians, therefore, is incapable of providing "evidence" of the existence of God.