Witness Evidence

[RoadRunner79]

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.

You do realize that you cannot repeat history right?   And even if you can repeat the outcome, that does not necessarily demonstrate the means.    Science isn't concerned with history (although it may be involved with it).  The focus of science doesn't care about what happens once, but cannot be repeated.   I once brought up alchemy in this regards, and that given good testimonial evidence would show that it did happen, even if there are unknown conditions where it cannot be repeated.   A friend who is also a chemist for an R&D firm, said they experienced this very thing.   While trying to do something else, they accidently created a compound, that would be worth a lot of money to their company.   What they started with, what they did, and what the ended up with was all documented, and witnessed by a number of people.  Further, the spent a lot of money trying to replicate the results.   However the only physical evidence they ended up with is the final results.   However it not being repeatable is only evidence, that they do not know how they did it, not that it did not happen.