(April 30, 2011 at 11:35 am)FadingW Wrote: For many christians, personal testimony, personal experience is a really big deal.The problem with personal experience is that it is necessarily first-person, telling anyone else who doesn't already subscribe to your religious concepts/denomination without question you had a divine encounter or interaction is senseless.
But does personal experience really prove anything?
Isn't it at best like an ink blot test which reveals more about the person than provides any evidence one way or another about god?
Personal testimony is by nature subjective; moreover when the things experienced are non-material, there can't even be plausibility within what is generally knowable.
If your friend tells you he caught a fish thiiis big, at least we know fishes have been known to exist and can be interacted with in a stable way.
You can't convince or prove anything with testimony alone, expecting your audience to take supernatural claims at face-value is unrealistic; they can't verify the claims for themselves because they have no independent access to the experience(s) being described or investigate what information or data you may have forgotten or deliberately ignored.
Another problem is the claim is so vague we may misinterpret your "fish story" story and build up an inaccurate skewed mental structure of a fish that bears no resemblance to the one you caught, people may even exaggerate the story to the point that eventually that the fish caught was of gargantuan proportions, bigger than a house, and so on. If you wrote this stuff down and let these stories build, those writings wouldn’t be worth the paper they're written on to determining whether there is any truth or validity behind them. Yes, fish are demonstrably real, but through testimony and word-of-mouth alone you do not conflate your abstract concept of a fish with someone else's.
