Atheism

[SteveII]

Let me get this straight. If people report an experience with God, that is not information of facts (evidence) that support the premise that God exists? Then the converse must be true: if God exists we cannot have any experience of him. This is obviously false. Your defense is some sort of shifting from 'experiences' to 'beliefs' and then to beliefs can be false and then an unjustified leap to these beliefs are false.  You don't have a logical leg to stand on here. 

We cannot have an experience that would allow us to know that the cause of the experience is the theodic maker of the universe. That is not something that is possible to know by any experience. You might be left with a feeling of certainty or knowledge about what you experienced, but actual knowledge of such a being is inaccessible to humans. Even if some being contacts us with a revelation or something, we have no way to evaluate the experience as truly being 'from God'. We'd have to be omniscient ourselves to be able to know that what 'touched' us was the all-knowing and all-powerful creator of the universe. The most we can ever get from a personal experience of contact with something that seems to us divine, even if we eliminate something just happening in our brain as a possibility (which we can't do), we are still just left with a personal experience that seemed to us divine, for some other reason than our internal brain activity. That doesn't get you t a capital G God. It doesn't even get you to an intangible spirit, aliens with mind-affecting rays could be the cause. If God is real, personal experiences aren't enough to show it.

If you mean 'know' to be certain knowledge, okay, I agree. However, one is entirely justified to believe that the experience are from God (with a capital 'g') when it is in the typical Christian context: I believe the message of the NT and that God will be a presence in my life if I sincerely ask. Then I sincerely ask and subsequently feel God's presence and see its effects on my inner life. The inferred connection between these events is more than reasonable--even authenticating, to a certain degree, the underlying belief. You started with a hypothesis/prediction and getting the predicted results is evidence that the hypothesis is true. 

Now, if everyone's personal experience of the divine were consistent, that would be something to pay more attention to. It would at least require explanation if large numbers of Hindus started having visions that inspired them to become Christians, and the visions were theologically consistent, to boot (agreed on things like baptism and what is necessary for salvation)! Or if God could be counted on to give verifiable information that we couldn't possibly have obtained on our own.

By your own argument, you can't rule out that the experiences are similar. God's presence is not about visions or theological revelations. God's final theological revelations are in the NT. God's presence is a strength, support, peace, hope, and guidance for your personal life as well as being willing to be used to further the message of the Gospel or otherwise effect God's plan. 

That Middle Easterners had different divine experiences than people from India or China is par for the course. It's what we'd expect if those experiences have more to do with brain chemistry than an omnipotent supernatural influence.

If there's a God, it can certainly contact you. But you can't know your experience was genuinely from God. All you've got to go on is 'feels', and anything that could contact you could probably make you feel any way it wanted to about it. And drugs can provide similar experiences (not to mention schizophrenia), which I find telling.

In context, I can a be reasonably certain. Additionally, confidence in your experiences are not in a vacuum -- every individual has a slightly different cumulative case undergirding their beliefs.