Evidence for a god. Do you have any ?

[polymath257]

We believe there are other minds because we see other people moving around, talking, and acting in ways that show they have minds. They act in complicated ways that show the existence of internal states and motivations involving planning and long-term goals. That is the evidence for other minds.

What evidence can you provide that there is a divine? What do you see, hear, touch, feel, or taste that provides evidence for the existence of a divine that is *anywhere* comparable to the above evidence for other minds? You claim it is based on 'common sense', but common sense dictates that we should limit our claims of existence to those things that have obsevable evidence supporting them.

Humans are quite prone to any number of illusions and illogical leaps in thinking. That many people 'feel' the existence of a deity is very far from proof of the existence of such a deity *especially* when the claimed properties of such deities conflict on almost every point.

Let's give an example. Suppose you are color blind, for specificity red-green color blind. How could you learn that the claims people make for the difference between red and green is real? Well, you can observe that many people make this claim. That alone is not enough--they could be delusional or simply under some sort of illusory mechanism. But, after looking a bit more, you find that they are *consistent* in their evaluations of red and green. So, one person may claim an apple is red (which you cannot detect). And it then turns out that *other* people will agree that this particular apple is red. Even when there is no communication between the people involved, they will still agree that the apple is red. Similarly for a green apple (which looks identical to you): people who claim to see red and green will be agree between themselves about which are red and which are green even if there is no communication allowed between the people questioned.

On the other hand, when it comes to the divine, there are literally thousands of mutually contradictory claims concerning its nature made by those who claim to see such divinity. pretty much any two people who claim to experience the divine will disagree about most particulars, even if allowed to discuss with each other, let alone if they are prevented from such. Instead of the consistency of red and green, which can be determined even by someone who is color blind, the claims of divinity have almost no consistency at all.

This is strong evidence that the experience of the divine *isn't* an experience of reality, but simply a common malfunction of how the human mind works, like a sort of optical illusion.

This does *not* deny that you have some sort of experience. I believe you do. But it *does* deny that your interpretation of that experience is valid.

One might counter this with Frank Jackson's thought experiment about Mary the neuroscientist, who, having been raised in a black and white world, had never experienced the color red.  Presumably, Mary, as a neuroscientist, knows all the factual knowledge there is to know about perception, yet all that knowledge would not inform her about what it means to experience the color red.  The implicit argument is that factual knowledge cannot cover all possible knowledge, and that some things can only be known through experience.  One might make an observation about consciousness that if we did not possess consciousness and experience it ourselves, then we would probably be unlikely to attribute such a thing to other persons, and the behavior of other people would likely remain a black box, the mechanism behind which we do not understand.  It is only through our experience of our own consciousness that we make sense of, and develop a theory about, the behavior of others.  (It is true that we have evolved the inference about the behavior of others and their consciousness, but I don't think that alters my point significantly.)  

I know that there are various objections to Jackson's argument, but both the objections as well as the original argument seem inconclusive to me.  YMMV.

My observations about the reliability of inductive inference and reason that I posted in another thread are relevant here as well, so I'll repaste them here for convenience.

Well, it seems that the behavior of people *is* a black box. We just give that black box a name: consciousness. I strongly disagree that this is the only way to make sense of the behavior of others: we can collect and categorize information about their behavior and, yes, use induction to determine likely future behaviors. In that process, it becomes clear that a good model will include an ability to model internal states, which is the essence of self-consciousness. It will also include the ability to interpret and base behavior on data acquired from the senses, which is the essence of consciousness in general.
Here's a question: have you ever wondered if you are a p-zombie? How would you tell? Perhaps *other* people are 'really conscious', but you actually are not? That what you think you experience isn't really consciousness but rather p-consciousness?
There have been times where the claims of people thinking there is a 'hard' problem of consciousness are so fart outside of my experiences I wonder if they experience something very different than what I do and that, maybe, I really am a p-zombie.
But then, they then claim that noone could actually think themselves as a p-zombie,.....

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I don't think that p-zombies are a coherent concept. Anything physically identical to something having subjective experiences will also have subjective experiences. 

In near future robots will have behavior that is identical to humans without having consciousness. Subjective experience seems to be unnecessary.

Why would you think they would fail to have consciousness if they behave identically? I would argue the exact opposite: when they begin to behave identically, they have achieved consciousness.