(July 14, 2022 at 6:55 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(July 14, 2022 at 5:56 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Yes, I have a goal to have as many true beliefs as possible, and eliminate as many false beliefs as possible. Accepting poorly evidenced claims of personal experience with gods, is not a good was to achieve my goal.
Yes, I agree with you. This is what I've been saying.
Any atheist who has heard the claims religious people make, and given any thought to them, has rejected those claims.
As when we evaluate any kind of claim at all, we have principles we use about what constitutes good evidence. For many people, personal testimony is not good enough, because (as I said) we consider it unreliable when it doesn't align with our larger beliefs about how the world is.
So I think we agree on this point. Thinking atheists have a number of principles they hold to, and a number of standards they use. Their continuing atheism is a result of what they hold to be the best principles.
But should personal testimony actually be considered good enough by anyone, is the question? Even to those claim to have had one?
People have "personal testimony" for an almost endless number of supernatural claims: various mutually exclusive gods, witches, UFO abductions, encounters with bigfoot, encounters with Jinn, ghosts, zombies, exorcisms, etc, etc, etc.
Most of the people that have some of these 'personal experiences', will understand that most of the other of these claims should not be believed based on the peroneal experience of others, many times because they are rightfully skeptical, and understand the unreliability of peroneal experiences. "My personal experience with my specific god is absolutely true... but come on, alien abductions. Let's be serious."
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
