(July 20, 2022 at 12:47 am)Belacqua Wrote:(July 19, 2022 at 11:25 am)Simon Moon Wrote: I am open to demonstrable and falsifiable evidence, reasoned argument, and valid and sound logic to support the existence of gods.
I think these are reasonable standards. They are standards held by very many people in our time, place, social class, and educational level.
It's good that you can state your standards of judgment. If someone disagreed with these standards, I hope they could explain why. I'm sure you could defend them properly, and have a genuine good-faith conversation.
Unfortunately there are atheists who pretend that they have no such standards, and their atheism is just some sort of pure nothingness. (This might be true of atheists who had never heard religious claims and never given any thought to the issue at all. If they were raised by wolves or something.) Like you, they hold strongly to certain epistemological and metaphysical principles, but they don't seem to recognize that their conclusions are based on principles.
Just to interject my own views on personal testimony in case you're interested...
Yes, most theist or 'wooist' personal testimony I would tend to dismiss out of hand but it would be largely dependent on their awareness of and willingness to accept psychological explanations of things; their credibility goes up the more the latter is the case. Like I was talking about in the other thread, things like believing in superstition or divination, when the effects of such things have simple psychological explanations, means someone has very low credibility to me. Or perhaps the most frustrating one for me, not recognising the power of expectation... that you often see what you expect to see or what is pervasive in your mind... basically the concept of a Rorschach test. Basically if something would not convince me in my own mind, why should personal testimony to the same effect in others hold any sway? And that is the majority of the sort of testimony I hear, at least around me, in my family.
