Credible/Honest Apologetics?

[Belacqua]

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.

This all sounds reasonable to me. When you or I hear someone claiming that he's had an experience of God, we reject it for reasons we find sound. We judge such claims according to certain principles:

~ Psychological explanations (i.e. the mental state of the person having the experience) are more credible to us than divine explanations.

~ Determining the origin of any given experience requires a [Rorschach-like] interpretation. People who already believe in the divine are likely to interpret the origins as divine, while those of us who call divinity "woo" will explain it in other ways.

Little kids I suppose will just repeat what they hear from their parents, but some people hear and adopt other standards. The Tooth Fairy, or the voice of Jesus, will no longer be compatible with the way they interpret the world. 

My parents never made any woo-like claims, so I never had to reject any of that. But I've been thinking lately about how much of what they taught me has stuck with me over the years. Like political ideology, or other values. As far as I can tell, I've fallen extremely close to the tree. (Except my dad worked a lot harder than I do.)