How do I know the things I know?

[Darkstar]

God is not easy to realize. That was the meaning of "not cheap."

Let's say I want to verify the theory of relativity. I don't like to accept things without knowing it's true for myself. I can't just accept the authority of Einstein. I want to really know for myself.

So is verifying the theory of relativity a really easy thing to do? Is that verification something any fool off the street can do for themselves, so that it can be proved?

Verifying something like that takes serious study and discipline. Most people just accept it on authority.

Err...no. You see, science has rigorous peer review. Science tests and retests its ideas before concluding something. A 'theory' in science is something that has passed rigorous testing from many sources. They take a hypothesis and devise a test that will either provide evidence for or against the hypothesis. If the hypothesis is wrong, this doesn't mean that science was wrong; either way, science has learned something. Science has earned the right to be trusted.

Not so with religion. Religion starts with a conclusion: god exists. It then seeks anything that can be interpreted as evidence for god, and throws out everything else. It took the church centuries to admit that the earth wasn't flat. We laugh now at the idea, but in a few hundred years, people may be laughing at the ideas held now.

In the same way, if you're not ready to accept the God theory on authority, you need to verify God' existence for yourself, it's certainly possible. But it's a really serious thing to do. Any fool off the street can't demand proof for God - most people have no clue what or who God even is. Realizing God takes serious study and discipline. But it's certainly possible, just as many many spiritual scientists have experienced God in the past.

No one knows what or who god is because everyone defines him differently. He was deliberately defined in vague terms so he couldn't be disproven. It is not certainly possible to prove god, or someone would have done so by now. Many 'spiritual scientists' were dangerously ignorant. They said that Zeus caused lightning and Posiedon caused tsunamis. You are using them as a source of accurate knowledge?

In other words, when people say "where's the proof?" it sounds as childish as a crazy theist coming into this forum and saying "I haven't seen any monkey's giving birth to human's lately - evolution is so dumb! where's the proof?"

Those people have no idea what evolution is. I don't know how you claim to know what god is in such detail when he is supposed to be unknowable (another shield against falsifiablilty).

What' you're going to say to that person are things like "do you have any understanding of what evolution is? have you taken 5 minutes to study it? where do you get off even talking about it, forget about claiming it's not true."

Yeah...so...what is your point? Many people have said that the quickest way to turn someone into an atheist is to get them to read the bible. In fact atheists tend to know more about religion than theists.