(April 19, 2013 at 3:38 pm)Love Wrote: Do you need repeatable scientific evidence that you love your parent, partner or child? How do you know that you love them (if you do, of course)? How can you prove these actual subjective feelings mathematically? I would assume that you just "know" that you love them by intuition alone. That is, you cannot determine this by inference, observation or reason. My conclusion about God is the same.
No, I do not, however, I am not trying to posit that love cannot be reduced to physical phenomena. The love I feel towards my son and wife definitely feel real to me, but I would never dream of claiming that it was anything outside of my own mind. You've had an experience you can't explain, and you have come to the conclusion that this experience is due to external influences based on nothing more than you feel it to be true. What we feel is not equal to what exists. So, knowing this, how can you be certain that your experiences cannot be explained by a materialistic position?
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
