Atheism, Theism, Science & Philosophy

[The Reality Salesman01]

[Also, I think due to the extreme complexity of God, it is impossible for him/her/it to be expressed in a single form that can be perceived as exactly the same by everybody, hence my belief that it has to be realised by transcendening sensory experience.

If God can be percieved rationally he is contingent upon certain logical restrictions. If he cannot be percieved logically, it is an irrational, illogical belief.

Example: Seeing my face melt off without causing harm to my body can only be achieved by taking LSD. It doesn't mean it actually happened.

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Do you need repeatable scientific evidence that you love your parent, partner or child?

Nope, but I have a picture of me holding my son. I watched him laugh this morning as he made my dog chase a light up and down the hall way. When I tucked him in bed last night, he told me he loved me and even showed me in sign language with his hand. He woke me up this morning and told me he didn't want me to go to work because he wanted to stay home and play with me. I didn't wake up one day and all of the sudden begin describing the feelings associated with my actual son and assign them to a character I read in a book.

How do you know that you love them (if you do, of course)? How can you prove these actual subjective feelings mathematically?

If one were so inclined as to confirm that my brain consistantly functions in conjunction what I ascribe to my son, FMRI's can in fact, with comparable experiements and reproducible consistant evidence show which part of my brain is beig stimulated which cause my experience. (At UC Berkeley they have been using FMRIs to actually duplicate thought imagery, its amazing and could be used one day in trials to verify testemony by duplicating what a person saw exactly as the brain recorded it) There are words I use to describe the activity occurring in my brain that are consistant with the activity of other brains describing the same experience. In the end I'll have at least this much...

1) My physical Son (Jack) That's a big one
2) The physical experiences we share that are observable and verifiable to others....another big one
3) My conscious understanding of my existance and his, which allows me to reflect on both him and our interaction. This is the one that produces the "love" word used to convey my assessment of our relationship. It is an adjective describing a state of mind that is purely subjective but can be understood by studying the processes of the brain and comparing them to similar studies rendering the same results.

I would assume that you just "know" that you love them by intuition alone.

This of course is false, and is really equivicating the definition of "knowing" something and the "faith-based-knowing".

That is, you cannot determine this by inference, observation or reason. My conclusion about God is the same.

You have arrived at your conclusion illogically, but your assessment of what was necessary for God to qualify as a conclusion are accurate. It was achieved without inductive inference, verifiable observation, and because there is no logical justification for it, it is in fact unreasonable.