On Belief in God X

[FallentoReason]

How do we translate that to the real world? Open his brains up, wire it up to a tv, press play and experience what they experienced? That's the unfortunate problem.. just like we can't see other players' hands in a game of poker, we can't experience what someone else has experienced.

[1]
That's for him to figure out. He's the trying to win the pot using his supposed royal flush.

So, I'm in this poker game where the other five players are all claiming to have a royal flush but none of them can show his hand. Well, I happen to have a three of a kind, but based on probability and the sheer impossibility, I'd say that all of them are lying. So I go all in and call. If a single one of them is right and shows his hand, he'll get the pot. But if all of them keep insisting that they have the royal flush, but can't show their hands and I just need to have faith - well, screw them. I'm taking the pot.

In the real world, they *can't* show their "hand". The best they can do is describe to you what that "hand" looks like.

[1]
Not good enough. To win, they need to show their hand or shut up.

I think this is actually the only route that would yield better results. Maybe they need an explanation of *what* a royal flush is! Something or other would do the job of undermining their experiential justification and render it trivial, useless, a delusion in such a way that they would undergo internal reflection between their updated metaphysics of a royal flush and what they percieve(d) and see that there's conflict.

[2]
If they don't know what royal flush is or if they are redefining it in a way contrary to the rules of poker, then they have no business playing the in the first place. The rules of a rational debate and of poker have already been established. You try to change them mid-way through, you get kicked out.

---

"I know I have a royal flush because I can seeeee my hand".

Who has more authority to comment on that? The players around the table or the guy holding the hand?

[3]
There doesn't need to be an authority - that's the point. Even if he does have a royal flush, we still don't need to take his word for it. In fact, most of the time, we wouldn't take his word for it.

I've put the numbers in bold in your post as a way to show what I'm responding to in my post. I felt like we were beginning to get sidetracked, so I kind of re-iterated my thoughts as a way to get myself across better, and therefore the numbers are there to show how my post relates to yours.

[1]
The poker analogy can only take us so far; in reality our "hand" cannot be shown. I can't translate my experience of how bored I was watching the first Lord of the Rings movie in such a way that your experience of it will be synonymous with mine. In fact, it won't even *be* an experience, but simply my description of my experience which I am telling you... that's my point exactly - there's no way of transferring this quale from me to you. The closest we can ever get is my description of this quale which I am telling you about.

If we agree on that much, then it follows that we have to use other means to determine what the person's hand really is.[2] But firstly, let's consider two different situations which I think effectively reflect the subject matter of religious belief:

1) The person claims to have a royal flush, but their concept of a royal flush is flawed. They are in fact holding anything *but* a royal flush. But since they don't know any better, their claim, as far as they're concerned, reflects their hand.
2) They do in fact have a royal flush and they know exactly what a royal flush consists of.

[3]
Since the others sitting around the table won't *ever* know what it's like to be staring at that hand, they need to try a different strategy for deducing the truth about that hand.

The point I'm hoping to make in this thread is that maybe we need to think of these other strategies, because the current strategy of sitting back and waiting to be given the impossible simply isn't working. The theist understandably gets irritated at the impossible task while the atheist jumps to the conclusion that since nothing was produced, the theist is wrong. [3]Then I can just picture the theist looking down at his hand and rightfully saying to himself "but what I have seen is this!". Both parties can walk away at this point, but the issue at hand wasn't ever touched upon.