(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Now you're conflating two different things. I never said God can only be experienced by a select few. I do think that it's right to assume the hand can't be shown though:
Let's call the royal flush my experience of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I look down at my hand, and what follows is that I think it's extremely boring. That's *my* experience of this hand. How exactly do I *SHOW* you my hand, such that your experience will be *synonymous* with mine? I can't. That's the crux of the OP, that what the theist "holds" is purely *theirs* and a private matter by nature.
Either you are being confusing or you are confused - but I don't think you are expressing yourself properly.
Look at it this way. There can be two components of an experience - objective and subjective. The objective one depends upon the nature of object being experienced - its form, physical qualities etc. and the subjective component would be your feelings and emotions related to it. So, when you see a royal flush, the objective part of the experience would be seeing five high cards and the subjective part would be feeling giddy at the expectation of victory. Similarly, while watching LOTR, the objective part would be seeing and listening to everything and the subjective part would be, for you, being extremely bored.
Now, I'm no longer sure what the royal flush represents anymore, so let's do away with the middleman. If you compare your experience of watching LOTR with a theist's experience of god - it would be true that there is a part of your experience that you'd never be able to share. The subjective part of their experience would always be purely theirs - a private matter. But the objective part of the experience can be shared - IF this god is an objective entity.
Compare this to another movie that you saw in a dream last night. Basically, you dreamt that you were in a theatre, watching a movie called "rise of the boobie monster" and you enjoyed it. This experience would be completely a private matter - since I can't share in the objective part (since it was your dream) or the subjective part.
This is the issue with the OP. If this god is an objective entity, then atleast a part of that experience can be shared. The only reason this won't be possible is if this entity is in the theist's head, thus making the experience completely private. Basically, if he actually holds the royal flush, he'd be able to show his hand and the only reason he can't show his hand is because he doesn't have the royal flush.
(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: And what happens if magically we could transfer his experience on to you and suddenly you confirm the royal flush? That's the other underlying point here - that no matter how crazy something sounds, they *could* have a valid experiential justification for said crazy claim.
That is why we don't consider experiential justification to have any great validity to begin with.
(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Yes! That's the idea. I mean, I don't know what those suggestions would translate to in the real world, but the point is that the atheist should be trying different arguments to settle the fact that they can't possibly be experiencing a royal flush.
But we do try - or haven't you been paying attention? We see that the same experience is replicated in others with completely different gods - thus establishing that a royal flush seems to provide the same experience as a straight flush. We see the necessary implications of having a royal flush - certain cards being missing from the deck (of the necessary implications of the god they experienced - like absence of suffering) and check them out one by one - not true, not true and so on. I'd say that we do a lot to check if they have a royal flush when we had no reason to believe them in the first place.
(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: If this claim is dependent on previous claims, then surely that implies previous claims also depended on the ones before them. How did we consider the very first claim then? Better yet, let's say this *is* the first claim.
What now?
That would be unnecessary. The first claim of royal flush would be the first claim of "experiencing god". And we got completely and totally fooled that time. We bought it, hook, line and sinker. In fact, we got fooled a few thousand times after that as well and lost a lot of pots to that. Now, we are smarter.
(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: Because in the real world, they simply *can't* show their "hand".
As I said, if the flush is real, they should be able to.
(July 9, 2013 at 12:08 am)FallentoReason Wrote: No, what I think is that the atheist needs to be a little more pro active and realise that the experience can be undermined in a different way. They would have to try a line of argumentation that would lead to the conclusion "...and that's why you couldn't possibly have experienced God" because if the experience is undermined such that "God" wasn't responsible for it, then the floodgates open for the theist to fill in the blank with anything *but* God.
You are crediting the theist with too much rationality. The only way you'll convince them they couldn't possibly have experienced god would be by first proving that there is no god. Try giving any explanation - that the experience was caused by hormones - god stimulated the glands. It was caused by force particles - god is a jedi. And you won't convince them that there is no god because they'll keep saying "but I experienced him".
