On Belief in God X

[FallentoReason]

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.

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.

I think you've made some very important distinctions here and I'm following you all the way on them. I guess the thing I'm left wondering is how one could share their god..? Their subjective experience is in the past and a private matter. The objective entity - god - is most likely a public matter. Does this imply that the theist can control it like a marionette and make it introduce itself to you? I don't think so, or at least it's not directly obvious to me that simply because it's an objective entity, they can manipulate it to satisfy your needs.

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.

Agreed, but what I also want to get across is that we need to be more understanding of *their* position. Whether true or not, they say they have experiential justification for their beliefs. This means that by *default* there will be some arguments that you can present to them which they will outright deny because of their circumstances.

An example closer to home of this might be that you believe in moral relativism. So a theist could say that action x is morally wrong according to divine command theory. The statement *as is* doesn't affect you in the slightest because whatever *your* justification for moral relativism might be leads you to think that statement is false, according to moral relativism. This means the theist can't simply keep asserting the same thing, because to you it's prima facie false. Therefore they need to find a different strategy to undermine your belief in moral relativity.

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.

This is what I'm talking about! Now you're not resorting to the near impossible task of getting them to show their cards. There's other ways which indirectly tell you something about the cards they hold, and if they're honest enough/your argument is sound, then it will undermine their experiential justification from their *own* p.o.v.

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".

I don't think we can generalise too much. After all, reasons along those lines worked on me

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You're sort of missing the pount. As already pointed out, the actual purpose isn't to claim improbability of their religious views being correct, but to demonstrate that they're being inconsistent - and arriving no where - by claiming that their theological and soteriological views are thereby correct because of some particular experience, when it can be - and has been - claimed by believers of EVERY religion, and EVERY denomination of every religion.

In other words, if you accept the basicality of religious experience as a confirmation of said beliefs, you arrive at a contradiction and inconsistency, since said experience can be claimed by anyone just a validly and lead to mutually exclusive beliefs being true, such as there both being only one God and there being multiple gods being simultaneously true.

If you get dealt a royal flush, what do you do? It's right there in front of your eyes. Doesn't that give you justification for believing you have a royal flush?

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Because in the real world, they simply *can't* show their "hand".

Oh, they absolutely could. They won't. And there is a perfectly rational explanation as to why: their 'royal flush' is virtually certain to be nothing any other player would recognize as such. They have only two options.

1: Lay down a hand more suited to the strength of any theist claim, such as K♥ J♥ 8♣ 7♦ 4♠, and insist that it doesn't appear to be a royal flush to the other players because they aren't interpreting poker hands according to what they believe is correct (i.e., you aren't interpreting it so that they win every hand), or
2: Never show their hand because, as long as they don't show, the game cannot continue and nobody can prove they don't have a royal flush.

It is giving theists far too much credit to suggest that they are incapable of showing their hands. If that's the case, they aren't actually holding any cards and should not be treated as though they are legitimate participants in the game.

If you do not have evidence which exists outside of your head, you can only lose or draw.

If you've read genkaus' last post, then let me ask you this: how do you literally show god?