(November 2, 2013 at 7:07 pm)Lion IRC Wrote: The personal experience of something real cannot be invalidated by an atheist claiming it never happened.
This scenario never actually happens because you don't have personal experiences of anything real.
Quote:How would you know that a persons experience of sensus divinatus was false or fake?
How would you know it was true or real?
Quote:The fact that theists of various religions interpret their experience in differing ways does NOT mean that none of them are real. (Science doesn't always produce unanimous agreement on the data either.)
Science doesn't dogmatically require adherence to a single viewpoint. Your religion does. Your scripture insists that there is only one god and it's yours. The fact that, while a majority of humanity believes in gods, only a minority believe in yours is quite telling. It's a fact that Christians have to engage in the craziest sort of mental gymnastics to justify why most people get revelations from someone other than the Christian god.
Quote:When the atheist says...I never heard God or sensed a divine experience, I'm not skeptical of THEIR claim. I believe them!
And we're to blame for it, no doubt.
Quote:Great intellectual approach you have going there. That typifies the emotional basis for so much of what passes for counter-apologetics. Atheists get angry at the argument from intelligent design. Why? It's a purely intellectual question of cosmology.
We're not angry about it, except when it is passed off as legitimate science. You're free to believe in stupid bullshit if you want to.
Quote:Science is based on the experience of scientists reporting stuff to others who weren't there. We either have to believe their reported testimony or put it to the test by repetition. I can't fly to the moon, so I have simply take on faith what is said by others who claim to have been there.
Not all faith is equal. You don't need blind faith to accept the moon landing. There's tons of evidence out there, and unlike with your religion, it doesn't matter whether you believe it happened or not before you examine the evidence.
Because, unlike Christian claims, there actually is evidence to examine.
Quote:You say....oh but Lion IRC, divine experience isn't repeatable like science.
But it is. William Lane Craig is not the only person to have had first-hand direct experience of what Christians call God.
Craig has never demonstrated that he had first-hand experience with a god, and neither has anybody else. If you have more than one person making a claim they can't demonstrate to be true, it's not a repeatable experiment; it's a shared delusion.
