Personal experience

[Eilonnwy]

I'm going to have to strongly and respectfully disagree with you both on this. Personal experience is evidence. You use your human senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, 5 types of nerve endings for touch, balance, orientation, diretcion, kinesthetic, and several other internal senses which are up for debate but are more than likely true) to experience all the things you see as evidence, it's a necessary precursor for anything deemed as evidence and at it's very basest is a personal experience and subjective in nature. It's not "something happened because I wanted it to it's "something happened to me" and some people can leave it at that and it forms their subjective view of reality. I'm not stating what's real for me is real for you, just trying to get some people to accept the posibility is more than likely that something outside the , IMO closed minded, view of a materialist world observed only by the five senses. It's productiveness is debatable and certain few aspects are unproven but that's sounding like a whole other thread.

I would never deny that if someone said something happened to them that it did not happen to them. However, I would not make the leap from "Something happened" to "Something happened as a direct result of my praying and God did it". You're making a logical leap with really no sound reasoning to back it up. Also, how many times do you pray for something and nothing happens? Confirmation bias is the tendency to remember this hits and forget the misses. For every 12 times you pray, 1 time something happens that you feel fits the requirements of what you prayed for. You remember that 1 time and forget the 11 times nothing happened. You build up these hits and constantly ignore the misses. This isn't evidence, it's just anecdotal, and anecdotal proves nothing.

It's not close minded to not accept the claim of supernatural intervention. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I've not going to believe something supernatural happened solely on one person's say so of a strange event.

I will turn to this youtube video that I have posted many times before, but never tire of listening to, but it nails it in terms of what is truly close minded and open minded about supernatural claims.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI