the case against the case against god

[Mystic]

If you have some false memories, it means memory is never reliable and you can never be certain of a certain memory?

Precisely. What it means is that your memory is capable of producing true recollections and false recollections, meaning you'd need some other way of determining which was which, and that can't just be "more memories."

It's the same with personal experiences; if your personal experiences can produce a false picture of reality then you cannot reliably claim that your personal experiences are evidence in and of themselves. You'd need some outside indication of which category your particular personal experience falls into, something objectively real to demonstrate that what you're experiencing conforms to reality.

And if you're having to look outside of subjective experience in order to verify your feelings about god, you can pretty much just skip the middle man and look to reality before coming to your conclusions. Of course, if you did that you'd find nothing to justify your personal feelings about god at all, which is why you're so set on keeping it all within the realm of your own subjective experiences and preferences, but then, it's hardly mine or any atheist's problems that your beliefs are indistinguishable from fantasy.

I have a hard time believing you verify all your memories that you believe in with certainty with some outside source. As well, this can be extended to things like free-will. Do you believe we are unjustified to believe in free-will? It can't be verified outside of personal experience...when a child thanks their mother, are they unjustified because they haven't proven free-will exists?

I think this an absurd position to take.

---

If we take a more scientific approach, sure, it might not seem we have a soul. But who says that must be the approach we take? It seems it is as I said, you are ruling out the experience within and a conclusion of a spiritual nature.

I have yet to see any kind of consensus on how to take a "spiritual approach" or how to confirm that one person's spiritual approach is legitimate or not. The thing is, the scientific approach is another way of saying the scientific method, which was developed in order to remove as many biases, ambiguity, and fallacious reasoning as possible in order to get at the truth of a matter. "Spirituality" is awash in these things, and thus it is impossible to verify any conclusion reached via that approach. Your only option is to accept it on faith or reject it.

They are two completely different ways to explain our experiences and cannot stand on equal footing. When someone devises a reliable way to quantify such experiences, then I'll consider them. Until then the spiritual and supernatural realm remain a place where opinion replaces fact and where desire replaces truth. That's not reliable.

Even if there isn't a consensus on how to approach spirituality, it doesn't follow there is no way to know something via spiritual experience. We accept free-will on faith, doesn't mean it's not knowledge.