Benevolent Creator God?

[tackattack]

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@LadyForCamus to answer how can you differentiate between your own mind in action and a god acting upon you[?]

And what would be the practical effect of intentionally not making that distinction? I actually don't think it would be all that important. The same process of interpretation and disambiguation would have to be undertaken in order to make sense of what it being evocated, regardless of whether the source is imaginal or inspired.

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The practical effect of coming up with a conclusion about the distinction is the confidence the foundations of your question. For instance, if I believed all my life that little green leprechauns told me their outfit was green and I used that as my bases for the definition of green then it's valid. It's also corroborated by a lot of other reasons. What you're getting at is that it doesn't make a difference but it does. If the science of green changes, and there is no other support that green is green, you have to reevaluate the reliability of the distinction, and thus the source. That confidence is what we believers call faith, and it can be blind or reasoned. Usually it's blind because of the fact that people don't see the value in assessing their reasoning.

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@vulcanlogician that seems a reasonable position as well. cheers

@LadyForCamus to answer how can you differentiate between your own mind in action and a god acting upon you: Speaking of my inner self,
If a situation outside of myself happens, I look for a cause. I look for natural causes within reason, and if I can't find one, look for unnatural ones within reason.

A few follow-up questions, if you would be so kind to oblige:

1. How do you rule out all possible natural causes, including potential natural causes that you aren’t aware of yet? And, what is the difference between an unnatural cause “within reason” versus an unreasonable unnatural cause? How do you make that distinction?

2. Is there a reason you don’t stop at “I don’t know the cause at this time,” when you have an experience you can’t think of a natural explanation for? I hope that doesn’t come across as condescending, btw. I don’t mean it as such. I have had several experiences in my life that I similarly have no natural explanation for, and back when I was far less skeptical about that sort of thing I attributed the cause to some force or “spirit.” Twenty years later, I’ve realized that I don’t actually have any evidence of such a thing as “the supernatural” (or even a clear definition of it for that matter), so I say, “I don’t know what that was and I probably never will.”  It is annoying as fuck, not having an explanation, don’t get me wrong. But I know I can’t make a rational inference without supporting evidence, and being rational is very important to me.

Both of those reasons are tainted by my biases and knowledge limits.

Yours and everyone else’s, atheist and theist alike. I appreciate your awareness and willingness to admit it.

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No LFC I don't take it that way at all and I appreciate the dialogue.

1. You can't, for an individual instance, factor out potential natural causes that are unknown. Unnatural cause “within reason” versus an unreasonable unnatural cause are still unnatural. The distinction is the reliability and amount of similar unnatural causes. This leads theists to a belief in the "super"natural world.

2. You, by definition, can't have natural evidence of something non-natural so I'm not surprised. I do stop at I don't know usually. Then I factor in the amount of similar I don't knows, to get to a confidence level that the supernatural world could very well exist and might. I then reassess those other things, known and unknown by the new world view that the supernatural could exist and reevaluate and resolve any cognitive dissonance. Bottom line its I'm OK with saying I don't know generally, I don't know lots of things. When trying to introspect I have a tendency to be a little more forceful and tidy about my thoughts because I'm the only one that could know the whys and who am I type answers to those questions. I think part of the problem is you're looking at one single instance and trying to make a rational inference to something materialistically known. If I were you I would take and make a rational inference to other similar experiences in the same category.
We do the same thing for natural inferences. This tree is green, the clover is green, I can compare them, this spectrometer lists it as green, paul agrees it's green, I was taught it's green, I guess that's green.