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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (34958)	4/15/1999 9:41:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

But Sidney, how can the believer be sure that his "personal experience of God" is really "of God" -- and not of something else? I know this argument is often made, but I think it is flawed. It is flawed because the believer is asking us to accept a subjective experience as an objective reality. It might be, or it might not be... jbe

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (34958)	4/15/1999 9:58:00 PM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

Sidney, that is beneath you. Believers in witchcraft base their belief on the knowledge of their experience on a personal level with witches, while disbelievers base their assumption on a lack of knowledge about witchcraft and witches. Sidney, the evidence of the power of witchcraft that I have seen, or heard firsthand accounts of, is much more impressive than anything I've heard tell about 'God,' but I feel pretty damn sure it's a brain-phenomenon in the same way that Christine religiosity, or any other kind, is. Cultists of all sorts say of their cult object/leader that the "negative assertions" of their appalled families "are just prejudice, while their own assertions to the positive are more likely to be true. The reason being that the cultists are basing their beliefs on the knowledge of their experience on a personal level with " _______, "while the disbelievers are basing their assumption on a lack of knowledge about" ________.

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (34958)	4/16/1999 12:25:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Sidney, there are several logical problems with your position. But the most important one is that a negative proposition cannot be proven. The second is the application of a logical device called Ockham's razor, which is a logical heuristic designed to inject parsimony into inductive reasoning. Briefly put, it states that given a choice between two equally plausible explanations of a phenomenon one chooses the simpler. By invoking a supernatural explanation for the phenomena you are simply shifting the answer upstream. For not only must you try to explain how a deity accomplished a certain task, you must now grapple with questions concerning the nature and origin of the deity. That's why a scientist will always choose organic evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life over a "God's plan" type explanation. It is simpler. Only when the simpler explanations fail do you look to the more complex. TTFN, CTC