I don't think there has been a claim about the evident-ness of God's existence. I think reaching that conclusion would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the conversation.

This question is different from the one that has actually been discussed.

The fundamental flaw in your view is that you're claiming a standard of evidence that is higher (in some form) than the standard you actually use for reaching conclusions. If I clapped my hands 5 minutes ago, I have no evidence for it. Does this mean that I'm not properly justified in my belief that I clapped my hands?

In fact, you *ARE* choosing different bars all the time. And if you think otherwise, I'd say that you're deluding yourself. All of the scientific evidence available confirms this fact. Certain statements proceed through your evaluative grid with significantly more and significantly less scrutiny than others.

And I'll get back to the other part when I have some more time.

wat. I have not suggested any standard of evidence in this thread. Indeed, I have repeatedly stressed ad nauseum that I am interested in why YOU believe it in which case you are welcome to tell me whatever standard of evidence YOU are using.

As for your example of something that happened in the past, our memories count as a form of evidence. I have no idea why you would not think this would count as evidence.

No, but you've implied the existence of one, and that somehow this standard is fixed.

These two quotes taken together seem to imply that you have a set of standards of evidence in mind.

I'm growing quite weary of this. You can't continue to pretend like you're using words in a meaning-neutral sense. It reduces what you say to utter nonsense. I don't care if you assert certain meaning with the words that you use. That's how communication actually works. And it will work a lot better than what you've been doing here.

You continue to assert this, but that's not how you're using your words.

To be clear: If you do this, you're allowing a (substantially large) class of non-verifiable claims to be included as evidence. This goes beyond the standards of the objective (external) observer that was posited earlier in the thread. That observer does not have access to the thought-life of the individual.

Right. If I have a conversation with a friend, the act of conversing on the phone stands as the evidence of the friend, even though the act of me talking does not prove that the friend was there. And there's nothing about the act of conversing that can really be used to provide evidence of the friend. Maybe the phone was disconnected and I was faking the whole conversation. From the "external" perspective (watching me talk on the phone) you cannot tell the difference.

Yes. But this class of events happened much, much earlier in my life (12-14 years ago). That's the whole "downhill" reevaulation process.

There was a situation in my life that I think I've brought up in the past here. I looked around, but couldn't find it. It is the only time in my life that I've ever had an experience like God speaking to me in clear terms. I would posit this as circumstantial evidence for God's interaction with me. (And I anticipate already the onslaught of propositions that it was all just a coincidence. It has happened every other time I've brought it up.)

Basically, what happened was this: I was in college, and was going to lead a Bible study that year in the dorms (not technically dorms, but it's not an important detail). It was a large social gathering, and my job was to meet people who were in the dorms and just start the process of building friendships with people.

But I'm an introvert, and at that time in my life was not as comfortable with social situations like that. I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and was definitely not doing it. Instead, I kept bouncing around to various people that I already knew from the previous years.

So after resisting for quite a while, I started the process of trying to build up courage to get outside of my comfort zone, and it wasn't working. There was a prayer process going on at this point, too. Asking for confidence, guidance, and things like that.

At a certain moment, I saw a person across the room and had a "go" impulse. It's really hard to describe what it was, exactly, but there was a sense that I knew I had to talk to that specific person, and it was absolutely clear. It was almost as if someone thought the thought for me. It was strange because the thought seemed to come from "not me." I know how my thoughts normally sound and feel, and this did not fit any previous experiences. So I went there and talked to her, and it eventually ended up leading her to come to the group.

[Pause to respond to various comments that have been raised in the past.

* No, she was not attractive or anything. She was somewhat average-looking and plain, and had no particular features to make her stand out.
* No, I did not know her already. This was not about catching up with an old friend. And she was not with anyone that I knew.
* No, it was not audible. It was an impulse and a sense that this was the thing I was supposed to do.]

As weird as it was, at this point, there's nothing in particular to connect this as being particularly meaningful. It would have ended up in the bin of "it could have been God" if not for something I discovered at the very end of that year (there perspectives are from her directly).

As it turned out, that student was miserable with her first week in the dorms. She was placed in a freshman dorm even though she was a transfer, and she was a little bit older than everyone around her. She felt very out of place and was basically ready to quit school and go back home.

Getting connected with a community of people who she felt she could relate to was central to her sticking things out.

Now, is this proof that something was orchestrated by God? Not in any sort of strong sense of the word. Is it evidence? Circumstantial at best. Can it be interpreted in a way that makes no reference to God at all? Aside from the prayers being directed "at" God, yes.

I suppose this would one of the "top ten" experiences which "prove" God to me. A better word would be something like "confirm" because on its own it does not really appear to be sufficient (circumstantial really isn't good enough for "proof").

I don't know how else I can possibly say this: I am trying to find out from you why you believe as you do. As far as I can tell, you have not even begun to tell me. you can explain whatever reasons you believe whatever definitions of whatever gods with whatever standards of evidence. After this occurs, I can say whether this is or is not convincing to me and why it is or isn't. But you keep quibbling on and on that I am imposing these fixed standards when it is exactly the opposite, I am leaving it wide open.

As for the two bolded things, these are meant in the most general of ways. I didn't specify at any point in this thread what my standards f evidence might be. I simply said that the only reasonable "bar" to epistemology that I can see is one that tries to provide justifications through reason and evidence for ones beliefs. Heck, if you want to propose a different epistemology or set your own standard of evidence all of this is fine. I asked you "what other bar is there" so that if you didn't like this you could propose one! And then you turn around and act as if I am being narrow minded and definitional. Nonsense. I merely want to know why you believe you do, in whatever sense you actually believe it.

Anyways, as to this business of memories, I think you are getting lost in the false idea that I am asking for proof. I don't want you to prove god exists to me, to my standards of evidence and to my definitions of god. I that was the case then absolutely, I may heavily discount the experiences you may allege to have as evidence since I can't access them. However, I am instead asking for you to explain why it is that you believe and have asked you to convey your experiences. Clearly if I didn't find these kinds of unfalsifiable reports of your memory acceptable I would not be asking for them! I am more than happy to take you on your word as to the veracity of the experiences you had as being genuine recollections as your mind perceives it.

The above refers to post 229 before reading 230. 230 will have to wait until tomorrow when I am at a desktop and can properly quote.

Unless they don't think their beliefs require justification, or that justification for their beliefs are not important, for example.

In which case, they should state why they think that this is the case.

If you are looking for a single discrete event/argument, you're not going to get one. I'm pushing very hard to keep the language usage as far away from giving any sort of impression of that form as possible. This is why I'm pushing back very hard against anything that looks/sounds like that.

This is why I wrote what I wrote here:

And here:

And here:

The process of telling you is a process. It's not like didn't believe one day and then believed the next. There was a period of time during my first two years of college where I "explored" things. I took a lot of time working with, contemplating, and attempting to integrate various religious/secular ideas to make sense of my life.

I describe many things in terms of analogies because I recognize that the framework I use is dramatically different from the general "atheistic" framework. (I use that word because I'm not sure what other way to say it.) There's a LOT within my Christian framework that has no good parallel with the atheistic framework. So even though you think you're "wide open" you're really not as open as you think you are.

It's a lot like the transition that needs to be made when you do a serious cultural anthropological study. If you only talk about what they do on your terms, then you really aren't doing it right. You have to learn how they talk about themselves in their own terms. I think a reasonable short paragraph summary is given in the wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_anthropology

So even when you say that you're just looking for "whatever standards of evidence" there's a sense in which the thing you're looking for doesn't come in that form. This sense comes from the way you use your words. As I read your words, I don't get the sense of "wide open" that you claim.

I think you are confusing two different things. In a phone conversation that you have, you receive stimulus through the phone namely the persons voice which (to you) counts as evidence that the person exists. To me just listening to you, I can't verify that the other person exists. However, the point of this conversation is one where I will accept the veracity of the experiences you describe (not necessarily their explanations). So if you had an auditory sensation that you attribute to God, and told me about it, that would be quite acceptable and I would posit for the purposes of this discussion that you genuinely experienced this auditory sensation. Now you have told me it is not auditory, so the question is whether you can describe the way in which you experienced God on the metaphorical phone with you. For example, some people have said that when they pray they say things in their inner voice and then subsequently experience, say, a sensation of certainty towards a particular outcome. Or perhaps it manifests as an event they prayed for occuring. These are the ways in which these people find that the conversation is "two way" if you will.



This is the kind of story that I was hoping to get from you, and others like it that are similarly meaningful.

I am actually quite sure your experience is very true at the time (and not one where I think the most likely scenario is that one's memory of the event is flawed due to retroactively explaining it in other terms or something like this). When I was younger I used to be very into mountain biking and would do things like big drops. It was quite common that for an envelope pushing drop that I might begin the run up to it upwards of 20 times trying to "psyche" myself up for the drop while inwardly thinking there was no chance I was going to do it this particular drop was just too big. When I actually did the drop, I was never aware during the runup that I was actually going to do it that time. I didn't psyche myself up before hand, firmly commit, and do it. What would happen is that if I did this run up enough times eventually in the last possible second where I could still stop one of them I would just get this strange impetus and do it. I still don't really understand the psychology of it, but this is how it happened. As time went on, I learned to trust that this impetus would occur and this became my process for completing the most scary things in mountain biking. I don't know if this is related to the impetus you experienced, but perhaps there is something there.



Nah I would call it evidence. Certainly not sufficient evidence as you say. Personally, I would like to see more like it. (not necessarily from you, just generally, I am always interested in such experiences).

Great. But I never suggested you explanations would be a single discrete event. It just depends on why you actually believe as you do. If that is based on a small set of events then great. If it is based on a small set of common types of events of which you can give some archetypes then great. If it is neither, then so be it. I find it odd that you keep interpreting these sentiment as me narrowly forcing you into very specific types of examples.

I describe many things in terms of analogies because I recognize that the framework I use is dramatically different from the general "atheistic" framework. (I use that word because I'm not sure what other way to say it.) There's a LOT within my Christian framework that has no good parallel with the atheistic framework. So even though you think you're "wide open" you're really not as open as you think you are.[/QUOTE]Just as above, I have clearly said you can tell me whatever framework you like. I even said you can give an entirely different episteology than the one I usually find reasonable namely having some level of evidence. So I really don't know why you think I am not being open here.

Can I ask: Do you think it is possible to communicate why it is you believe as you do? Perhaps not in a post or even a thread, but do you think that with a long amount of time available, and with me (or someone else) being genuinely interested in internalizing and understanding, do you think it is possible?

Well, there is an aspect of something that is made manifest, but it's not something that you can characterize quite like that. Mother Teresa is reported to have had the following exchange during an interview:

http://sermons.logos.com/submissions...missions/79049

Your criticism would apply here, as well. But this is simply a part of prayer.

I appreciate the story, but I don't think there's enough there to draw a successful comparison. There is an element of psyching myself up, insofar as trying to get myself to do something that I didn't want to do. But that's kind of where the comparison stops. There were no run-ups and no practice runs. I didn't start to head towards someone and stop over and over again.

Furthermore, this is not something that has even been repeated. As mentioned, this is the only time anything like this has ever happened. There is no deeper "trust" or "confidence" in any "thoughts" or "go" impulses of this type. As far my as experiences go, this is completely unique.

Some people just attribute special meanings / signs to everyday events that other people do not. I am just as baffled as to why this is, but I don't think it is any different than simply asking "why do you believe in God?"

I think we all ponder situations presented to us, we have an internal monologue when we try and come to conclusions, we occasionally make decisions based on something you might call "intuition" or "gut instinct"? There are a lot of processes going on when we make decisions or receive cognitive input from a social situation, say. But someone like Aaron W and other theists, experiencing the exact same situations, might say something like "God put me on this path" or "God had plans for me" etc.

Aaron's last story (the lonely student) is a good example, because it is the kind of story I think he was being asked to provide, but at the same time, it doesn't allow us to come to any conclusion because he was already past the point where attributing things to God was natural for him. "I was getting ready to lead a Bible class..." - ya know? I could imagine recounting a story like this, but my version would attribute my empathy for the student somehow helped me recognise that they were in distress or lonely, or whatever, and I was drawn to them to help.

As an atheist it can be frustrating to hear these stories (like the "Any Christian Poker Players" thread, where that OP recounted a pivotal story about praying for a child, even though they were basically already rescued at the point the prayer took place, but the situation was a heavy influence for their faith). It's like when you ask someone why they believe in the resurrection, for example, and they say something along the lines of "when you believe in God, it's easy to believe in the resurrection". So I can understand Aaron's reluctance to get drawn into relaying his beliefs. It's just that that way of thinking is so alien to some of us, or at least it is to me. I want to get a handle on what happens to reach that point, as it just seems to be that so many so-called Christian get brought up in a lifestyle, and they just attribute whatever happens to them with the way they were brought up (and the cycle just repeats).

The kind of thread I would be genuinely interested in would be for a self-described atheist who later became religious (not one of the "I used to be an atheist" BS threads!). That would be really interesting.

You may not have suggested that they would be, but you ask questions as if you expect it. For example, you've still been looking for something that "leads to God" based on the original prayer example. You're looking for something that provides "evidence" of God. And I've been trying to get you to understand that this way of looking at it is not going to be successful.

A lot is tied to your word choices. As much as you try to frame your use of language as being meaning-neutral, that's not how communication actually works. When you say "evidence" you have a concept (or a particular range of concepts) in your mind. When you say "reason" you have a concept (or a particular range of concepts) in your mind.

Word choice.

Yes. As I've noted before, it's both the experience and the evaluation of the experience. But there's a limit to what words on their own can communicate. Words shared between friends carries far more meaning that words shared between strangers. This means that there are some things that I can't tell you, or I could tell you but it wouldn't be understood. (See the prayer example.) This puts an upper limit of the type and amount of things I can communicate to you in this forum.

Much of Christianity is best understood through a community of other Christians. You may have heard the expression that "more is caught than taught"? I believe there's a large element of this in coming to understand Christianity. (Again, think cultural anthropology.)

There are a few points here. The first is that I was not (and still am not) in the habit of attributing things to God. I recognize why you believe this, and I actually stand opposed to many other Christians in that I think there is a tendency to "over-spiritualize" things. One way of saying it is that I think it makes Christians spiritually weird. As I noted, this is the only incident in my life in which I confidently claim to have heard from God in some direct way.

The second is that the detection of God depends upon a certain type of attentiveness. The "machinery" of recognizing God's influence is not like the machinery of measuring voltage, electrostatic forces, and detecting electrons. Nor is it formulated in mathematical models, or subject to repeatable measurements. The evaluation of events is subjective, even if the reality is objective. This makes it very hard for people who come to the conversation with the sense that God isn't even real to come to see God's role in certain events. (It's also the same thing that leads some people to excessively attribute things to God.) That's why most of the atheists' demands for "evidence" are going to be left unmet.

The third is that you're right. Throughout this entire thread, I've been trying to point out the different-ness of the mindset of religious people. Although it's a continuous landscape of ideas, most of the atheists are sufficiently far from the theists that the gap creates significant issues in terms of even understanding the other.

One important aspect of that is that it's not something that is well-understood at arm's length. That is, part of the understanding is the experience of undergoing the "spiritual journey." There are many aspects of the experience that *can* be relayed in words, it is also limited in nature. (Again, think cultural anthropology.)

Edit: You can read about Francis Collins, and read about his conversion, but depending on how far you are from believing, you may find it underwhelming.

WOW! So we're FINALLY getting somewhere. So, after about 100 paragraphs of quibble, all you're really saying is that "My worldview is different from the average non-religious person's worldview". Why didn't you just say that? We assume you are on the same page as you, until you state that you are not. Is that so hard to just... say?

Maybe your experience of reality is actually different from ours (non-believers). Does this sound about right?

So do you think the scientific method is a load of essentially useless bull****? Or that it's just a different way of looking at the world (and the wrong one)?

settle down now jewbinson, I am trying to have conscientious discussion here. Your last post is a complete non sequitur from your second to last post. I suspect Aaron is quite content with the scientific method and perhaps even as far as methodological naturalism when it comes to discovering our immediate physical world. And even if not, he probably can speak to whatever other epistemology he has with some sophistication.

First, because it's somewhat obvious. My worldview includes "God" and yours doesn't. Of course they're different. Second, you talked about worldview in your first paragraph in a manner that assumes there are different worldviews. This is already a given in the conversation. Third, because it's not really an answer to the question being presented. It doesn't clarify anything about the actual distinctions between worldviews, and it doesn't advance the conversation in any meaningful way.

You are not actually assuming you're on the same page. Why would you write this if you did:

Why would you assume we are on the same page? How could there be such a large number of fundamental disagreements about the most basic of things if we're basically on the same page? Why do you think I'm taking such care to distinguish between different forms of concepts of "evidence" and all this?

It depends on what you actually mean by "experience of reality". There are some people who "get" art. It connects with them. It expresses meaningful ideas and emotions to them. I'm not one of those people. My "experience of art" is certainly different from that of those who do.

But at another level, my "experience of art" is still basically the same. I see the same thing. It's the same picture/painting/drawing. I just don't ascribe the same meaning to what I see. Part of this is certainly due to lack of "natural" experiences. And part of it is a general disinterest. These are experiences that I simply won't have because I've never made myself available to them.

Yeah, pretty much this. I don't think that methodological naturalism is "complete" when it comes to understanding reality. Not every event is subject to verification through these means. (See "clapping hands" again. The claim is not that I have the ability to clap my hands, but that I *actually* clapped my hands. You can run similar analogies with probabilistic events. How do you prove that I rigged *THIS* coin toss?)

An interesting choice for, if I understand it correctly, Mother Teresa had a prolonged (and torturing) experience of doubt and questioning and disbelief in God.
The difference, as I guess, between Mother Teresa and many other people is not that they experience a more direct manifestation of God other than the "he is listening", but that other people are less troubled by this while Mother Teresa seemed to find the lack of a more significant manifestion to be deeply troubling to her. But if you are one of these people who thinks that God is listening far more than metaphorically talking or acting, it still doesn't get - to my mind - to what I hope will be a conclusion of the conversation namely a description of why you think you are being listened to.



They are not perfect analogues, surely. I merely meant to illustrate that the sensation of receiving an impetus seemingly out of the blue is not entirely rare.

Actually if my distant memory of first year psychology holds, they have done studies which show that we can see the electrical impulses that indicate a decision has been made and someone is about to act before the person is consciously aware of it. This may provide some basis for the idea that impetuses sort of come out of nowhere.

There is an important difference between trying to prompt you in a variety of ways to see if I can get a response, and being tied to that particular prompt as the only acceptable way to answer. So I might prompt you to try and describe your most profound experiences because that seems to me be a reasonable starting place. If you prefer and not do that and instead start with something else (say describing a different framework or a different epistemology) that would be quite fine. Yes, I have ideas of what I personally mean and find acceptable in terms of evidence and reasons. But I have tried to be painfully clear that this is not meant to restrict the acceptable answers from you. If you use a different standard of evidence and reason, or, in fact, use something entirely different from evidence and reason, that is all fine. I just want an honest conveyance of why you believe as you do, in whatever form that takes, and am not attempting to restrict you in any way.

Perhaps instead of trying to insist that I must be meaning something more narrow than what I am genuinely intending, you accept at face value my repeated claims that you can tell me in whatever form you are interested in. It would seem to be a much better use of time to slowly start moving towards explaining the larger framework and experences and the like then to repeatedly question the authenticity of my prompts.




I am glad for the affirmative as it motivates the discussion. Just to check given your qualifications, do you still think it is possible to communicate authentically why you believe as you do despite the barriers of me being a stranger, me being an atheist, and it being but a limited internet forum? Assuming I was perfectly willing to listen and internalize and the like outside of these barriers.

Troubling? Yes, but probably not the way you think about it. The analysis is subject to the background knowledge/perspective of the individual. Your comments are right in line with an old Time article:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...655720,00.html

---

I think there is something to be said about our modern culture, which is the demand/expectation for instant feedback on things. In WW2, there were thousands of letters written by soldiers to their family. Not all of them got responses. For some, it was because of the sheer difficulty of getting letters delivered and for others, it was because the person they were writing to was no longer interested in maintaining communication/relationship with the soldier. (My rough sense is that the latter was not that common, as the culture in the US during WW2 would probably have seen that as a HUGE betrayal -- though I'm pretty sure it did happen quietly to many people.)

Yet, the soldiers continued to send their letters, and simply acted in the trust that the other was listening. Many of them returned home after the war to find their family waiting for them, and got to see their patience fulfilled.

Bringing this back to prayer, there's a cultural manifestation of prayer that Evangelicals often do, which is known as a prayer journal. This is a book in which people write out their prayers and at various points in time go back over them to see how God has been answering them. (I don't do this because I'm not disciplined enough, and it's not something I want to do. I've tried a few times, and found it to be too much like a chore.) The purpose of this is to bring attention to the non-immediacy of responses to prayer, and the value of retaining a long memory of prayers so that you can watch things come to fruition in time.

I recognize that this still doesn't show you at all how one can "reach the conclusion" that their prayers are heard. In the immediate sense, you often cannot know. In the broader sense, one can build confidence in the claim by patiently observing larger patterns and longer trends that are not necessarily accessible within a specified timeframe.

Sure. I've had many other random impulses. But none fit the same experiential sense of what happened with that one. This was a significant aberration from my normal experiences.

You are probably thinking of the Libet experiments. It doesn't quite speak to "impulses from nowhere." It's more about the timing of various decision-making mechanisms in the brain.

I appreciate that you've hung in through my repeated warnings and protestations. Culturally speaking, RGT is not known for having the ability to deal with nuance. So when I come to conversations here, I do bring a background knowledge of how words are used here in general. And there is a reticence to responding to certain types of prompts as they often lead down uninteresting rabbit trails. And it's very hard to get off those rides once you've left the station because of a "piling on" effect by others.

And I this point, I do admit that I can see your position as being one of a much more genuine interest in conversation (coming to a point of understanding the other) as opposed to debate/discussion (coming to a point of determining the "right answer").

Authentic communication can certainly happen. It will require a bit more "work" (on both ends) because the relational connection is much weaker and the basis of shared experiences is probably very limited.

I struggled my first year of teaching remedial level math classes because I worked under a certain expectation of shared background which was not where the students were at. Sometimes they would assent to things that I said because they thought they understood me, and because of their assented I would move on, only to find out later that they didn't really understand the earlier thing and we had to go back. But at least that had a very clear feedback mechanism (tests). In a communication of this type (an exchange of longish expositions, and not a more conversational mode of shorter thoughts and the ability to interrupt), it will be much harder to sniff out those misunderstandings.