Religious Experiences - Evidence of God(s)?

For the sake of argument, lets assume that each of these examples is actually extremely unlikely. (Most of these are very unconvincing in that regard.)You appear to have described several examples of confirmation bias. Each of these people were searching for something, and were not placed in a position where the event had a single chance of occurrence. For example:1) You looked for your gloves for miles down the road. You were having doubts about your ability to find them, likely even before 5 miles into the search. Every empty stretch of road wasn't evidence against God existing; even were you to never find those gloves (like the many things I am sure you have lost across the years) you wouldn't take it as proof of God not existing. When you spot the gloves, which are marked with reflective labels precisely to increase your ability to do just that, you retroactively interpret your pressing on in the face of doubt as a supernatural voice in your head.2) PaulK never runs out of gas even without a meter (apparently). First of all, if you have no meter you are going to be much more careful about regularly picking up gasoline. If you drive for a while you will go to fill up again, so your chances of hitting empty are rather slim due to your natural reaction to prevent it.But lets suppose he did run out of gasoline several times, and sometimes he was close to a station and sometimes not. Would he have concluded that God didn't exist because he wasn't saved from running out of gas? I somehow doubt it, and he would be claiming divine intervention in how he never seemed to get an empty ketchup bottle in the local diner.3) Your mother's friend was looking for a sign; any sign which would back up her preconceptions. "One day, not so long after..." is not a particularly definite period of time; it could have been weeks after her conversion. During this span she is looking for any type of coincidence that she judges as having a low enough probability to carry supernatural meaning. She finally finds it in litter from a mass-produced product easily and often scattered over the local area.It is like saying "This person I know accidentally dropped their half-finished Coke bottle off the bridge, and then when we came home that evening we saw an empty Coke bottle along our curb! *GASP*, its GOD!" Not only is it not particularly astonishing that that exact type of balloon was similarly lost, but there is also a wide area in which it could be found. It didn't even have to be that day; any time during that week she could have found the balloon, perhaps at her parking place at work, or her child's school.4) Your sisters are going through everything your father had in his house, for several weeks. They are consistently emotional and particularly prone toward religious or spiritual interpretations of experiences. At some point, after searching through the entire house for several days, one of your sisters finds your father's will.Was every stack of papers or box of belongings they searched proof that God didn't exist? Is it truly that astonishing that they would have found the will at some point? If they hadn't ever found a will, would they have concluded God didn't exist... or just that your father didn't write a will?---The most telling thing from all these experiences is that they are utterly devoid of any actual indication of supernatural origin. Their occurrence does not in any was indicate that a god exists, or that a god was necessarily required for such things to happen. Even were these things extraordinarily unlikely to occur, being unlikely does not imply that it was caused supernaturally.The common theme in these accounts is that these people were looking for something, anything, to confirm their hopes. Out of literally billions of experiences on a daily basis they finally find one that fits their bill, and latch onto it.

Can you explain the difference between such an experience and say, the everyday experiences of there not being fire-breathing dogs?I suspect you are talking about an emotional devastation and feeling of hopelessness, or dismay at being cheated and fooled. Perhaps a lack of direction or goals for your life, or the realization of your own mortality. Drawing a distinction between a feeling contradicting a deeply held belief rather than an accepted one might shed some light on the issue.

I suppose this implies that normally you feel like you are to some extent not part of the natural universe. I don't think that is the focus of the experience though, especially in light of you having several which vary in this respect. It seems to me that you are describing a class of experiences that don't hinge on the presence or absence of deities or design to the universe, but rather are fundamentally based on awe. You seem to be describing a feeling of amazement... just general amazement, similar in concept to dj vu being a general feeling of having already experienced the present.Similarly I have heard of people experiencing profound feelings of primal fear, or the sensation of being watched by a presence (both malevolent and benevolent varieties). Or the feeling of being separate from one's body or limbs. The interpretation varies depending on the viewer, where the latter "out of body" experience could be viewed as an alien abduction or journey to heaven depending on the person.Perhaps the details are irrelevant compared to the emotional impact of the experience itself. Given that dj vu can to a certain extent be pharmacologically induced as well as faith experiences, it might be interesting to research the form faith experiences take when compared to diet or genetics.Edited by Phage0070, : No reason given.

I wasn't referring to amazement in the sense of cheapening the strength of the emotion compared to say awe, instead I was trying to clarify the *type* of sensation.Most people at some point feel a tingle of being watched when they have no logical reason to think that they are. Occasionally some people get this sensation cranked up to 11, where they become dysfunctional from paranoia. I would say that fundamentally the sensation one feels when speaking on stage and the sensation of someone suffering from paranoia are the same, the difference being the strength and the appropriateness of its application.Classifying them differently is what I see as the root of the problem with religious experiences. It is tempting to consider a sufficiently strong emotion as somehow special, or of particular weight. Contrasting fear with terror for most isn't the same thing as contrasting amazement with numinous awe, and it is that disconnect that I see as the root of most religiously-identified experiences.

Certainly, our minds are much too complex and interdependent to have an emotion or sensation cranked to extremes without interacting with other elements of our psyche. What I was getting at is that classes of these various intense emotional phenomenon may be directly related to particular abnormal activity in specific areas of the brain. While the regular tingle of being watched hardly compares to all-consuming paranoia, the root of both might be the malfunction of the same area of the brain.The fact that a stronger manifestation of this abnormality results in stronger involvement from other areas of the psyche shouldn't lend some metaphysical weight to the event. Certainly. Having different terms for red and blue is important, but it shouldn't distract from them both being colors. The problem I see us encountering is that some consider red = religious experience and blue = normal experience, with no clear dividing line where the spectrum turns supernatural (or accompanying explanation why). Unfortunately agreed, but if impracticality has a place it is in philosophy.

So when someone tells me that they were abducted by grey-skinned aliens do I have to sit there with my thumb up my rear and go "Well they said they were abducted by Greys, thats the sequence. I have to accept it,"? Congratulations, you have managed to waste a non-trivial amount of time. I'm glad you have achieved your desired contribution to this thread.

Sure, but we don't have all the information. It is almost certain that we will never have universal knowledge. In these cases, we are guessing which is the correct answer, or the one that will be the most often correct even if imperfect. Do you go with the 90% right one, or the 10% right one?

Genesis 3:22-23 "And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."Gee, if we need the Tree of Life to accurately evaluate heavenly matters it sure is a shame God kicked us out of Eden. It seems like God purposely denied us the tools or ability to make informed decisions about spirituality.So why is he being such a hard ass about us getting it wrong?

Past experience and accumulated knowledge are forms of evidence. As for skill of survival, someone can survive due to getting lucky; it doesn't give them special knowledge.So try again. So basically you are saying that people will subconsciously make an unwarranted decision when lacking evidence, but you provide no evidence of this claim. Perhaps an example can show you the error in this way of thinking:I am making the claim now that the Christian god you worship is actually evil. Both Satan and God are equally immoral, and there is no supernatural advocate for humanity. Heaven is still available however, and the only requirement to get in is that you try to make moral decisions based on your own capacity rather than being a slave to either God or Satan.I have no evidence to support this claim, therefore you cannot tell this from truth without evidence or falsehood. If you don't believe me, you are subconsciously making a "no" decision that is unwarranted.So the problem is you are now left with two possible faith-based positions which are contradictory. Since neither has good evidence to support them you cannot objectively determine which is the more appropriate choice. Therefore choosing over the other has a 50% chance of causing eternal damnation for your soul. Well, that stinks, huh?Furthermore, I can come up with more unevidenced claims that contradict your faith-based belief. This lowers the odds even more, so belief in your particular idea is unlikely to be true. Open-minded people easily realize that there are an infinite number of possible unevidenced proposals, each indistinguishable in truth from each other. This means that believing any completely unevidenced claim is not 90% likely to be true, or 50% likely, or even 10% likely; it is 0.000..(infinite zeros)..00001% likely.So why believe your version rather than mine?