why does an internal experience have to be reduced to delusion just because someone is incapable of conveying their own internal experience to an outside observer? i know many people who claim to see god revealed in reality, or as einstein put it, through the orderly harmony of what exists, and others who know what they mean due to their own experiences and sometimes even shared experiences, but how on earth would one prove that they can see the workings of god in reality? would science be more comfortable if i were to phrase it, "man, i can really see the mechanics behind reality working in a relationship with my thought process right now, it's as if reality is communicating with me", or would it just be reduced to delusional thinking?
a lot of people might say that. i don't like to jump to conclusions so quickly. it seems i gave the impression that one of the things i was talking about wasn't internal. what i meant was that one idea is all-internal (a delusion), and the other idea is part-internal (some kind of observation about the rest of existence). how do you know in that case that you are actually seeing something instead of imagining it somehow? what convinces you that it's real?
Some may be able to observe more than others in terms of the senses. This wouldn't lend any credence to religion though, because they make claims about the divine/supernatural which are unobservable things -- "unsensable" lol. You do make a good point though, some people say they can observe these things and we can't prove them wrong. We can explain how it would be natural for people to report such experiences though, and also how they don't necessarily imply that the person who experienced them actually had an encounter with god/supernatural. Reason FTW I guess haha, I don't really know where this convo is going anymore As for knowing what the odds really are, idk tbh. I would go with my answer, its the best one I think any human can honestly give, IMO. To give any other answer one would have to assume that they actually "know" something about the divine/supernatural and I do not think its possible. How would it be possible for someone to come to a justified and true belief that the odds are any different?
I just think the fact that almost everywhere in the world has been a birthplace of spirituality may be at least a credible reason to suppose there may be something out there we can't experience normally. I'm thinking that we may find a scientific way of knowing what the phenomenon is about someday, who knows? In the meantime, however, there is a science of the mind that can suggest physical explanations. We still have to ask ourselves, when we do have such experiences, how we can tell them apart from our imagination. "Did I just experience that, or was that a hallucination?" How do I tell the difference? Now that's a tough one. This comes under the category of things that are impossible to measure. You seem to think that means a one in infinity chance, and I'm not sure I agree. Say we were having a discussion in some saloon somewhere and the date was 9/22/1860, and I tell you this story about black holes. One in infinity doesn't quite seem like the right odds, does it? It might in that context seem right (back then, the situation would be the same as we have been talking about), but knowing what we know now, the odds were really not so dire, were they?
religion is a wolf in sheep's clothing religion is cockroaches, we have to debug pick your high, i will supply