It’s not a matter of challenging personal experience so much as it is a case of recognizing what does and does not constitute acceptable evidence.

The first point that must be made is that personal experience, by definition, is anecdotal. It cannot be independently tested or verified. That does not mean such experiences are false, just that they cannot be demonstrated to be true.

The second point is that the assertion of a personal experience is really an assertion about what an individual believes to be true about that experience. We know there are all sorts of ways for people to be mistaken about their own perceptions. Those errors may range from simple sensory errors to elaborate hallucinations. Again, this does not prove a personal experience is false, just that there may be good reason to think it is not true.

Finally, it must be understood that a personal experience is only meaningful to the person who experiences it. It does not translate into proof of anything to anyone else.

It’s all well and good to make the claim that one’s personal experience of a god gives one the basis for belief in that god. However, such a claim only has validity in the internal narrative of the person making the claim. It has none in the world outside that narrative and does not constitute evidence that anyone else is bound to respect or even consider.

Posted: April 12th 2009

See all questions answered by George Ricker

I would like to focus on this bit of the question’s elaboration: So since we don’t believe in god we say it’s unexplainable.

The lack of god belief for many rationalists is not as tautological as that above quote. The lack of evidence for god along with the immense failings of the god hypothesis coupled with much better existing explanations is the basis for not having god belief. A proper rephrasing would be: So since we do not have evidence to believe in god, we do not. If evidence is presented, then the existence of god(s) would be accepted.

Just as it is needed for people to be taught quite young how to deal with their emotions, how to critically think, it is also equally important to be taught that our brains and minds are capable of being misled because of the kludgey way they evolved. Unfortunately, not only are we not taught how important it is to be able to question yourself when going through personal, subjective experiences (we learn often haphazardly and on the wing as we mature that many of our first impressions and deeply held perspectives are essentially made from fluff), but that religious ones are completely excused from being scrutinized in said manner. It’s that old tacit agreement to give religious beliefs a free pass simply because they are religious beliefs. Happily, that is now changing.

The questioner also brings up the point about equating the unknown with false. Some of the testimonies that have been presented at evangelical gatherings have been shown to be false — feigned illnesses that were 'cured,’ special effects, etc. But in general, when a religious person speaks to me about their and others’ testimonies and personal revelations, I will question them, attempting to educate them regarding how religious beliefs get a free pass and how they need to be analyzed critically just like any other belief. It is not a matter of labeling their experiences as false, but rather describing them more as being insufficient as a basis for embracing what they believe.

Posted: January 30th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel

I’ve had this very discussion with many theists – mostly christians – over the years, and have always run into the same sticking point.

They have never been able to define what they mean by “a personal experience with god”.

So, I don’t consider that evidence in any meaningful way, and I think it’s especially poor if you’re using it a justification for why others should believe.

As for extraordinary evidence, I think you are confusing extraordinary and supernatural. I agree that supernatural evidence has some problems, since if you have evidence, it’s of natural origin. Or, it is if it’s good evidence.

But extraordinary means just that – out of the ordinary, and science is full of cliams that were extraordinary.

The claim, for example, that a photon interferes with itself in the two-slit experiment, is extraordinary, but the evidence was very conclusive.

Or, the claim that ulcers are caused not by stress and too much acid, but instead by bacteria. That was a hugely controversial claim, but it also turns out to be true.

Posted: January 29th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

I don’t have to go out of my way to tell you that your experience was false, or that “it didn’t happen”. Your experience is irrelevant to me, under normal circumstances, as irrelevant as hearing about things people “see” while drunk or on drugs. It is well-documented that your mind can play tricks on you, especially when under stress or other extreme conditions.

If your experience stays personal and private, then I have no problem with that, and the same is true of religion in general. How do I even hear about such things at all? Because you invest them with too much meaning, which (how coincidentally) fits your desires. You use a personal experience to support a very public religious agenda. It’s not enough that you see something, or believe something, is it? You must tell everyone else about it, try to indoctrinate children and vulnerable adults, and push laws based on “scriptures”.

So since we don’t believe in God we say it’s unexplainable.

You have that back to front. Because we don’t believe in supernatural explanations, we try to explain what we see, but when you say “it’s god” or whatever, what kind of explanation is that? You have not explained anything, you have merely pushed the responsibility away from yourself, to an idea that you think is “higher”, yet is unsupported by any actual evidence.

Posted: January 28th 2009

See all questions answered by brian thomson

It’s difficult to declare it as false with complete certainty, but very easy not to believe it.

If someone believes that they’ve had a personal experience of God, nobody else can categorically state that it didn’t happen. However, nobody else has any substantive evidence that it did happen, and neither does the person him/herself.

If a person claims to have experienced the supernatural, there are three basic possibilities:

1. The person is lying.
2. The person is mistaken.
3. The person really has experienced the supernatural.

C.S. Lewis misrepresented the second option as simply, “The person is mad.” He applied his version to Lucy in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and to Jesus in what’s now known as Lewis’ Trilemma.

One must decide the probability of each option. One may trust the person implicitly and therefore easily dismiss the idea of a lie or a hoax. Harder to dismiss is the myriad of ways in which the person might think they’ve experienced the supernatural without actually doing so. For example:

• The person dreamed it.
• The person hallucinated under the influence of drugs, alcohol, prescription medicine, physical illness, mental illness, sleep deprivation, sleep paralysis, oxygen deprivation, etc.
• There is a natural explanation for the phenomenon the person experienced, but the person doesn’t know it and has not described the phenomenon such that others might recognise it.
• The person, rather than perpetrating a hoax, was the victim of a hoax.

The combined probability of all these options tends to outweigh the probability, in any given instance, that the supernatural has revealed itself to a single person in an oblique, unverifiable way.

Even if one concludes that the experience is probably supernatural, it’s still a leap to think one particular god did it. One then has to consider other supernatural possibilities like ghosts, mystical energies and of course the thousands of other gods.

Posted: January 28th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX