I don't believe in God, I believe in Gravity

You shouldn't. Christians who regard their God as necessarily incapable of demonstrating his existence to us via our senses are rare. Omnipotent is a common description. So it certainly isn't odd that that I find your position odd. We know that it never has been. Especially one specific vintage.

Exactly. So experiencing gravity and experiencing God may involve similar brain chemistry. The difference between believing and accepting has to do with what's outside our own brains. When we compare our own experiences with other people's experiences we approach objectivity.When we accept something, it's because other people's perceptions match our own. When we believe something, it's as often as not despite other people's perceptions.

Too funny.I never said that GOD is incapable of anything. I said as a human I see no way WE are capable of detecting the supernatural. We might believe we did but I see no way to verify or detect the supernatural. Yes we do, don't we. Do you think UG the cave man said much the same about the fire from the sky?

Perhaps an actual unexplained event would make this clear.In 1969 I bought my first car, I did a lot of driving and exploring of roads and places I had never been before. When coming back from visiting my cousin at Cornell a very strange thing happened to me near the town of Ovid, NY.While driving I had a vision, don't know any other way to say this. Over reality I was driving my VW in a town I'd never seen, stores, cars parked along the street, and a green light at a major intersection. As I was driving through that intersection a white Ford Fairlane, speeding, ran the red light he had, so I was going to be t-boned. The vision ended.This was so strange, I stopped the car and got out, to check and make sure I wasn't having some kind of physical or mental problem which would affect my ability to drive home. I could find nothing wrong, so just basically shook my head and returned to driving.A little over an hour later I was driving into a town just north of Buffalo and suddenly realized this was the town I saw in the vision with all the same stores and cars parked along the road and the green light at the intersection. I slammed on the breaks and stopped just before getting into the intersection and a white Ford Fairlane blew through that intersection going about 50 right in front of me.Had I not had that vision and stopped I would probably not be here today.I have no explanation for this event, as my understanding of the world is things like this do not happen. However it did, so something is going on which I and other people don't know about. Still don't know what that is and in the following 44 years have never had anything like this happen to me again.My wife of over 25 years never knew about this till a year or so ago when I told her about it. Her response as a devote Roman Catholic was "God gave you that vision to save your life".Now as a deist, that never occurred to me, but if God does intervene I really don't know how he does it. I still don't think that is what happened but also I can't explain it. It doesn't bother me if my wife takes this as an example of her theistic beliefs being true.Was this a supernatural event? Who knows, which I think illustrates your point which I quoted above.Have a good one.

Look - Don't get me wrong - I like your idea that religious experiences are empirical. I like the idea that the next time someone "hears" the voice of God they can simply press record and get an audio recording of Him speaking. I like the idea that the next person to "see" Allah can just whip out their mobile and take a snap so that we can all give Allah the Facebook thumbs-up when the pic is posted for the world to see.The difference between ice cream and religious expereinces is that we know for a fact ice cream exists and we know for a fact that we can empirically detect it (i.e. taste it in this case).The difference between gravity and God is that we know for a fact gravity exists and we know for a fact that we can empirically detect it. I don't think anybody is denying the reality of any experience. It's the claimed cause of the expereince in question (i.e. ice cream, gravity, God...) that is in dispute.

so very you, Straggler. I appreciate your honesty---it lets me know just where you stand. So as far as cause goes...you never seemed to like the idea of an uncaused first cause. How would there ever be evidence, though? The evidence--if any---would appear after the cause itself.Im beginning to lean towards the idea that humans themselves are a sort of evidence for what they stand for and what they believe in. Does that make sense?Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

There is evidence that causality as commonly conceived is misleading and that causality more generally is an emergent property of our universe.See Message 165That people believe stuff isn't evidence of the things they believe in being real. But I'm not usre if that's what you mean or not.

And that's why I've been making a distinction between "accepting" something with a detectable cause and "believing" something with an undetectable cause.

That is all well and good but for the fact you seemed to be blurring the distinction when you started comparing tasting (i.e. empirically detecting) ice-cream and having a religious experience. Tasting ice-cream is an empirical experience. The sort of "vision" Petrophysics described wasn't. Do religious experiences have a detectable cause?

Well, there is a blur. It's a spectrum. It's not all black and white. It's mostly gray in the middle. What I'm saying is that the experience is the same, internally, whether the external cause is different or not. People who experience God apparently do so as vividly as you experience ice cream.Instead of thinking about empiricism you should be thinking about objectivity. Subjectively detectable, maybe. Objectively detectable, no.

Your "distinction" and your pronouncement of similarity seem to be at odds with one another. Because the exact manner in which tasting ice cream and religious experiences differ is the one upon which your distinction rests. A subjectively detectable cause? Can you give an example of what you mean here?

Yes, they are. As I said, it's a spectrum. (You literalists crack me up.)When using specific words, such as "believe", the distinction is important. When talking about experiences in general it is not. You'd have to ask somebody who claims they can detect "God" for example. I don't discount the experience just because I haven't had it.

There is nothing "literalist" in pointing out when you are contradicting yourself. If someone detected God that would be a religious expereince wouldn't it? Religious experiences as the subjectively detectable cause of religious experiences is just a recipe for circularity. I don't "discount" religious experiences. I merely take issue with the claim that God is the cause of such experiences. It's just "Goddidit" by another name.

Why don't you look up the definition of empirical?I'll do it for you...empirical (adj) based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.Notice that with something empirical we don't need an explanation of why something happened, we just need to have the observation or experience that it did.Your standard is to have objective verifiable scientific evidence of things before you accept them, like God.So give me your objective verifiable scientific evidence that you are biologically related to the people you call mom and dad.A DNA test will work, if you don't have that, then your mom and dad being biologically related to you ( however much you believe it to be true) falls into the same category as jar, Phat, GDR,Faith,or jaywill's belief in God.Try to stop being a hypocrite.

You've declared your belief that your GOD intervenes in the world, but that he could not or chooses not to do it in a way which we could detect. Presumably, if he so wished, he would be capable of creating us with the ability to detect his intervention. Strict verification isn't necessary. If, as you believe, a supernatural being can affect the physical world, there's no actual reason why we shouldn't be able to observe the effects, whatever conclusions we come to. The O.P. writer believes in gravity, but his belief is built on his own and others observation of its effects, rather than the force itself. So, why this: Why do you believe that the scientific method cannot be used to observe phenomena, and to infer things about the cause of those phenomena? Before you say "I didn't say that", it is what you seem to be implying.Take my Great Lake waters turning into Bordeaux wine example. You believe there is at least one supernatural being capable of doing this. I'm presenting it as a hypothetical situation in which that is the case. A supernatural being of some kind has decided to turn the lakes to wine, and has done so. So, although we can't be sure of it, we are actually observing a supernatural effect when we observe the transformation. When you consider that (a) we know that the Bordeaux region never produced that much wine, and (b) our knowledge of natural chemistry tells us with high confidence that dirty lake water doesn't suddenly transform naturally into fine wine (the fact that our knowledge of chemistry is incomplete doesn't actually lower that confidence), then why would the observation based hypothesis "the cause is supernatural" be the exclusive province of fools, charlatans and con-men? The fact that they can't strictly verify it is a common situation in science, but they can support it by observation and experience.A supernatural cause is an extraordinary claim, because the existence of the supernatural hasn't been established. But, as is often quoted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the Lakes transforming into wine fits the bill (unlike "irreducible complexity" in biology, for example). Yes we do know approximately how much Bordeaux is produced naturally, and we also know, with very high confidence, that the chemistry of lake water does not permit it to transform spontaneously and instantly into Bordeaux wine naturally. You mean UG might have made the unsupported claim that he knew that fire couldn't come from the sky naturally? What makes you think that is analogous to the well supported claim that the Bordeaux region doesn't make enough wine to fill the Great Lakes?If you want to use UG for an analogy, his baseless belief that a lightning bolt was caused by a supernatural being would have been far more akin to your belief that "all things seen and unseen" were caused by a supernatural being than it is to the very well supported belief that Bordeaux doesn't make enough wine to fill the Great Lakes, or indeed, a belief in gravity.