Immaterial "Evidence"

You take the process by which you are determining this specific belief and apply it to another situation in which you can compare it to the expected outcome of a guess and see if it results in a statistically different outcome.

Well, it would be the varying outcomes we would be testing, is it not?As for processes that can't be repeated or replicated, why do you give them any credibility to being with? If they can't be shown to be accurate, why hold the belief that they are?

I guess that's where we differ. I'm a skeptic. If I'm not shown a reason to believe something, I hold it as unlikely to be true, especially when the claim being true would severely disrupt what we think we know about the way the universe works. BUt, that one's verifiable...we can try and replicate the outcome. We can have her write something she wants to happen on a piece of paper, keep it under her pillow, and record, before-hand, her feeling on whether it will work or not. For everything she feels strongly will work, we compare the hits and misses. We can look at the ones she doesn't feel will happen, and record those "hits" and "misses" as well. We can then compare the two sets of data and see if the percentages are statistically different from each other. If they're not, then the method isn't reliable, and is therefore to be dismissed until it can be shown to give better than random results. Maybe in the lottery number situation...but you did just that with your belief in God. Shouldn't your default be "I don't know" rather than, "I know it's true."

Well, since my worldview is built on evidence, I don't think you're quite correct. In fact, even my disbelief is built on evidence. My worldview, in a nutshell: "There is no reason to believe proposition A when there is no evidence for proposition A." So, my disbelief is entirely because of the evidence (or lack thereof).The only caveat is that the necessary amount of evidence is directly proportional to the novelty/"world-changingness" of the proposition. If it's not repeatable, again, there is no evidence that the answer provided is the correct one, so again, we are left with no reason to believe the claim.For example, maybe something supernatural did happen, but it wasn't the writing down of the numbers or the feeling she had. Maybe, the universe was fundamentally predisposed to give her the winning numbers because she happened upon the perfect color of socks when she crawled into bed.So, in the absence of evidence for one proposition, there is no reason to believe it. This is just circular:You: "I believe X."
Me: "There is no evidence to believe in X"
You: "I have experiences that lead me to believe in X."
Me: "There is no evidence that your experiences are accurate reflections of reality."
You: "I have experiences that indicate my experiences are accurate reflections of reality."etc, etc, etc.If your experiences are not repeatable and verifiable, as you claim, then again, you have no reason to believe that what you have ascribed them to is correct. SO again, your default state, as you claim, should be, "I'm not sure what those experiences indicate, nor am I sure they are external experiences versus internally generated ones." So, to be consistent, you're still left with agnosticism, according to your own logic.At some point, your breaking your own logic...thus behaving irrationally. Being irrational is fine, I guess, but it should be acknowledged.Edited by Perdition, : Answered the rest of the post...doh!

Not quite. There are reasons that are not based on evidence...but here we get into quibbles about the definition of evidence again. I don't think anything that can't be replicated and can't be as removed from human biases and fallibilities as possible constitutes evidence.So, what I'm saying is that without evidence I find no reason to believe, whereas, under my deifnition of evidence, YOU do find reasons to believe that are not evidentially-based. No, but it is indicative and a prerequisite for it. I know that there may be things that exist for which I have no evidence (absence of evidence) but I don't see any reason to believe in them until I do.

Sounds good. I hit submit too early and realized I had only responded to your first point.