1. Comment #98305 by bartvdo on December 13, 2007 at 1:05 pm

define experienced....

People are very good at pattern matching, even to the point of seeing things that aren't a true pattern.

Many that don't understand what is happening to them, will point to a higher being as the originator of the experience. Even though it might just be the LSD in the water :-)
(Or something else, that pattern matching also makes us very impressionable).

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2. Comment #98309 by Quetzalcoatl on December 13, 2007 at 1:10 pm

People have EXPERIENCED being abducted by aliens. People have EXPERIENCED rising up out of their body and looking down on it from the ceiling. It doesn't make it real.

One person's personal experience will never match another's. As real as it may feel, it cannot be used to empirically determine the existence or non-existence of God. That's where evidence comes in.

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3. Comment #98344 by rnewson on December 13, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Quetzalcoatl captures the essence of the counterargument.

To extend it, people *know* that astrology works, that homeopathy works, that acupuncture works, that ear candling works, etc.

Basically, people claim to know things quite freely and without any evidence. They are misusing the word.

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4. Comment #98352 by ronnieharper on December 13, 2007 at 1:59 pm

Nobody knows anything with 100% certainty, therefore those people who claim unequivocally to 'know god' are experiencing something other than knowledge.

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5. Comment #98394 by USA_Limey on December 13, 2007 at 2:43 pm

I hate these stupid 'debating points' so much I am going to be childish and petulant.

They completely mess up the 'latest visitor comments' section which helps us keep track of responses to the latest articles posted.

So there.

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6. Comment #98443 by Blue Lithium on December 13, 2007 at 3:42 pm

Okay then, why doesn't your god reveal himself to me? I am obviously the one in most need of meeting god, as I am an infidel.

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7. Comment #98476 by Intergalactic Hussy on December 13, 2007 at 5:53 pm

People tend to find what they are looking for. Did you get it on video?

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8. Comment #98484 by Rational_G on December 13, 2007 at 6:15 pm

I KNOW I dislike these debating points.

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9. Comment #98487 by polytheist on December 13, 2007 at 6:43 pm

'LSD in the water' would give you deep mystical feelings.
Some people interpret a deep mystical feeling as a Godly experience.

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10. Comment #98491 by automath on December 13, 2007 at 6:53 pm

I once knew I was God! Does this mean I was?

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11. Comment #98493 by Spinoza on December 13, 2007 at 6:56 pm

3PD > 1PD

QED

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12. Comment #98603 by Wiggy on December 13, 2007 at 11:35 pm

Most Christians have "experienced" God.
Most Muslims have "experienced" Alah.
Many different people have "experienced" many different Gods.

Does this mean all gods exist? Does that mean they are all crazy and you are not? Or is it simply easy for most people to mistakenly believe that they have experienced God?

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13. Comment #98754 by sidfaiwu on December 14, 2007 at 8:02 am

First let me counter the "I hate these debating points" commenters. Solution? Don't read them. They may not be entirely appropriate in the 'articles' section, but I like them very much.

People who've experienced God know that God exists.

So God singled you out as 'special' and gave you a direct experience. Are you certain it wasn't Allah or Vishnu, as Wiggy points out? Perhaps it was Satan. He's suppose to be really good a deception, you know. Perhaps you were temporarily ill or have been drugged. Considering these possibilities, how can you expect anyone else to trust your experience as genuine or that you've interpreted your experience correctly?

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14. Comment #101779 by Jake Atkisson on December 21, 2007 at 1:08 am

People once -knew- the world was flat. People once -knew- a lot of things.

But, hey, adolescents sometimes -know- everything too. In fact, people -know- so terribly much that I'm surprised any learning gets done at all by anyone, anywhere, ever.

Maybe there's some merit to the actualized realization that we don't actually -know- much, if anything, that enables the potential to maybe, possibly someday learn something.

But, I dunno, I don't know much, so I could be wrong.

:)

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15. Comment #106329 by sstrang on January 2, 2008 at 5:02 pm

When one says they "know" God exists because they "experienced" God, it begs the question: what exactly did you experience? Did God speak to you directly? Did God show you a clear image of himself?

What exactly did you experience and how do you know you experienced it?

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16. Comment #106336 by Garnok on January 2, 2008 at 5:16 pm

I wonder if the people that think this to be an excellent arguement for the existence of god would be impressed by me telling them that, by their own reasoning, since I have never experienced god I know that god does not exist?

Something tells me not that much.

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17. Comment #106477 by Spider on January 3, 2008 at 2:47 am

Are you certain it was not the light from the stained glass windows, the pleasant smells from burning incense, the men, women and children in front and wearing costumes, the strange music, the wine and biscuits at an odd time of day, the kneeling, the bowing, the group singing, the man (and infrequently, woman)shouting/chanting/ranting from the front, the groups total affirmation to the sermon, and/or the collection of your hard earned money that made you think you had a 'religous' experience? Have you ever had one in school....at the supermarket?

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18. Comment #106546 by Slavny on January 3, 2008 at 5:56 am

Experiencing God doesn't prove that God exists any more than being hungry proves there's food in your cupboard.

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19. Comment #110995 by Riley on January 13, 2008 at 10:34 am

I like sidfaiwu's response best. The problem has to do with being able to reliably certify the source of where the experience is coming from.

The ability to reliably authenticate the source of an experience (or message) is as important as the experience itself. A message purporting to be of "God" that exists in form susceptible to counterfeit and mimicry (e.g. a "holy book", an "experience", and any other form where the mere possibility exists of other explanation) is reason enough to know that the message is not of "God".


Here is the reasoning for this, by example:
Imagine that you are King and that you have a new set of commandments to impart to your subjects. Unfortunately, there are those among your people with their own ideas of how your subjects "ought" to behave. You have a particular problem because many of these prideful subjects are also unscrupulous enough to distribute their own set of commandments and claim them to be made in your name, under your authority.

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How do you ensure that every one of your subjects is personally able to differentiate between messages and commandments sent with your authority, and messages and commandments sent by false messengers?
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In order for your subjects to be able to choose to follow your commandments, they must be able to authenticate the source of the commandments they are receiving. To successfully communicate your message, you must be able to send your message in a form (i.e. in an experience) that is uniquely attributed to you (i.e. that is impossible to mimic or occur by chance). In this way, your subjects can know not only which messages are of you, they can also know that any message sent in a form not uniquely attributable to you, must be false.

In Short:
If you can't prove it is of "God", you can be certain it is not of "God".


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20. Comment #113856 by Alyosha on January 20, 2008 at 7:26 pm

They might have had an experience, but what is it about the experience that makes them so certain that they were expereincing a God? And if a God, then which God?

I haven't read many of them but, as you might have guessed, I also like sidfaiwu's comment.

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21. Comment #115096 by 82abhilash on January 23, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Experiencing something and coming up with a good explanation for the experience are not the same thing.

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22. Comment #125751 by the_ultimate_samurai on February 12, 2008 at 1:38 am

in life there are few things quite so unreliable as personal experience, to quote beneezer scrooge (not the best model i'll admit) when asked if he doubts his senses, "Yes. Yes. Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of
the stomach makes them cheats." many things can influence what one remembers, what one feels, and what one sees.

3 people can see the same crime and discribe 3 different people. many psychological things go into sense and memory, so such experience should naturaly be taken with skepticism.

also there is somethign of a non-sequitor from "this is an amazing experience" to "therefore god exists".

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23. Comment #130203 by martino on February 20, 2008 at 7:11 am

I have experienced no god and so I know no god exists.

If you don't like my answer who can you make a similar claim?

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24. Comment #138325 by 4horsefins on March 4, 2008 at 7:44 am

A child who finds money under his/her pillow after loosing a tooth, knows there is a tooth ferry...the difference is, the child's mind evolves, which causes it to start thinking for its self, which in turn causes it to rationalize where the money came from. There is not a cultural movement telling children they will burn in hell if they do not believe in the tooth ferry. This allows their mind to easily imagine mommy putting the money under my pillow because I was so brave in getting my tooth pulled.

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25. Comment #156055 by aavanton on April 6, 2008 at 3:02 pm

...then it should be kept as a personal experience and not imposed upon others, not without evidence or reproducible results.

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26. Comment #165177 by L-Young on April 21, 2008 at 7:14 am

No one had ever experienced god as god doesn't even exist.

http://perspectivevision.blogspot.com/2008/04/origin-of-god.html

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27. Comment #169365 by Crazy_Steve on April 25, 2008 at 9:57 pm

How many people here have seen a skilled magician? They can do magic, so magic is real right?

The basic functioning of the brain and an overview of how concious percepion is different than reality should be required in all education programs around the world.

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28. Comment #176077 by powerboy on May 6, 2008 at 2:01 pm

Again, you're placing an unjustifiable degree of trust in a claim that isn't trustworthy. Because someone said they had a "personal experience" doesn't make it true.

Rational inquiry dismisses this argument through the simple observation that Christians "experience" Jesus Christ; Muslims "experience" Allah; children "experience" the flying spaghetti monster etc. Logic dictates that not all of them can be right, and not all of them can be telling the truth.

Therefore, which God is real and which is not. Who is genuinely having a "religious" experience and who is being "deceived" by the devil? Perhaps none of them are correct. Perhaps they're having natural experiences and confusing them with religious experiences. Perhaps they are attributing to God, something that shouldn't be, out of loyalty to something they perceived as having helped them. Case and point; Pat Robertson claimed that in South America (of course somewhere remote where only he and his missionaries were) people were being "raised from the dead". Now, when pressed on this matter he admitted that someone had only died and was brought back to life while being rushed to the hospital from the inside of an ambulance while they were there. It didn't matter that emergency medical technicians were working to revive that person; it was all a work of God.

So you see, these "experiences" can, and should, be attributed to the truly wonderful reality of nature, and righteous intervention into the troubles of people by other people who care enough to help. If they were remotely inspired by God, then why aren't all believers saved from dying a horrible death, or suffering great tragedies? The most common response by the religious peddlers and personal kingdom builders of our time is that they were not paying their tithes! So you see, some things just don't deserve faith.

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29. Comment #176613 by Chato on May 7, 2008 at 7:13 pm

I was an atheist before i discovered Reiki. I have had many profound experiences - the most powerful was when what felt like two chords of pain around my heart snapped and I then vommitted what felt like static electricity (that is the best description I can give). At the moment before I vommitted, both times, I heard my own voice in my head speak to me. It was very strange - it sounded like the voice that normally thinks my own thoughts but it called me "You". What the voice told me directly pertained to an emotional crisis I was having and was not so profound to anyone else that it is worth repeating - the message was for me and was personal. The voice that spoke inside my head was extremely wise and compassionate. From the way it spoke I could tell that it knew everything and would forgive anyone for anything. you could call this God, spirit, collective unconscious - whatever you like - the Buddha called it mind because he wanted to get away from the false concepts the word "God" engenders. This force is real but it would never punish anyone - most if not all religions have seriously failed to understand thsi phenomena. I think the Buddha did understand it but modern Buddhism has been corrupted by earlier forms of ancestor worship and other such ancient religions. But in the recorded words of the Buddha himself you will find the truth - if you can understand it!

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30. Comment #177100 by LiseYates on May 8, 2008 at 2:51 pm

When I hear someone use the "experience" topic as proof of a god, I can only think of the experiment a couple of Swedish scientists performed in 2006. These scientists were studying the effects of electromagnetic stimulation on the left temporoparietal junction of a patient's brain. The results produced caused the patient to believe that someone was very close to her although she was the only person in the room.

I mention this because the religious are adamant about saying that you can't judge someone's personal experiences with a god but what if those personal experiences are nothing but the person's mind responding the stimuli people tend to create during worship (the latter is most likely the cause)? This is why I'm am furious about this distinction of science among the religious as evil. It seems some people would rather be ignorant and brainwashed all their lives than to actually think for themselves.

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31. Comment #177346 by Chato on May 9, 2008 at 12:42 am

My experience certainly could not be be proof of anything. In fact I cannot say it answered all my questions - it left me with far more unanswered questions. Ofcourse it means to me there is more to the world than science generally accepts but that only has personal value. However, after having such an experience you cannot then accept the view of the world accepted by the majority of the scientific community. Maybe it is just part of the human condition to struggle to find answers to questions that we are incapable of answering.

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32. Comment #180415 by Answer on May 14, 2008 at 9:17 pm

One should never trust an experience that they cannot reproduce empirically or share with another person. True, there are 4 billion Christians and most of them claim to have experienced God. However, this God that they experience has a multitude of different traits depending on who is experiencing it.

My first example was that of Christians, because I live in America where most people are Christian, and because that is what I felt I was personally experiencing before I found the truth.

But what about those genuine followers of Allah, or the people who believe in a pantheon of Gods? Are they simply wrong because the one "true" God told someone so? No, they're all right, because they're all wrong.

The "God" one experiences is more than likely oneself. We are all made out of the same things that stars are made out of. We are all following the same laws of nature and physics as everywhere else in the universe (except for where omittance is necessary i.e. black holes, etc.). It is not hard to believe that we are capable of doing all of the things the Bible claims we are capable of, therefore I assert that we are all Gods in our own way ( I have an interesting theory of relativity).

But if we could all move mountains and if we could all raise ourselves from the dead, there would be no God, because it would be the norm. So, not surprisingly, humanity invented a glorious (damnable) inversion of our limitedness.

So tell me, how can you experience a man who is three people and one of those persons was incarnated 2000 years ago, killed on a cross for claiming to be the son of God, and then neatly folded his dressings and ascended to heaven to be with his father and the holy spirit...who also happen to be him?

I would also assert that several people claim to have experienced being oranges, but they don't look or function much like oranges. They look and function like people whose minds have degenerated.

I apologize for the implied connection between theists and the mentally disabled, but that apology is only because it hurts people to hear the truth.

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33. Comment #181736 by evojosh on May 18, 2008 at 5:44 am

That is not a valid statement for scientific or responsible debate. It uses a faith arguement which ends conversation.

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34. Comment #188659 by mossie23 on June 4, 2008 at 10:52 am

"people who've experienced god, KNOW god exist."

don't think so. but i can't deny that human beings sometimes have experiences that can draw them to conclude 'something out there' exists. comment #29 by chato tells us about such experiences.

there are many ways to induce these type of experiences. fasting, the use of psychedelic drugs, sleep deprivation, meditation, etc. and, as abraham maslow argues in his beautiful little book 'religions, values and peak-experiences', everybody is capable of having them.

as i see it though, these experiences are just containers. the content of them is drawn from memory, expectations, surroundings, etc., very much like in dreams. what you bring to the experience could be called 'set' and the surroundings could be called 'setting'.

that set and setting have a big influence on what the contents will be, has been shown in numerous experiments. a famous one is walter pahnke's 'good friday' experiment (1962). in this 10 theological students were given a psychedelic substance, and 90% reported a genuine mystical experience.

also, consider why hindus rarely have visions of the virgin mary, and why christians rarely meet their forefathers, like native americans do. that's because these experiences are very related to what you bring to the experience.

so, it's kinda funny when somebody reads the bible a lot, has one of these overwhelming experiences where he has visions of things in the bible, and then concludes that the bible must be true. that's about as circular as it can get. but the believer can't see that his 'knowledge' is coming from being conditioned by his belief.

and that's exactly why i'm still an atheist after numerous of these experiences. i can see how i influence, up to a certain level, what i will experience. and yes, sometimes the experiences are so personal, clear and otherwordly that it's hard to believe that it's just a fabrication of the brain. but yet nothing has convinced me of 'something out there'. the brain is a strange and beautiful thing.

i think that the scientific study of these 'altered states of consciousness', can give us tremendous insight into why and what people believe. personally, i think it's very sad that researchers can't use psycho-active drugs to do this, as was normal until the seventies. once again, it's just one way of inducing these experiences, but it's definitely more convenient than having people fast for 2 weeks in a lab. so it's a shame that hardly any country allows this type of research.

for those of you who think i'm a total dopehead, i can only say i take psychedelic substances about twice a year. and the majority of my experiences have been induced in non-drug ways.

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35. Comment #197308 by Verster on June 21, 2008 at 5:05 pm

There are people that "know" they are Napoleon, it doesn't make it true.

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36. Comment #198132 by VincentStasik on June 23, 2008 at 9:09 am

The study mentioned by LisaYates, "Induction of an illusory shadow person," by Arzy, Seeck, Ortigues, Spinelli, and Blanke (2006), provides an area of scientific testing that could be used to test if people are actually feeling "god"'s presence. Furthermore, I propose that religious fanatics have only trained themselves to specifically activate this region of their brain, much like an athlete preparing for competition, and that there really is no god that could be proven.

Interestingly, I also propose that if tested, brain activity in the left temporoparietal junction would be present in all religious people who are in the state of feeling god. That proof could be used for and against the argument that god exists and could be felt.

If religious people use this to support their belief in god, then they would be able test for non-believers in the congregation. Just an afterthought.

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