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From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.religion,net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Logic based on ... (start again again...) (CONCLUSION)
Message-ID: <5473@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 13-Apr-85 15:45:11 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5473
Posted: Sat Apr 13 15:45:11 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Apr-85 15:45:11 EST
References: <886@pyuxd.UUCP> <5457@utzoo.UUCP>, <899@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
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Rich,
before you said that all subjective evidence was to be rejected because
it was subjective. What good does it do me to present evidence if you
are just going to reject it because it is subjective?  What I was trying
to do is to demonstrate that your beliefs are no less rigid than 
certain people that you were accusing of ``wishful thinking''. I
didn't think that you had a shortage of evidence for the existence of
religious experiences -- I thought that you had lots and rejected them
all because they were subjective. This leaves a lot of people in a bind.
You first reject all subjective evidence and then you say that there is
no evidence.

This doesn't help when you are overcome with a dread feeling and then
discover that night that your best friend was killed at that time. It
doesn't explain why you sometimes know that a friend who hasn't
talked to you in weeks is on the other end when the telephone rings.
It doesn't help when you are rudely shaken up walking through a park and feel
that you are the plants and the trees and flowers growing beside you. 
It doesn't explain why you suddenly feel like calling your mother, who
you haven't talked to in weeks and that when you phone her you discover
that her best friend has just told her that she (her friend) has cancer.
It doesn't explain why once (and only once) you have cut a regular deck
of playing cards and named 30 cards correctly. It doesn't explain
why meditation sometimes works on migraine headaches.

Suppose you keep records and discover that you cannot account for all
that happens by coincidence or chance. Then what? You still have
nothing but subjective evidence which people can deny ever happened --
but you might want to shop around and see if anybody else has any
explanations of what happened. Suppose your subjective evidence fits
descriptions of somebody else's religious experiences? Suppose you
never even knew the first thing about that religion before you
started having these bizarre things happen in your life. I would
maintain that you had rather strong subjective evidence for the
truth of that religion.

Not that that religion was absolutely true. Not that there was no
truth in other religions. But that that religion had some truth,
which you could grasp and find relevant.

But - the evidence is still subjective. And you always could be
mistaken, along with a lot of other people. Or you could be lying.
Your claims will never stand up to a persistent skeptic who is
determined to believe that you are either lying or a victim of
mass hallucination, or mistaken or a victim of your own wishful
thinking. There is no way to avoid this. The best you can aim for
is the understanding from the point of view of the skeptic that you
are sincere.

Laura Creighton
utzoo!laura