Wednesday 11 December 2013

The Argument from personal experience and why it fails to convince atheists.

This is a vastly varied field as personal experience is by definition personal and there are billions of theists in the world, and throughout history.

Basically it revolves around claims about miracles and feeling the presence of god. This is one of the poorest arguments anyone can present to an atheist, especially if the claims about a miracle are simply hearsay (e.g.: "my sister got healed when we laid on hands and prayed to Jesus").
Conversely if you could demonstrate a miracle to an atheist, empirically, then it might be the strongest argument you could present, but then it would not be an argument from personal experience anymore as it would have independant confirmation external to personal testimony.

So what is the problem with it? Well no one, including theists, would accept such unreliable testimony, if the tables were turned on them. No one would accept a tale by someone about something outragously improbable without some proof to back it up, unless you already accept the premises beforehand.

So for instance if you believed in ghosts, then you might believe someone telling tales of ghosts, but if you did not believe in ghosts, a tale about them would not convince you they exist.
If a hindu tells a christian that Vishnu revealed himself and healed their sister the christian would not believe them based purely on a unsubstantiated story, but if a fellow church member says Jesus did the same thing, then they might, unless it contradicted something doctrinal. Likewise if a Christian tells a Muslim that Jesus appeared and told them he was indeed the son of God, rather than a prophet of God, the muslim would consider the Christian either lying or deluded. This is because personal testimony is the weakest form of evidence you can provide, its highly subjective and easily contaminated by prejudice.

Now what if it is a 'confirmed' miracle of your faith, from history.  Does that make a difference?
Well not to someone not already a believer, because the miracles often 'confirmed' by religious authorities are highly dubious in their intent and purpose for validating the miracles. For instance the Catholic Church manufactured relics when it suited them, fabricated or accepted with little if any evidence miracle claims in the past when it suited them and nowadays, thanks to science, rarely if ever proposes any miracle might be authentic because they know it may be debunked if looked at closely by independant sources. The shroud of Turin is one glaring example of fraud and pussyfooting of the Church.

The holy books have claims of miracles in them, some witnessed by many people, even supposedly non-believers, does that make a better case?

The answer again is no. These are unverifiable 'proofs' written in the same book as the claims of miracles and the witnesses (of whatever type) are simply recorded as being witnesses, but there is no way to know what actually happened as there is no way to verify the statements. In many of the cases, no names are even mentioned, only numbers of anonymous 'witnesses'.
No theist would accept any of these as proof of a different religion being true over their own by itself.
If a theist will not accept such 'proofs' even when they already accept a truck load of supernatural beliefs, then why should an atheist that shares none of those beliefs?

Does that mean no miracle could impress an atheist? Well yes and no. No unsupported miracle will impress anyone not already a believer in that miracle or type of miracle. However if a 'miracle' could be shown to an atheist first hand, rather than a story or hearsay, then that is a different case entirely.
First hand experience is a lot more persuasive than 2nd or 10,000th hand.
However prayer studies have failed in this regard, or been shown to be badly or even dishonestly done, and no miracles have been recognised as valid outside of a religion's own followers unless they ascribe different purposes for the miracle (done by demons to trick you or something like that) by opposing faiths.

For me personally, if I saw limbs being regrown, as I watched, on amputees after someone prayed to only a particular god and no other, that would cause me to be impressed. It would need to be done openly and with proper sceptical double blind methods and repeated in different situations but if that kept occuring, only when one god was prayed to, then that might be enough for me to stop being an atheist. In the future this may NOT be enough as we may medically be able to regrown limbs but for it to spontaneously happen now after a prayer, well that would be, for me, a miracle.
However other 'cures' like healing bones, or curing cancer are often poorly documented and in many cases either misdiagosed in the first place, or had perfectly plausible natural reasons for what happened. I remember reading up on a famous case in Lourdes of a man who had a broken leg spontaneously heal on visiting the shrine, but after a bit of research found out that there was collusion with the doctor, outright lies and mislaid testimony and the leg had healed over 3 years prior to the trip to the shrine (he claimed the old scars was a 2nd miracle, which shows in hindsight the brass balls of the guy).
The claim originally sounds very impressive, the truth is a very different matter, often extremely deceptive and exaggerated.

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