: : : : What's the basis for your leap of faith? Personal experience? How reliable is that? Historical data? How reliable or convincing is that?: This is ridiculous! personal experinec is the mnost convincing thing there can possibly be! What could be mroe convincing? Why do you believe taht electrons are negatively charged? Because a whole bunch of scientsits PERSONALLY OBSERVED it. Their personal experinec is merely serving, in thsi case, as a stand in for your own. When it comes down to it, teh only things we can KNOW for sure is what we have perosnally ex;pperienced, the rest is all inference. As such, personal experince is the ebst guide to truth tehre is. I suspect teh speaker is one of those people who would disbelieve in God even if God came and spoke to him, and would convince himslef till the end that he was being duped.
Ridiculous? Well, there's an unequivocal rebuttal if ever i heard one. However i fail to see how such a judgment is justified on the basis of what i have written. Allow me to explain.
What i was talking about was personal experience of God (or if you please jehovah, buddha, satan, zeus, venus, etc etc take your pick). Such experience is subjective. There is nothing to ground it in the real world. Indeed it is a common occurance that only those who actually 'believe' are capable of subjectively experiencing God. Consequently i hold that personal experience of God is highly subjective and unreliable.
Now you give yourself away in your example. How do we know electrons are negatively charged? Because a WHOLE BUNCH of scientists observed it. It wasn't a case of bertrand the physicist having a subjective experience that an electron was negatively charged. It was an observable phenomenon.
Do you imagine that if a scientist came by and said 'oh yeah i had a personal experience of cold fusion. No I can't show you what it is, i just experienced it. No i can't explain it' Do you imagine such a scientist would be anything but scorned? and this Nikhil is what you would have us accept?
