Argument from personal experience.

When you come down to it, this is the argument for god. In my individual discussions with many different people I have found that this is an extremely strong reason why people believe, their 'personal' experiences.

Many a times in a discussion there comes suddenly from the other side,

"Well to me god has shown himself so it's not really a matter of doubt for me"

They have become so utterly convinced through their experiences that it's impossible to make them think different. And who am I to shout hallucination? It is their personal experience. Now some of them are very silly but some really are quite complicated.

A friends mother became an atheist but then she saw a dream where several people were knocking on the door shouting "god exists, wake up" and then she became a believer again. That is ridiculously silly as I have seen dreams one telling me that god doesnt exist and another showing me that jesus was laughing at richard dawkins and his followers who were about to go to hell, I was among the one going to hell standing behind dawkins.:lol:

The silliest of all which actually seems pretty rampant is the answering of prayers where people dont even think whether the said thing would have happened without prayer or not, they just assume that because they prayed it couldnt have happened without it.:?

But some experiences really are very complicated to answer. I have heard several times that people saw something in thier dream which was completely random thing but it turned out to happen exactly that way a day or 2 after. It happens way too much to simply call it a complete coincidence that we happened to randomly dream something that was about to happen. And by random I mean something which wasnt least your concern, not something you had been pondering over or something.

Group hallucinations is the one which rather bothers me as well. There have been many instances where many people simultaneouly happened to see or experience the same thing in a religious ritual or practice. We are talking thousands of people so it's very unreasonable to say that they were merely hallucinations or a conspiracy by all claming to have experienced it.

The strongest reason I find against the personal experiences is that people who's beliefs are very contradictory all seem to have these experiences so surely not all can be "right"? I also find it very hard to believe that not only does a god exist who can simultaneouly communicate with billions of human beings but that there is absolutely no way of finding any trace of this communication going on?

Have you had any personal experience with god and how do you generally find this argument?

Personal experience is all people have to reference - aside from dreams and plans. Its also a very strong reason why people loose faith too. I'm not sure it is "possible to make people think things", although I believe "suggestion" is a skill and/or art that has a firm basis in human psychology and is used in religious practice. (Read Derren Brown's "Tricks of the Mind" for a fascinating insight, intro and toolkit.)

Do you have any specific group hallucinations in mind? Are the answers really all about controlled circumstances and guided situations? Wouldn't "spiral of silence", "bandwagon effect" and/or "collective hysteria" better explain such situations in psychological terms and without resorting to the spooky?

I think the human mind works (stores and accesses memory) by finding strange connections between things, places, people and ideas. It is no wonder that coincidences happen so frequently, since we are constantly looking out for them, while ignoring all the coincidences that don't happen.

Such special predictive powers would be all to easy to prove, yet so little evidence, outside of human recollection or laws of averages, exists to prove it - unless you know different!

The silliest of all which actually seems pretty rampant is the answering of prayers where people dont even think whether the said thing would have happened without prayer or not, they just assume that because they prayed it couldnt have happened without it.:?Gambler_3

Arg, yeah that one always bothers me.

But some experiences really are very complicated to answer. I have heard several times that people saw something in thier dream which was completely random thing but it turned out to happen exactly that way a day or 2 after. It happens way too much to simply call it a complete coincidence that we happened to randomly dream something that was about to happen. And by random I mean something which wasnt least your concern, not something you had been pondering over or something.Gambler_3

Well I dunno it could just be a coincidence. If you factor in how much random crap you dream the fact that one thing lines up with what happens in our daily life isn't really that surprising.

Group hallucinations is the one which rather bothers me as well. There have been many instances where many people simultaneouly happened to see or experience the same thing in a religious ritual or practice. We are talking thousands of people so it's very unreasonable to say that they were merely hallucinations or a conspiracy by all claming to have experienced it.Gambler_3

I'm thinking that the answer to this has a lot to do with the power of suggestion.

The strongest reason I find against the personal experiences is that people who's beliefs are very contradictory all seem to have these experiences so surely not all can be "right"? I also find it very hard to believe that not only does a god exist who can simultaneouly communicate with billions of human beings but that there is absolutely no way of finding any trace of this communication going on?Gambler_3

Heh, yup. When two people believing mutually exclusive propositions say that they are absolutely certain then you have good reason to doubt the justification for their certainty.

Have you had any personal experience with god and how do you generally find this argument?

Gambler_3

Nope, I never have before and that is a fact which is greatly upsetting to me. If, say, the God of the Bible exists as a person that I can have a relationship with then by golly that's someone I dearly want to know about. If he never calls me then he either doesn't want to be my friend or he isn't real and since scripture denies the former what can I do other than believe the latter?

Do you have any specific group hallucinations in mind? Are the answers really all about controlled circumstances and guided situations? Wouldn't "spiral of silence", "bandwagon effect" and/or "collective hysteria" better explain such situations in psychological terms and without resorting to the spooky?

RationalAtheist

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/258

My friend also told me that his grandmother witnessed the pillars of the mosque of the prophet muhammad in medina go into the sky. He said it was witnessed by pretty much everyone who was there, I dont have a link for this though.

I once witnessed a Jeep run into a dividing wall on the expressway and almost flip over into my car. (True story, very scary)

The only problem here is that I didn't immediatly connect my near death experience with religion. I didn't rule my continuance of living to be the will of God, trying to show me his existance and steer me towards belief again but more of very good fortune. I know it could have been a hallucination, but my girlfriend said she saw it also. This could be mass hysteria(a bit of a stretch calling it "mass") but I doubt it. I think what really happenedwas that some guy wasn't paying attention, and I just so happened to be the one who's car would have gotten demolished(had to be someones with all that traffic).

Now I understand that this isn't exactly the same as three peasant children seeing the virgin mary in Fatima, Portugal(the only reference I can find on Fatima,Portugal), but who am I to question these children? It is also not the same as a dream that divines the future...although I must say that if your dream can divine the future that you have no connection with, I am impressed. That doesn't however mean anything if you neglect to say something until after the prophesy happens. I ca divine the future too! Last week I dreamed that I was going to find a copy of Final Fantasy VII(black label) at the Goodwill. I found just such a thing three days ago. I must be psychic. 

I never put much stock in personal experiences. They invariably happened in the past...which is very easy to fabricate.