First of all, no you can't. A subjective experience is singular, and personal. Unless it's YOUR subjective experience, you have no basis upon which to judge. For example, "Bob" claims that peas taste to him like cheap dog food. This is his own subjective experience. Not yours. So you will have no way to validate or invalidate his experience. You can taste the cheap dog food for yourself, and have your own subjective experience, and validate or invalidate the taste comparison for yourself that way, but that still does not apply to his experience of taste, or his conclusion.
You are confusing "opinion" with "experience".
If a person claims that x happened to them, and it can be shown that x did not happen, then their "subjective experience" can be judged.
And the same would be true if he claimed that getting a flat tire on the way to a big job interview was a message to him from God saying that he should be looking at doing something else. There is no way for you ti validate or invalidate his interpretation of his experience. Because it was HIS experience. And HIS interpretation. Not yours.
Because there is zero evidence for the supernatural, or that it interferes with the real world, that claim can be judged as unreasonable (or just daft), despite the subject believing it to be true. Others can judge such claims on the basis of evidence and observation. If there is a nail in the tyre, there is no reason to include an extra, unsupported layer of complexity.
Secondly, I neither claimed nor inferred that you must accept the claims made by others about their subjective experiences as being anything more than their claims about their own subjective experiences. That's what they are, and that's how you should understand them. They require no validity assessments from you, and you don't have the capacity to make such an assessment, anyway; as it was not your experience, and it was not claimed as such.
You seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of forms such as this. By definition, it is about people challenging the claims of others.
If you don't like people doing this, I suggest, with all due respect, that you are in the wrong place. You are like the person at the match complaining that people are engage in competitively kicking a ball. Baffling.
But that isn't the claim being made. THAT claim would include your participation (as witness) in the experience. It's therefor no longer a purely subjective claim.
The person making the claim insists that it actually happened and wants me to accept that it happened. All the evidence suggests that it did not happen. The situation may differ slightly, but the principle is the same. That is the point of an analogy.
I'll give you another that might be easier for you to understand... Someone making any extraordinary claim but refusing to provide any supporting evidence and simply demanding that I accept it on faith.
Whereas receiving a message from God is purely a subjective claim.
No it isn't, if they insist to others that is actually happened in the real world.
Your participation is not included.
It is, as soon as they tell me that they have received a message from god, especially if that message claims to impact on my life in some way (which they usually do).
And the fact that you had to alter the parameters of the experience to make it useful to you as a "analogy" only shows how it is not analogous, and that your premise is not sound. If it were, you wouldn't have had to alter the analogy to include yourself as a participant.
Your inability to understand the nature of the analogy is not my problem.
In this instance, it is not grounds for anything at all, because there is no reasonable expectation of any evidence, and therefor nothing to be surmised from not having it. And skepticism is NOT the logical default. It may be YOUR default position, but it's not the position being indicated, logically. The position being indicated based on a lack of evidence, logically, is an open mind. That means being equally receptive to evidence in favor of the claim's alidity, as to evidence against the claim's validity.
You've lost me now. Are you really saying that if a claim is so extraordinary that the idea of any evidence for it is even more unlikely, so asking for evidence is somehow wrong and acceptance of the claim is more reasonable?
Yet this is very clearly not YOUR chosen position. And that ought to give you some pause for consideration. Why isn't it?
I am happy to accept evidence for or against any position. That's how rational people form their positions. No idea what you would think otherwise.
The point here is that where no supporting evidence is provided for an extraordinary claim it is not rational to assume that it is as likely as not.
Now you're just stumbling into an abyss of foolish nonsense
You're funny.
based on others and your chosen assumptions about how God would or should exist if God did or does exist. And you can't justify any of these expectations.
You seem confused. The reason we can make judgements on god's existence and behaviour is because of how god is presented and explain by their own holy scripture. They are hoist by their own petard, as they say.
Of are you one of those apologists who claims we both can and can't understand god, depending on how it suits them?
For the lack of evidence to be meaningful, there has to be an established, reasonable, defined expectation of evidence that could be found and identified as such if it exists. And there is not, because all the claims are either mythical, or subjectively experienced. Proving a myth is a myth is a pointless waste of time, and subjective experiences (of God or anything else) can't be assessed by anyone but the subject that experienced it. So unless you have some other reasonable expectation of discoverable evidence, your not finding any means nothing.
Again, you seem confused. Showing that a claim is wrong is never a pointless waste of time, whether it is scientific, historical or mythical in nature.
Well, it's pretty strong evidence to the person having the experience.
You just don't get it. What we imagine in our heads is not "evidence" that the imagined thing is real.
I am now imagining you with a chicken's body. By your argument, that is evidence that you do have a chicken's body - at least to me anyway.
And it is even evidence to you if you respect the judgment of the person having the experience.
Respect is earned, not demanded. If someone insists that they have been communicating with god, I consider their judgement to be faulty. And you must respect my judgement, don't you. So we'll hear no more of your whining please.
But it's not proof in either case. And neither is the lack of evidence. Especially considering that what you are willing to call "evidence" is completely subject to YOU.
As you will recall, I have never claimed that there is
evidence that a person has not communicated with god (unless they make further claims that can be evidentially disproved), only that given the evidence surrounding the claim, it is unreasonable to insist that the claim is true.
That's irrelevant, however, as you have no way of showing that an experience of God would not involve the brain doing exactly as you claim. If I take an hallucinogenic drug and "see God" while under it's influence there is no more logical reason to presume that I did not see God, as that I did. Because there is no logical reason to presume that the drug created a false experience as to presume that it enabled a true experience.
How can our knowledge of such things be "irrelevant"? The whole point here is "was a person's mental experience real or imagined?" The facts that 1. we know that millions have imagined experiences that seem real, and 2. there is no evidence for the the claimed source of the experience, and every attempt to shoe that source has failed, and that some claims made about that source can be disproved - indicate a clear probability of the imagined rather than the real, thus supporting my argument that it is unreasonable to insist the experience is real.
