The evidence points to mystic experiences being cause by the brain.
Being caused by, or there is a physiological component to? Are your emotions caused by the chemicals in your body, or are the chemicals a response to thought, creating a felt experience? Are you meaning to suggest that our minds just going along for the ride of random and arbitrary impulses of the body, that we're just sitting around a big blank and then all of a sudden we feel happy or sad, or on another level suddenly experience God? We are nothing but a bubbling pot of brain functions?
The entire experience of your life is through the brain. This no more invalidates God than it does your own entire life. How the heck else are you going to "know" God in this body than through the body?
Why would I assume God exists for absolutely no reason?
Direct experience is evidence. Evidence is a reason.
I assume neither way, as I do not think we could truly know that any divine force exists. My point is we cannot use mystical experiences to say, objectively, that divinity exists. It is not knowledge, but subjective interpretation.
Nope, you're conflating terms here. It is knowledge in the sense that it is direct, firsthand experience. Then secondarily, you have interpretations of said experience. Those interpretations are nothing more than models trying to explain the actual data - which actual data is the experience itself.
Can we say objectively that God exists? I think we can say safely that the type of experiences mystics have (myself included as one), are objectively real. Objectively real in that you can actually measure differences in brain activities on a physiological level. Objective in a common basic descriptions of the types of experiences had. Now then, following that, these interpretive models come into play and those will vary in their basic frameworks, but the underlying descriptions of experience regardless of later interpretive frameworks are common enough to refer to as objective.
Just because someone calls that their tribal god at work in them, as opposed to another who sees that as some Cosmic Mind, does not negate the reality of common experience. To focus on the models is like looking at the fingers on the hand as all being different, rather than what they all in their unique shapes are pointing to.
Chemical reactions in the brain objectively exist, what we call emotions. I would agree that the reactions people interpret as God objectively exist, but this does not make gods objectively exist. Emotions are in the brain, but with God we have people arguing something objective caused the experience, which is likely not the case.
We know what we call emotions exist, we believe God exists.
We know God exists in the same way we know emotions exist.
