Its simply not possible to prove a divine revelation to yourself. How did you determine that aliens aren't experimenting on you and trying to make you believe a fairy tale? Maybe they are trying to see what they can get humans to believe by messing with certain neurotransmitters.
This is like saying it's not possible to prove
any experience. The experience is real unless you're intentionally faking it.
Or maybe its Satan that's revealed himself to you and is tricking you to convince you to believe the wrong thing such that you'll go to hell. The reason these are fair considerations to bring up is because you can't determine what is likely or unlikely when it comes to the supernatural.
I don't find that fitting of Satan's character or believe in Hell. And not all "divine personal revelations" are supernatural. One can have spontaneous insight into the nature of reality through a realization of spiritual significance on their own.
Or a deity can reveal it to them in meditation. The source is still from inside themselves though, as deities are reflections of ourselves.
I find it bizarre that people always just accept their personal revelations without even questioning them. There's simply no way a personal revelation would prove the truths you supposedly learned from that revelation. Its circular reason: the personal revelation is true because it came from God/ the supernatural, and God/the supernatural exists because I got a personal revelation. Its 100% fallacious.
I find it bizarre that people accept whatever they see. They justify that they saw it so must exist, and they know they really saw it because it has to exist to see it.
Isn't that the same kind of thing? Rather, I would offer that revelation is JUST like any other qualia. We have no justification that any empirical phenomena is really happening, after all as you said it could be aliens tricking us by firing off brain cells. It could all be a simulation.
But no, we usually assume any qualia/empirical evidence is real because we can see it, just as those with personal divine experiences usually believe them because they saw them.
How did you determine that?
I'm a rather skeptical person in general, so I question both directly proportional to how extraordinary of a thing it was I just perceived.
You think being contacted by the most powerful being in the universe via supernatural means should be classified as closer to getting a pet dog?
I think
@Quintessence just meant that it's better to relate to something we can literally see or feel. It's qualia, experience. It's not qualitatively different than "real" things to those who experience them. All that will differ is if people believe those things were illusion or reality.
If you've ever had a strong hallucination or an extremely vivid lucid dream you will know that it's confusing to know what's reality and what's not. I once had a dream so hyper realistic with someone walking that I woke in real life thinking someone was there but when I did it was dead silent.
Had I had an experience that seemed to be some kind of divine thing to that degree of hyper realism and sensory acuity and definition I wouldn't of for a second doubted it was 100% real. However in my life spiritual experiences and revelations ect are not that vivid. In fact, I'd argue, the ones that are hyper vivid are usually kind underwhelming when compared to fictional depictions in the media.
For a comparision/metaphor, it's the difference of a firecracker going off next to you're ear unexpectedly versus watching it happen to someone else. You can't convey the sensory experience just by watching the real thing, but maybe you could with an epic bright flashy explosion. But nothing short of it happening to you will accurately convey anything at all what it was like.
That's what it's like, from a person who's both skeptical and have have these experiences. Some I believe, some I don't. People can't be in my heads to perceive it but I can always check my revelations against science and later observation or reflection.