I’ve seen Matt Dillahunty say this a couple of times but I’ve always disagreed. The idea is that someone who thinks they have had an experience with the divine, that somehow justifies a belief in a god. Except it doesn’t. Only an *ACTUAL* experience with a *DEMONSTRABLE* deity would justify a belief that such a god was actually there.

Let me know when someone manages to do that.

This really gets back to the problem that the religious can’t prove any of this. Just because someone has an experience and attributes that to some supernatural entity, almost always for emotional reasons, that doesn’t mean that’s what happened. They never have the ability to step back and examine the experience rationally and only go where the evidence actually leads. Why? Because they don’t care. This is not about fact, it’s about emotional comfort. That’s why they remain unjustified in claiming things about their supposed experiences.

So let’s look at this intellectually. Something happens that the individual has no immediate explanation for. Okay. So what? The answer to what caused it in that situation is “I don’t know”. It’s never “God did it” unless you can prove that God exists and was directly responsible. Yet that’s not how religious experiences work, is it? If you put ten theists in a room, all having different religious beliefs, and something bizarre happened, you’d have ten people likely saying that ten different gods were responsible. How does that work exactly? What’s really going on here are ten people simply making the bald assertion that their own personal god did it, because that’s what they are predisposed to belief. That doesn’t mean any of the gods claimed were actually responsible. Therefore, every single one of them, while they might feel confident that their claims are true, every single one of them is almost certainly wrong.

That’s what we need to be concerned with. It isn’t which ideas make the believer most emotionally satisfied, it’s which beliefs are most likely to be objectively true in the real world that we all share and you can’t just staple a god-claim onto an experience and claim that’s what happened. You have to be able to prove it.

That means that all of this stuff is just laughably ridiculous on its face. If something I couldn’t explain happened to me, I can’t just pretend that invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies done it. The time to accept any given proposed solution is when that proposed solution can be demonstrated to be so and not one second before. Just because you like the idea, that doesn’t change the reality. Thus, there is no more validity in saying “God did it” without proof than there is in saying “Barney the dinosaur did it!” Just because you like the solution, that says nothing about any truth value the claim might possess. I don’t care about what you believe. I care what you can prove. Let us know when you can do anything worthwhile.

Now I’m not getting on Matt’s case here, I just don’t think he states it well and as I said, I’ve heard him say it several times. I don’t care what is convincing to the theist. I care what is true objectively. The believer might sincerely think that their attributed cause is true. They’re just wrong. The level of sincerity someone might have says nothing about the truth value of the idea. I think it’s a genuine disservice to tell people that just because you’ve played a great game of make believe, that somehow makes your claims worthwhile. It says nothing of the sort. You have to do better than that and I don’t care how much it hurts your feelings when I tell you the facts, if you can’t demonstrate a direct causal link between your experience and the cause that you’re trying to assign, you’re just not being rational. This goes for absolutely everyone whether they like it or not. I’m sure that’ll hurt some feelings. I don’t care.

We really need to stop pussyfooting around the emotionally frail and just insist on the truth. You feelings need no apply. This is the way the world actually works. If you want your ideas to be taken seriously, then keep them within the realm of reality. Otherwise you’re just making a fool of yourself. I can’t stop you if that’s what you want to do but I’m certainly not going to pat you on the head and tell you to go play in traffic. I’m going to call you the idiot that you are. If you don’t like that, don’t be an idiot. It’s not that hard.