One thing you didn’t mention that is critical to the success of science is peer review, the effort to reign in personal bias. Relying on personal feelings or experiences as a keystone of our world view makes us especially vulnerable to personal bias. Peer review tries to counteract that.

Aside from that, in my case, I interpreted my feelings and experiences the way I was told I should. When I had pleasant, peaceful feelings reading the Book of Mormon, I interpreted that as God communicating its truth to me. I interpreted it that way because that is what I was taught to do. When I finally stepped back and looked at my experiences with a beginner’s mind and asked myself what I thought that they told me, I came to a different conclusion.

You can rely on science, in the ideal case, to be fiercely loyal to the evidence. Any theory that fails to explain new evidence is cast aside as yesterday’s news. I’m not looking for absolute truth from science. I want an honest, humble, good-faith search for the truth. I might believe one thing today, and something entirely different tomorrow, but at least I know I’m doing my best to live honestly in light of what evidence I have.

Religion could probably be like that, but mostly it ends up dragging its feet when evidence contradicts its dogmas. It’s also often more about preserving mysteries than parting the veil and peering into the universe’s deepest mysteries. That’s not the kind of reliability I’m looking for.

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It does not follow, however, that feelings are a reliable source of knowledge.

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What I have difficulty with is that people reject the concept of God because of its uncertainty flee to science because of its “certainty”, “truth”, “knowledge” and “reliability”. But science never claims to have any of those things. The only thing certain about science is that next year it will be different. How can religion be more unreliable than that?

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“All I’ll say is, what you felt wasn’t “god” or “supernatural” or even all that special.”

Wow! You must have some kind of supernatural power that let’s you know what other people are feeling or experiencing. Science can’t explain it all. If it could, we wouldn’t need to have humanities departments on university campuses.

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I was with you right up until the stuff about spiritual experiences. We almost agreed on something.

Also regarding #10, if I feel happy, that is reliable evidence that I am happy. Once I try to extrapolate from there, the evidence becomes less useful—not completely useless but not entirely useful either.

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I can “prove” your evidence false, but you won’t believe me. I have a very close friend who received a spiritual confirmation just like the one you received. He also received this confirmation many times. The only problem: He was an evangelical Christian at the time and he was praying about whether Mormonism is true. His confirmation: It is not true and it is a Satanic cult.

That friend is now, like me, an atheist. Why? Because we both talked about our “confirmations” and realized they are the WORST way of arriving at beliefs. How can “god” tell us contradictory things using the same method?

I’m not going to deny that you felt something. In fact, I’ll admit that you very likely did. That you felt something is “truth.” All I’ll say is, what you felt wasn’t “god” or “supernatural” or even all that special. It was natural processes that were manipulated by your religion to convince you of something. And now, as a result of that “confirmation” experience, you are unwilling to consider evidence that contradicts your beliefs. You put more weight in a capricious, flawed approach than you do in a method that has shown itself to be extremely reliable – science. No one can make you change your approach, but I can insist that your approach is flawed and irrational.

In short, I discount “spiritual” experiences because they are not reliable, a key element of scientific investigation. It’s as if I was using a magic 8-ball to answer scientific questions – I can get different answers to the same question or the same answer to contradictory questions. Prayer is a magic 8-ball.

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If feelings are so unreliable, how do you know whether you are happy or whether you are sad? If I tell you that I’m mad at someone, should you doubt that because feelings are an unreliable source of knowledge? Feelings and emotions tell us important things about our world, things that reason can’t tell us. If feelings were so unreliable, we’d have to get rid of all sciences except history. Past experience doesn’t tell us anything about the future. Only our feelings can tell us that.

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Feelings are important but they are an unreliable source of knowledge.

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Now if you’re going to discount personal or spiritual experiences as evidences, the rest of this post is useless. But for me, as long as I can personally replicate the experience, it qualifies as good evidence. And like you exmoron, I require good evidences. I didn’t simply accept the LDS doctrine as true from the moment I heard it. I thought about it, I lived it, I experienced it. Then I prayed about it. This combination of personal, repeated (and repeatable) evidences led me to my conclusion–it’s true. You ask what it would take to change my conclusion? The simple answer is that the evidences supporting it would have to be proven false.

Considering the evidences are historic events that becomes difficult. Regardless, faith is not simple and, like most, I have my moments of doubt. These moments, however, are fairly easily overcome by recalling the initial evidences and experiencing new ones.

My evidence, like you claim for yours, came first. And while you see science as verifiable knowledge, it is theory and verifiable only until it is unverified. Theory and theology are much closer cousins than I think you want them to be.

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