[net.religion] logic and the supernatural

hardie@uf-csg.UUCP (Peter T Hardie [stdnt]) (01/10/85)

	I'm rather surprised at the paucity of experience often exhibited
by the folks on the net in refuting the non-technical arguments that occur.
For example, in article <1659@umcp-cs.UUCP> Charley Wingate states:
>...Plenty of human knoledge uses non-logical methods.  When you wake
>up in the morning and see the face of your wife/girlfriend/whatever-you-
>slept-with-last-night :-), you don't deduce their identity through a logical
>deduction or anything like that; you just Know.  Thus also with God....
					   ^^^^
					   (emphasis added)

Sorry, Charley. (:-))   (Apologies, but I couldn't resist).
You don't "just Know" anything.  Ones' world is a net of assumptions.  When
you wake up, you have an assumption of what the room will look like, who or
what you slept with, what day it is, etc.  Most of the time these assumptions
are correct, and you "Know".  But sometimes they are dead wrong.  Examples:
	You have a serious fever.  You go to sleep and wake up.  How long
		have you been asleep??? One day?  Two?
	or you attend a big party and fall asleep in a spare bedroom.  When
		you awake, you think you're at home and walk into a wall
		attempting to find the bathroom.
	or you see an old friend in the crush of shopping for Christmas,
		but when you tap them on the shoulder, it turns out to be
		someone else entirely.
	etc.
So there is no certainty from one waking to the next that anything is the
same as before.  Some paths of human logic are not easy to follow, or are
more of a Gestalt pattern-recognition thing, but that doesn't mean that
they aren't logic.

-- 
	Pete Hardie, Univ. of Florida, CIS Gould
		acct:..!akgua!uf-csv!uf-csg!hardie