coatta@cs.ubc.ca (Terry Coatta) (10/07/90)
Tim Hoogasian writes: > david, i admire your honest appeal to folks asking for their personal > "revelatory experiences", but your question cannot apply to everyone. > Salvation is not a "feeling". it is a fact. if you follow the Owner's > Manual that God has supplied us with, it doesn't matter whether or not > you get some sort of mystical emotion telling you "it's right." I'm wary of the dichotomy that you set up between feeling and fact. We experience the world as perceptions: sight, sound, smell, touch. A common definition of ``fact'' is that which can be verified (experienced) by others. But what of experiences that are mine alone? To me, the experience of seeing that the grass is green is not so different from the experience of God. They are both simply perceptions of mine. And although God does not appear to be accessible to the other senses, there are a large enough group of people who share this experience of God, that I cannot simply dismiss my perceptions as the creation of my own mind. You would seem to ask me to fall back on the ``owner's manual''. But now I wonder why it is I should accept what it says? Is it because it claims to be the source of truth? Thats not a secure foundation because there are other books which make the same claim. Is it because there is historical evidence supporting this book? Again, there is a good deal of historical evidence for Muhammed and the Bhudda, and so I find this lacking as a justification. Is it because there are a lot of people around who say that this is the ``right'' book? I think its fairly obvious that this is a poor choice (I can just hear the marketing hype: ``Buy Christianity, 2 billion people can't be wrong!). For me, it comes back to experience. Facts derive from experience. Although the perception of God is not so easily shared as the experience of green grass or Mozart, I have no other way to justify my belief other than to say I perceive that God exists. Terry Coatta (coatta@cs.ubc.ca) Dept. of Computer Science, UBC, Vancouver BC, Canada `What I lack in intelligence, I more than compensate for with stupidity'