23 Famous Scientists Who Are Not Atheists

[Orrex]

8. Your question is irrelevant to the discussion at hand

If you want to make the question relevant, here's how to phrase it:
what evidence do I have that the person I love or loved actually exists or existed?

To answer, I can present things such as photographs, handwriting samples, audio/video recording, and other physical evidence of the person (perhaps including the actual person) sufficient to establish that person's existence with a fair degree of certainty (except to deliberate contrarians, I suppose).

Your question, as phrased, seeks to conflate the actual existence of an unverified, transcendent entity with a mundane human's personal experience of another mundane human, and that's an intellectually dishonest comparison.

Assuming that I exist and am of competent mental faculty, then I am an acceptable judge of my own emotions, and my own perceptions are sufficient to justify my own personal assessment of those emotions.

However, even assuming that I exist and am of competent mental faculty, my own perceptions are simply not adequate to assess the existence of a unique, transcendent divine being for whom no other verifiable evidence exists--and to that end, others' testimony of experience does not add to mine, unless I can evaluate that testimony independent of their experience.

I can choose to believe in such a magical entity, but absent corroborating evidence of that entity's existence, then my belief is not sufficient to demonstrate its existence.


That type of verbal trickery, of equating transcendent phenomena to everyday occurrences, is a favorite tactic of religionists, by the way, but it's a crock.