Common claims: “it happened to me and I believe it.” or perhaps “God spoke directly to me.”
Do you care about whether other people believe it too? If not, great then I don’t believe it happened exactly as you claimed.
This is exactly the same response one would give if you heard a person making a causal claim you know cannot be confirmed as true, and which conflicts with your understanding of reality? You must admit you would dismiss some peoples claims as not credible or you admit to being gullible and therefore have less credibility.
If in fact you do care that people believe your claim about the cause of what happened to you being divine, you must have something that would be convincing to others in support of your claim, the claim is not enough by itself.
If what you claim is supporting evidence cannot be verified or the conditions not reproducible, then one of the most important tenants of modern scientific method for understanding what is true is violated. (reproducibility)
If there are any alternate explanations for a given event, then simply claiming “it wasn’t any of those” is not valid support for one possible cause especially when unknown unlisted but sufficient causes may exist.
The very nature of a claim like this goes against another tenant of the scientific method which is that for one thing to be evidence of another it must be exclusively concordant (thank you Aron Ra) with that result. It must be shown if A is true, then B is also always true, and that if B is True it can only be because of A. If you can’t show this is the case then you don’t have valid evidence of causation.
In any case where an alternate explanation including a possibly unknown one, can be conceived of, you violate the exclusive concordance required for any explanation to be valid evidence.
This is a concept we all understand from the courtroom model. Defense attorneys can present an alternate explanation for the same set of facts which can lead to a jury having a reasonable doubt as to the truth of one theory of a crime over another.
We must first understand why claiming “it happened to me and I believe it” is being intellectually dishonest because it ignores others’ reasonable doubts as well as your own. This is another form of lying to ourselves.
People who are deliberately obtuse on this issue will continue to use these kinds of arguments because they have no choice, as long as there is no credible, reproducible, reliably predictable, or detectable evidence that is exclusively concordant with the existence of a god.
