I don't agree that it's relevant to the particular argument I was making.
I agree. That's why I don't condemn it for that.
I'm not imposing a standard. If a hundred people told you they had seen the Yeti, communicated with it, and that it was real, then each person gave you an entirely different description of it - tall, short, hairy, smooth, fish, fowl, mammal, black, white, green, single, a group, just a diffuse cloud of smoke, and so-on, you'd be justified in thinking that they were not talking about something objectively real and/or they did not have the true knowledge of it that they claimed. With god concepts, it's much worse than that.
Whatever your ultimate beef, it applies to scientific topics galore as well. Is "dark matter" made of ordinary plasma, WIMPS, Axions, MACHOS, sterile neutrinos, chameleon particles, black holes, or something else altogether? Do you know? Does anyone know? You can't blow off a concept based strictly on it variability in terms of potential "explanations".
Once you strip away the dogma of virtually every religion, you're left with a distilled set of teachings that put love, forgiveness and service to others above other "values". That's ultimately true of Buddhism and it's not even a *theistic* religion.
Where you see "variation", I see a lot of similarity. Most atheists haven't a clue what "dark matter" might be, they can't see it, but they typically "believe" in the idea none the less.
I'm not talking specifically about Pantheism or Panentheism, as I already described, I'm talking about all god concepts. I'm definitely not talking about LCDM theory.
Shall we talk about theoretical aspects of particle physics? QM theory? Seen a graviton particle recently?
There is no scientific evidence for, or overall consistency of, religion and topics related to God.
Now you're right back to trying to impose your own personal and highly subjective standard on the term "evidence". You appear to be trying to play judge, jury and executioner with respect to it's meaning. The term "evidence" does *not* require a lab demonstration of cause/effect mechanisms as you seem to imagine. The mere *effect* is often cited as "evidence", as is the case with 'dark matter', inflation, space expansion, graviton theories of gravity, string theories galore, etc.
There is a range of studies that contribute to independent lines of evidence that such experiences are internally generated. I could find some references if you're really interested, but I suspect if you were really interested, you'd have aready looked them out yourself.
I did and I found the "evidence" to be rather lacking in empirical substance. Now what?
It's redundant. To paraphrase the apocryphal words of Laplace, "We have no need of that hypothesis".
How did you decide it's redundant to add God to explain human experiences of God, but you think it's necessary to add exotic forms of matter and energy to explain "nature"?
What makes you think nature, as a whole, has a consciousness?
For starters, even single celled organisms exhibit highly "intelligent" behaviors. They can work themselves through mazes, find and eat a balanced diet, anticipate repetitive changes in the environment and respond to them accordingly, yada, yada, yada. Slime molds in particular are pretty fascinating in that respect. Such behavior suggest that "awareness" is simply an intrinsic part of "nature" and it simply manifests itself in a variety of physical forms, including human forms.
Please try to understand that I'm not talking about physics hypotheses, I'm talking about god beliefs. There is also a significant difference - the former are proposals to be tested, the latter are claims of definitive knowledge.
Who is empirically testing "inflation" or "space expansion" in a lab these days to make sure they have some influence on photons and electrons and other forms of matter and energy?
I'm not talking about what astronomers know.
Technically they only claim to "know" about 5 percent of "nature". They're mystified by 95 percent of it. They haven't a clue what it's made of. They don't know where to get any "dark energy", yet it makes up a full 70 percent of their claims. What little they do know is mathematically modeled using "pseudoscience" according to the author of MHD theory which they abuse regularly. In short they really don't know very much about the composition of "nature".
I mention all this because if you going to claim to write off "God" theory based on variation in belief, you'll definitely have to write off huge chunks of so called "science" in that same breath. There are huge variations in "dark matter' claims, and various "inflation" concepts to choose from. There's no "standard of uniformity" in science as you seem to imagine.
The difference being what?
In the final analysis, it's primarily a scaling effect.
Are you saying that because you can't explain them internally, they must be external?
No, I'm saying that my experiences are congruent with the existence of "God", and an awareness and consciousness that is much greater than my own.
