Z, you would like to one day be in a romantic relationship, correct? Tell me, when that day comes, will you be able to objectively prove that the other individual loves you? And, perhaps more pointedly, will such proof or lack of proof actually be important?
Certitude is possible with enough intimacy and empathy. "Objective" proof of anything is essentially impossible, but logic and reason can assure the experience of love is genuine, that the odds of a God are scant, and that the origins of religion and the concept of divinity are manmade.
Part of the reason love is a special achievement over others is that it represents the voluntary actions of two sentients. One sentient can do something incredible by manipulating matter to create art or structures, but one sentient cannot force another to love.
You quite missed the point in your attempt to address what you thought was the intent behind my questions. The key is in if proof or lack of proof of love will be important to an individual in love. Except in rare cases, no, the state of objective observation is quite unimportant to the individual, even if the individual usually is quite taken with logic and reason. The cause of this is quite simple; love, being an emotion, projects from our midbrain to the forebrain (the cortex, where our "reason" and "thoughts" come from). The midbrain has a large number of connections to the forebrain, but the forebrain has comparatively few connections back to the midbrain. Thus, emotions can easily dominate our reason while reason struggles to control even the mildest of emotions. Of course, there are elements that can make this better or worse. Bad genetics and poor upbringing, for example, can make it so an individual has an even harder time controlling their emotions. And in turn, individuals who routinely control their anger and passionate outbursts will improve those connections from the forebrain back while those who are prone to grandstanding will be less capable.
While emotions are still a poorly understood aspect of our brain (but then, there aren't really any well understood parts), it is quite simple, given the proper equipment, for the proper chemicals to administered and the proper sections of your brain to be stimulated so that you will fall deeply and madly in love with Pat Robertson. Your reason might tell you that you are being manipulated, but the midbrain has the advantage. A simple swarm of brain chemicals is all it takes to overcome you.
You went the romantic route and attempted to justify these chemicals and signals by crouching them in terms of empathy and intimacy. That just merely produces the brain chemicals that can produce a feeling of love. Get a sick, twisted individual and they will be able to abuse another human being in such a way as to provoke those same responses. From the experiencer's standpoint, love is love, regardless of if it is produced through empathy and intimacy or pain and manipulation.
I asked you to provide proof of love because love is an emotion that science can essentially toy with. The experience of the individual can produce a result that society as a whole would regard as actually love or as not being love. That is, though something could be proved to be "love," it isn't actually love. This also leads into the reverse; if you engaged in intimacy and empathy with another human being, but those chemicals weren't present to invoke a "love response," would it still be love? Is love just the physical proof, or is there more to it?
This relates to the question of proving that God exists in that
1) You admitted that definite objective proof isn't possible even for things which you do claim exist
2) You claimed that one can achieve "certitude" through social interactions
3) You stated that logic and reason can assure that experiences are genuine, thus implying that experiences are valid proof.
As I illustrated, one can genuinely experience love without what we, as a society, call love actually being present. Religious experiences have been scientifically shown to be the result of a storm of brain chemicals, much like love. The individual genuinely experiences these events, which apparently is good enough for you (or at least, good enough some of the time). Individuals can "interact" with the divine through meditation and prayer, thus producing social interactions that can provide certitude of god’s existence.
This matter is complicated by the fact that one’s emotional response to the existence of a God, or love, or what have you, is capable of overpowering one’s reason regarding that topic. That is, one who’s emotional response to God is negative will find (if they look) that their emotions influence their reason regarding the topic of God’s existence, while if one’s emotion response to God is positive, their emotion response will influence their reason regarding the topic of God’s existence. An agitated, passionate individual will never be able to approach any matter, this matter included, clearly or logically.
There is a hang-up, when you say "that the odds of a God are scant." While a nice little poetic bit of writing, it is also bunk. Humanity does not have any statistical models for predicting the possibility of the existence of a deity. Given known information, it is just as equally true that the odds of a God existing are incredibly high; that is, both statements are grade-A bull crap.
This nicely relates back to my earlier comments regarding the human need for justification and its associated dangers.
Like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where it was wrong of the city to ask for the angel in order to sodomize them, but it was okay for Lot to offer his daughters to be gang raped by the townspeople.
Whoever said that it was okay for Lot to offer his daughters?
People seem to often think that the instances "violence" and "negativity" contained in the bible are always commendable or representative of God. In this case, the destruction of the cities can indeed be attributed to God, but the text does not commend Lot for offering his daughters to be raped, nor does it commend his daughters getting him drunk later. It calls him righteous at the beginning, but are we to take this to mean that good individuals can never "fall"? Or is it that we expect the bible to be far more blunt than it is, with clear stances of "nyuh, fire... BAAAAAD!" (where fire here represents incest)?
Something that might interest you is "G-dcast," a Jewish podcast:
http://www.g-dcast.com/A wide variety of individuals provide the parsha, sometimes you'll find their "interpretations" (if they provide an interpretation) to be nutters, sometimes however you'll get insights into the cultural significances of portions of the bible that make the nutter sections make sense. And it is often entertaining, regardless.
The persistence of the Bible's externally discredited power in the minds of its admirers is emblematic not simply of the impressive survival mechanisms Christianity has evolved over the centuries, but of the inherent propensity in every human being toward barbarism, which we must each overcome within ourselves in order to embrace that which makes us a unique species on this planet: higher thought.
Wow, I'm glad you have such a high opinion of me. I didn't realize I was what made humanity a unique species.
