Although God, ultimate Reality, Divine Truth, cannot ever be proven, it can be experienced. However, the experience is entirely subjective, non-verbal, inexpressible and cannot be reduced to intellectual conceptualizations. It is also extraordinarily rare and there is no means for the ordinary person to rationally verify that experience from the outside.
That experience is of an entirely different order of knowledge than the knowledge we acquire through intellectual rational inquiry. Those who require external, intellectual verification can just write this off as unsubstantiated hearsay. And simply recognizing that there are rare individuals who can achieve a universal consciousness does not in any way prove the existence of God. Of course disproving such experience also does not in any way disprove the existence of God. In terms of proving/disproving God, it's a moot point.
That experience is also entirely different from religious experience, which is extremely common and forms the foundational basis of every religious tradition. It is also distinct from spiritual experience which is less common but very readily recognized in all cultures and societies. There is a commonality among all these experiences, however: each type of experience configures the mind to a particular awareness, a particular variety of knowledge.
In point of fact all knowledge is based on experience, whether it is the experiences of scientific and mathematical inquiry or the experiences of love or baseball or highway construction. Participation in the human experiment is a continual sequence of innumerable experiences yielding an unending creation of knowledge. Some knowledge fits well with other knowledge; some doesn't.
Both religious and spiritual experience does, in fact, generate a particular range of knowledge which does not always necessarily correspond completely with knowledge gleaned through scientific inquiry. And there is also a lot of current scientific investigation into the nature and conditions of both religious and spiritual experiences.
However, all of this still does not prove or disprove the existence of God. None of the knowledge gained by religious, spiritual, or scientific experience can every prove or disprove the existence of God. That will still always remain beyond the reach of intellectual verification.
Both religious and spiritual experience provide coherent, rationally cohesive, intellectually satisfying and emotionally fulfilling conceptual structures which are based on a belief in God or ultimate Reality or Eternal Truth. It is not always congruent with the equally coherent, rationally cohesive, intellectually satisfying and emotionally fulfilling set of knowledge which forms the foundation of atheist conceptual systems. Science and it's current set of knowledge intersects both the theistic and atheistic ideospheres. None of any of this proves or disproves the existence of God. It all just contributes to the rich diverse fabric of the human experiment.
Those who attempt to "prove" the existence of God by refuting current scientific knowledge are not just mangling science, they're mangling religion as well. They're becoming oblivious to the genuine religious knowledge accessible by genuine religious experience. They're trying to "win" a game that's not supposed to be about winning anything and they're doing it in the wrong arena by lowering the hoop, moving the goal posts, taking out third base. They're trying to mix two separate fields of knowledge and somehow come up with a rational conclusion.
But that's not even the real problem in this whole argument. See next blog for an unexpected turn.
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