Does God Exist?
William Lane Craig says there are good reasons for thinking that He does.
(VIII) God can be personally known and experienced.
This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence; rather it’s the claim that you can know God exists wholly apart from arguments, by personally experiencing him.
Here, in my view, it all comes down to the profoundest mystery of them all: the human mind, the human "I". For all "I" know, my mind is on automatic pilot generating thoughts and feelings [about God, about anything] wholly in sync with laws of matter. Nature. A nature that may or may not come back to God. "I" am just along for the ride. Or solipsism is in fact the real deal and "the self is all that can be known to exist". And then, as Berkeley suggested, God is the anchor here as well. Then sim worlds and dream worlds and myopic, totally manufactured Matrix "realities".
Or, sure, suppose none of that is the case, and you really are convinced that you have had a profoundly personal experience with a God, the God. How on earth would others, in not being you, go about confuting that? Maybe it's as a result of a mental affliction, maybe through drugs, maybe in the midst of an epiphany of some sort...a truly dramatic, once in a lifetime experience that you and you alone come to embody.
And I'm the first to accept the possibility of that given what must be the staggering mystery embedded in the existence of existence itself.
Okay, but this part...
1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and hundreds of paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed...but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual's belief in God
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God
...doesn't go away.
Philosophers call beliefs grasped in this way ‘properly basic beliefs’. They aren’t based on some other beliefs; rather they’re part of the foundation of a person’s system of beliefs.
And, in regard to God and religion, how is that not deeply embedded existentially in dasein? Then the part where these personal experiences are or are not able to be demonstrated to others. The part where others are able to have them as well. The part where collectively these experiences can be used to connect the dots to your God and not to their God.
Other properly basic beliefs would be the belief in the reality of the past or the existence of the external world. When you think about it, neither of these beliefs can be proved by argument. How could you prove that the world was not created five minutes ago with built-in appearances of age like food in our stomachs from the breakfasts we never really ate and memory traces in our brains of events we never really experienced? How could you prove that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals being stimulated with electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are reading this article? We don’t base such beliefs on argument; rather they’re part of the foundations of our system of beliefs.
Exactly! Most of us can't elaborate on the "properly basic beliefs" regarding how microwave ovens work or how smart phones can exist or how we can click on "submit" and send our own thoughts and feelings to other computers in the blink of an eye. "Wireless" no less.
But there are those who can.
But what of the "properly basic beliefs" that connect us to a God, the god, your God?
Did you have your own personal experiences with Him? Okay, tell us about them. And if others have similar experiences with their own Gods -- Gods that are not your God -- then what?
Again and again and again: with so much at stake on both sides of the grave, you'd think a God, the God would have made these experiences considerably more
revelatory. You have one and through it you are able to make it unequivocally clear that your God really, really is the One True Path.