Today's Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don't; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!
As vivid as personal experience can feel, if we're going to treat it as evidence of a hypothesis, we can't give it any more weight than anyone else's experience. And that includes religious experience. Our intuition is important, but it's biased, and we have to step back from it and view it like we would anyone else's. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.
Human intuition isn't just unreliable. It is frequently demonstrably false. One can present many examples in math and science where the basic human intuition fails drastically (the Monte Hall problem is but one of many good examples).
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | May 05, 2010 at 01:32 PM