This pretty much destroys the claim from personal experience
"Millions of people personally know God through an inner spiritual experience. People who doubt God have not had a personal experience with Him." So says the Christian.
Religionists don't realize how meaningless this statement appears to Rationalists To the less sympathetic rationalist, it appears pathetic. To a skeptic, such a statement about Personal Experience won't advance your argument at all, but rather, it will set you back. Empirical Rationalism is a system of thought based on evidence that can be independently verified, and potentially falsified, and the use of common sense and verifiable experience. In the real world, anyone is free to say anything, without the strength of supporting evidence. Are all claims therefore to be taken at face value, and given equal weight? The person who says he saw Elvis at the supermarket, or the person who says he was abducted by an alien spacecraft, or the person who says salvation is waiting in the tail of a comet... is all anecdotal evidence valid? In a court of law, witness testimony is given and evaluated. If it is not in accord with factual evidence, it is in doubt. In a court, the burden of proof is on the prosecution (the skeptics). But in the search for scientific truths (in this case, the ultimate origin of the universe), it is the opposite. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim that God exists, or the defendant.
Some say that we cannot deny the existence of the spirit (because it would require one to prove that the spirit does not exist), but this is to misunderstand logic. It is a logical error called shifting the burden of proof. It is unnecessary for Rationalists to deny the existence of the spirit; they would say that the existence of spirit is unproven (and unlikely) based on current scientific knowledge, and in the absence of proof, they would simply ignore the possibility of the spirit for more meaningful and tangible pursuits, until such proofs are made available.
Anecdotal evidence and arguments from authority are meaningless in science, and in any search for empirical truths. There is either a god or there isn't, and popular opinion means nothing. For example: 500 years ago, everyone KNEW the Earth was flat. It was an important doctrine of Christianity, as was geocentrism (the Earth sitting at the center of the universe), and to speak against these religious doctrines could result in your death at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. 500 years ago, probably 99.9% of the population believed in a flat Earth. The belief was based on perception and personal experience. But personal experience can be in error, imagined, contrived, or done out of conformity. It CANNOT be relied on for establishing universal truths. IT'S POSSIBLE for the entire population to believe wrongly! It took many years for the idea of a round Earth to gain acceptance, but (thanks to science) it eventually did. Even today, there are many Creationists who still claim that the Earth is flat.
Some religionists have claimed that dreams are analogous to the Personal Experience Argument, in the form of the premise: “Dreams are non-physical, and can’t be proved. We accept their existence from the evidence of accounts from personal experience.” But everyone has dreams. They are a common shared experience. No one doubts their occurrence, because we all have them. Dreams are a product of firing synapses in the brain, and can be detected with scientific tests. Comparing dreams to personal religious experience (something that is totally unverifiable) is a false analogy. It is trying to compare apples with oranges. Instead of dreams, it is more appropriate to compare the personal religious experience with the claim that someone saw Elvis at the supermarket, because both Elvis and a personal religious experience are equally unverifiable, are not a shared experience, and must be taken completely on faith.
The Argument from Personal Experience is also a circular argument. In other words: “The proof of God is that I believe in Him.” The conclusion is assumed in the premise. These kinds of statements are absolutely worthless in establishing the truth. Another very common circular argument is as follows: “God is real because the bible says so, and the bible is true because it is the inspired word of God.” Another is: “The proof of the miracles contained in the bible is that God can do anything he wants.”
If you are asked to prove the existence of god, don't bother stating your personal relationship with him as proof. Saying so will only make you appear to be a brainwashed individual who cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. As an argument, it carries no weight, and does nothing to counter the mountain of biblical errors, obscenities and absurdities.
Most theists claim their god can be known through prayer, but such experiences POINT TO NOTHING OUTSIDE THE MIND. We know that many humans habitually invent myths, hear voices, hallucinate and talk with imaginary friends. We do not know that there is a god.
“But there are millions of people who have a personal relationship with God!” This is a statement about humanity, not about god. It speaks about the belief in a god, not the existence of a god. Truth is not something that is determined by vote. Religions arose not from truth, but to deal with the saddness of death, emotional weakness, the terror of dreams, a desire for explanations and the fear of the unknown. If you consider such popular numbers to be significant, then of what significance is the fact that there are more non-Christians in the world than there are Christians?
The 1998 World Almanac and Book of Facts ranks Non-Religious first in world population, with a whopping 2,669,737,500... outranking Christians (all denominations combined) at 1,955,229,000, and Muslims at 1,126,325,000. The Almanac sites the 1997 Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year as its source. In the U.S. alone, polls consistently show about 10% of Americans call themselves 'non-religious'. That's 26 million Americans. In Europe, Russia, the Orient and Australia, it is much higher. What about people working in scientific fields? A recent poll of scientists revealed that only 7% of them believe in a god of any kind.
