And similarly, to tell a doctor "I must have eaten something I'm allergic to" says something about your state of mind, but doesn't tells us nothing about whether or not the patient actually has any food allergies.
You're skipping over several steps in the chain of reasoning here, though. You're saying "well, let us assume that the patient is an 'expert' in his own food allergies--has experienced them before, knows what they feel like etc. etc.'
So, in other words, you assume that the existence of these allergies is already established (unlike God), their effects upon the patient already observed and tested (unlike God) etc. etc.
But if a patient showed up in your office (assuming you're the doctor) and said "I've been up vomiting all night; it has never happened to me before, but I assume I ate something I am allergic to" you'd be a fool to lend any more weight to the allergy theory than to any other possible reason for the symptoms presented. In other words, the patient's statement has evidentiary weight in those areas where the patient has demonstrable, verifiable knowledge ("I was vomiting all night") but has no evidentiary weight whatsoever in which the patient has no such knowledge ("it must be allergies.")
This becomes clearer, perhaps, if we give the account of a patient offering testimony for something inherently unlikely. Say your patient appears and says "every time I swallow it feels like there is a creature in my chest who grabs my oesophagus and squeezes it." Now, this gives a nice, graphic account of the patient's subjective feeling. But no doctor is going to say "well, if that's what you say you feel, then I guess we have to start by giving you a scan for chest-creatures."
You see? In each case, the statements you take to have evidentiary weight are ones where the thing in question is to some degree already settled (the patient's experience with allergies etc.). With the question of God, it is the thing that is in question which needs to be suppositionally accepted (i.e. begging the question) before testimony can be taken to have evidentiary weight.
Or, for that matter, when a field biologist's report that they spotted a pair of nesting eagles at such and such a place, "is useful evidence of the man's state of mind, but tells us nothing whatsoever about whether there actually is" a pair of eagles there.
No. We have prior evidence of the existence of these eagles. We know something about this person's experience at identifying birds etc. etc. If the same person said "oh, and by the way I witnessed a perpetual motion machine at the same site" we'd have no reason to think that such a machine existed. The statement would have no evidentiary weight at all.
Only in the sense that all of science is also a gross logical error.
You think science is based on taking people's word for having witnessed things which they cannot demonstrate?
Sometimes you have to take eyewitness testimony seriously. Sometimes it's all you have. Sometimes it's all you can expect to have.
Again, I said nothing against eyewitness testimony per se. I said that testimony of something whose existence has yet to be proven, or demonstrated to be possible, when that testimony is more easily explained in other ways (e.g. religious fervor, psychosis, etc.), has no evidentiary weight. If someone tells me out at sea that he can see a container ship flying above the horizon, I do not take this as evidence that container ships can defy gravity. I take it as evidence that the person reporting this phenomenon doesn't know about that kind of mirage.
Now, in the case of eyewitness testimony about God, I can name some very specific reasons why I might mistrust it. Just because eyewitness testimony is not, in general, automatically invalid does not mean that it is automatically valid. But the point is one of relative credibility and reliability, not of (in legal terms) "admissibility."
That would be a significant statement if I had said that all eyewitness testimony was "inadmissible." Given that I didn't, I don't know what your point is.
I can claim to have spoken to my department chair today and no one sensible will question it. I can claim to have spoken to God and no one sensible will do anything but. But that illustrates that the key differences is not in the nature of the claim that I make -- eyewitness testimony of personal experience is fine. The key difference is that between God and my department chair(*).
And isn't this precisely what I said? It begins to appear you just misunderstood me. I never made a general attack on eyewitness testimony. I made a specific attack on the evidentiary weight of eyewitness testimony
of the divine. If you agree that eyewitness testimony of the divine has no evidentiary weight, while eyewitness testimony of the mundane (if your chair will excuse the lese majeste for a moment) can have, then we're in agreement.
(*) Of course, the real distinction is that "God doesn't think He's my department chair."
Quite.
