Posted: Feb 25, 2018 10:41 am
GrahamH wrote:And your basic premise about being fooled is deeply, deeply flawed. If you can be fooled into believing you are human when you are in fact God then surely you can be humans yet fooled into believing you are God. The latter seems infinitely more credible since it doesn't shatter on the contradiction of omniscient ignorance.
I think that's a very valid point. If we are willing to grant that god can be fooled, then we surely must grant that humans can too. There's no obvious way to breach that equivalence and James didn't attempt to.
GrahamH wrote:I don't think jamest is making an argument that characters in his lucid dream could verify that he is Christ He is, as ever, talking to himself about how he must be right in his belief that he is divine. He is asking whether God can know it is God without having any experience of being able to do the sort of things God is supposed to be able to do.
You might well be right, in which case he should not have asked us "about the signs of a Christ in a persona" or "what you would expect to see in the persona of a Christ" and he should not have answered his own query with "IF there were a Christ amongst us, it should imo be possible to verify this".
All of these lie on the other side of his storied Observed X/Experienced X divide. They are all externalised. If he wants to say that he could know subjectively he's Christ but cannot provide any reason for anyone else to think so, then he should say that instead.
As it stands he's borrowing a premise from a contradictory position.