I guess the Christian perspective is that the "real world" includes a reality beyond what you know with just your senses. Logic and scientific experiments don't get you there. And we also believe that most people are in denial unless they turn to God for grace to see. That's a lot like the man returning to the cave in the Allegory of the Cave, trying to explain that light is good and being chained in a cave is bad - things that don't make sense to the inhabitants of the cave.Franklin wrote:My background is as an atheist who followed science and science takes exactly the same position about reality, namely that any conclusion about reality reached with deductive reasoning is nothing more than a hypothesis until it has been verified against the real world. Only then is it accepted as likely to be true.
I can't prove God. I can't prove that a poem is good or that the espresso I just drank is better than coffee or that Bach is a particularly good composer or that my wife is an amazing match for me either. And even if I could - you would be much better off letting yourself get absorbed in the St Matthew's Passion than sitting around debating whether Bach is a good composer, there's a majesty there that is very human and very real. Some things are beyond logical proof. But I can point people in God's direction, and I can promise you that if you sincerely ask God to reveal himself to you, he usually answers that prayer. But like the people in the Allegory of the Cave, you have to be willing to be open to a completely different reality than the one you have been living in.
To me, "verifying against the real world" doesn't mean only the dark cave, there's more to the world than that. If our world is limited to the things that deductive reasoning is good at, it's pretty limited.