Like what [evidence is there for the claim that "love exists as a subjective experience contained in minds]?
Well, for starters, we can take the nearly universal claims of people having experiences that they term “falling in love.” In addition to individual reports of this experience, we have the experience dramatized in a number of sources – film, literature, etc. – in remarkably consistent ways across all cultures (there’s a legitimate question to be asked about the extent to which media representations of love influence individuals’ experience of it, but that’s a little too complicated for this thread).
From these accounts – and from our own experiences – we can broadly conclude that there are various emotions that get grouped under the heading of “love”: romantic love, familial love, fraternal love, the love of friendship, the love of a fine cigar, etc. All of these categories are different experiences and emotions, but we use the same word (“love”) to classify them because they have enough similarities in common.
Finally, we can actually hook people up to machines and watch the neural patterns and changes in brain chemistry as they experience various kinds of love.
Something is clearly happening in the brains of these people and, we would correctly suppose, something is happening in their consciousness.
In all of the above, the evidence suggests that love is something that exists inside consciousness. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that love is a “thing” that exists independently of minds (love is not, for example, a fat cherub with a bow and arrow floating around outside of us).
What I’m saying on this thread is that people who claim that “god is real” on the basis of the same sorts of evidence – individual reports, personal experience, depictions in literature, measurements of brain activity – only have enough evidence to support the claim that “god” is an experience contained in the consciousness. “God,” on the basis of this evidence, is nothing more than an inner emotional experience – this kind of evidence can’t demonstrate that god is an independent being, any more than it can demonstrate that love is an independent being (with wings and a bow and arrow and everything).
