The Experiential Roots of Religion
Religion is characterized by the passion that it can
arouse, either for or against religion.
Why is religion capable of such enormous effects on human life? Apart from the fact that religion is about
the ultimate concern of human beings, we also need to bear in mind that
religion often has an experiential basis. God is not just a hypothesis for the
religiously devoted. He is a Living Reality
who permeates all their lives. Hick has
a good account here:
"To the Old
Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles, for example, whose religious
experience lies behind the biblical writings, God was an experienced
reality. He was known to them as a
dynamic will interacting with their own wills; a sheer given reality, as
inescapably to be reckoned with as destructive storm and life-giving sunshine,
or the fixed contours of the land, or the hatred of their enemies and the
friendship of their neighbours. The
biblical writers were (sometimes, though doubtless not at all times) as vividly
conscious of being in God's presence as they were of living in a material
environment. Their pages resound and
vibrate with the sense of God's presence, as a building might resound and
vibrate from the tread of some great being walking through it."[1]
God is what they can experience directly,
what impinges on their consciousness and what turn their lives around. These characteristics can clearly be seen
from the paradigmatic religious experiences: Abraham's hearing of and
responding to Elohim's calling, Moses' encountering Yahweh in the burning bush,
Isaiah's vision of the Holy God in the temple, Paul's conversion on the road to
Damascus, Augustine's conversion, Luther's experience of the justifying grace,
Wesley's feeling a strange warming of his heart ... The list goes on and on. Those people who experiences God will echo
with Job[2]:
"I have heard of
thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee."
Religious experiences sometimes convey such
a heightened sense of reality that the conviction they instill transforms the
lives of the experients. Furthermore,
religious experiences are not only life-transforming. They are often world-transforming as well-
just contemplate the immense impact of people like Moses, Paul, Augustine, etc.
on Western civilization.
Although
religious experience is an ancient phenomenon, the discourse about
religious experience is relatively new.
When people feel completely at ease about talking about God, why do they
bother to talk about experiences of God instead? The
popularization of the discourse about religious experience more or less
coincides with the turn to subjectivty in modernity. For example, Schleiermacher's emphasis on
religious experience, especially the feeling of absolute dependence, is
well-known. William James' Varieties
of Religious Experience greatly helps the entrenchment of the idea of
"religious experience."
Rudolf Otto does a similar job for the idea of "numinous
experience."[3]
These authors are all concerned to show that the capacity for religious
experience is somehow natural to the human psyche. Their work can be seen as efforts to break
loose of the modern epistemological straitjacket of British empiricism or
Kantian agnosticism. However, they are
not always clear whether religious experience is merely a feeling or a
cognitive experience. So these thinkers
do not explicitly formulate any argument from religious experience, i.e. the
argument that the occurrence of religious experience provides grounds or
justification for the existence of God.
However, the argument from religious experience is now defended by
sophisticated philosophers and taken seriously by many others. In this paper, I will discuss some of the
epistemological issues surrounding this argument from religious
experience. Let me first introduce its
development in this century.
The Argument from Religious Experience in
the Twentieth Century
Before going into the argument from religious
experience, I clarify some related terms and concepts here. By a religious experience I mean an
experience which the subject takes to be an experience of God or some
supernatural being. Such an experience
is veridical if what the subject took to be the object of his experience
actually existed, was present, and caused him to have that experience in an
appropriate way[4].
The claim that "S has an experience of God" does not entail
"God exists." So the
undeniable fact that religious experiences have happened does not prejudge the
issue of the existence of God.
Earlier
defenders of religious experience include both theologians and philosophers,
e.g. Farmer, Frank, Waterhouse, Knudson.[5]
Some of them claim that religious experiences provide immediate
knowledge of God, and that they are self-authenticating because within
the experience the subject directly encounters God and receives God's
revelation. For example, the British
theologian H. H. Farmer said,
"the Christian
experience of God ... in the nature of the case must be self-authenticating and
able to shine in its own light independently of the abstract reflections of
philosophy, for if it were not, it could hardly be a living experience of God
as personal."[6]
Similarly, the Russian philosopher Frank
claimed that
"faith is such
an intimate possession of the object of faith that the very fact of possession
is a self-evident and certain proof of the reality of that object."[7]
However, philosophers tend to be very
critical of such claims to self-authentication.
They point out that religious experiences are heavily shaped by the
conceptual framework of the experient and that no knowledge can be inferred
from mere emotional states or conviction, no matter how intense they are.[8] In
fact it is very hard to make sense of the notion of self-authenticating
experience. Keith Yandell, himself a
defender of religious experience, offers devastating criticisms of this notion.[9]
C.D. Broad is perhaps the most
philosophically competent among the early defenders. He in fact anticipates a form of argument
from religious experience that is hotly debated nowadays:
"The practical
postulate which we go upon everywhere else is to treat cognitive claims as
veridical unless there be some positive reason to think them delusive. This, after all, is our only guarantee for
believing that ordinary sense-perception is veridical. We cannot prove that what people agree
in perceiving really exists independently of them; but we do always assume that
ordinary waking sense-perception is veridical unless we can produce some
positive ground for thinking that it is delusive in any given case. I think it would be inconsistent to treat the
experiences of religious mystics on different principles. So far as they agree they should be
provisionally accepted as veridical unless there be some positive ground for
thinking that they are not."[10]
From the fifties to
the seventies, able defenders of religious experience include A.C. Ewing, John
Hick, H.D. Lewis, Elton Trueblood, John Baillie, Rem Edwards and H.P. Owen.[11]
However, they have not drawn much attention from professional philosophers because at that
time, verificationism was still influential and hence even the meaningfulness
of religious language was in doubt. The
situation by now is very different.
First of all, as Taliaferro in a recent introduction to philosophy of
religion said,
"Since then many
philosophers have conceded that concepts of God and other components of
different religions cannot be ruled out as obvious nonsense or clear cases of
superstition. Important work has gone
into building a case for the intelligibility of the concept of God. There is also important criticism of such
work, but the debate on these matters is now more open-ended without being less
rigorous."[12]
Secondly, starting from the end of 1970's,
a number of analytic philosophers have produced increasingly sophisticated
defence of religious experience. Richard
Swinburne defended religious experience via his Principle of Credulity
in The Existence of God which was first published in 1979.[13] The
Principle of Credulity says that it is rational to treat our experiences
(including religious experience) as innocent until proven guilty. In other words, religious experiences are
treated as prima facie evidence for the existence of God until there are
reasons for doubting them. This attracts
quite a lot of attention in the circle of philosophy of religion. There are of course many critics of
Swinburne, e.g. William Rowe, Michael Martin but he has also inspired the
support of quite a few professional philosophers, e.g. the philosopher of
science Gary Gutting.[14]
Whole books are written on religious experience which basically follow
Swinburne's line of reasoning, expanding it, modifying it, and replying to
objections. They include Caroline
Davis's The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (1989), George
Wall's Religious Experience and Religious Belief (1995) and Jerome
Gellman's Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief
(1997).[15]
There are also other philosophers who work independently towards a
similar conclusion, e.g. William Wainwright[16] and Keith Yandell. Yandell has written on this topic for a
number of years and his work culminates in his recent book: The Epistemology
of Religious Experience in 1993.
Another
landmark of this debate is William Alston's Perceiving God which was
published in 1991.[17]and Christian Belief," in Alvin
Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds. Faith and Rationality: Reason and
Belief in God (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); "Perceiving
God," The Journal of Philosophy 83(1986):655-65; and
"Religious Diversity and Perceptual Knowledge of God," Faith and
Philosophy 5(1988):433-448. In this
book, Alston brings his analytical skills to the issue of religious experience
and defends a doxastic practice approach to epistemology. This approach says that it is practically
rational to trust our socially established doxastic practices (including the
Christian Mystical Practice). His
arguments were discussed in major analytic philosophy journals, e.g. Nous,
The Journal of Philosophy. Both Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research and Religious Studies have specially
organized symposia to discuss his book in 1994.
Another
influential figure is Alvin Plantinga.
He started with an attack on classical foundationism in order to leave
the room for belief in God as a properly basic belief.[18] He then embarks on an ambitious epistemological
project. In 1993 , he published two
books: Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function.[19] In
the first, he surveys and criticizes almost all the major epistemological
approaches in vogue. In the second, he
elaborates his new approach to epistemology, Proper Functionalism. He is now working on the third book, Warranted
Christian Belief, which will apply his approach to defend the Christian
faith. His work is more epistemological
in nature and he has said comparatively little on religious experience as
such. However, he makes it clear that
his epistemological project is intended to be compatible with the sensus
divinitas as a basic source of epistemic warrant. In this way, his work can be seen to be
complementary to the above work. His
work has also caught the attention of analytic epistemologists. Many leading epistemologists (e.g. Keith Lehrer,
Laurence Bonjour, Bas C. van Fraassen, Ernest Sosa) pay him a tribute by
collaborating on a book about his proper functionalism,[20] offering criticisms of it. Plantinga in turn responds vigorously to
their criticisms. This project shows
that the old-fashioned empiricist epistemology, which is one major obstacle to
the acceptance of religious experience as a source of justification, can no
longer be taken for granted. The
argument from religious experience seems to be alive and well, having both able
defenders and detractors. It is also
exciting and fascinating because it often raises deep epistemological questions
and helps us rethink crucial issues in epistemology. Let's examine this debate in some details.
The Argument from Religious Experience: Its
Intuitive Force and Prima Facie Difficulties
The argument from religious experience has strong
intuitive force for many people. For
example, Hick thinks that we are "in the last resort thrown back upon the
criterion of coherence with our mass of experience and belief as a whole; there
is no further criterion by which the criteriological adequacy of this mass can
itself be tested. This is surely our
actual situation as cognizing subjects."[21] If it is the case, then isn't it plausible
to say that "it is proper for the man who reports a compelling awareness
of God to claim to know that God exists"? At least it seems to Hick that the "onus
lies upon anyone who denies that this fulfills the conditions of a proper
knowledge claim to show reasons for disqualifying it."[22]
Moreover, we need to contemplate the implication of the allegation that
religious experience as a type is unveridical.
It amounts to the claim that not a single instance of the myriad
religious experiences of humankind is veridical, i.e., all these experiences
are totally delusory. Is it reasonable
to believe that all "God-experients" are either deceiving themselves
or others? Gutting, for one, does not
think so:
"religion,
throughout human history, has been an integral part of human life, attracting
at all times the enthusiastic adherence of large numbers of good and
intelligent people. To say that
something that has such deep roots and that has been sustained for so long in
such diverse contexts is nothing but credulity and hypocrisy is ...
extraordinary."[23]
When we ponder the numerous religious
experiences, their enormous effects sometimes, the honesty of the witnesses,
the depth dimension of life and so on, it seems hard to believe that all
of them are delusory. Moreover, we may
encounter the life story of a person who has dramatic experiences of God
throughout his life. We find that the
person is honest, sane, wise and intelligent.
We also find his story corroborated by many others' stories throughout
history in many countries. Isn't it rash
to say that all of them are entirely and chronically deluded? Ordinary people may well fail to produce
an explicit and water-tight argument for his belief that the earth is round
rather than flat. Yet we won't deny that
their intuitive judgment, which is based on many empirical clues, is
rational. Can't we also claim that
ordinary believers, which have access to the relevant experiential evidence for
God, can be rational in believing God?
Nevertheless,
there are also many reasons that tend to throw doubt on the trustworthiness of
religious experiences. Here is a
catalogue of the stock objections to the argument from religious experience:
1) The Abnormal Condition Objection:
The
mystics having the mystical experiences are under abnormal conditions, e.g.
drugs, starvation. Their claims are
therefore unreliable.
2) The Logical Gap Objection:
We
have to distinguish the experience and the subjective conviction it produces
from the objectivity (or more technically, veridicality) of the
experience, e.g. a very "real" hallucination or dream is a live
possibility. The critics such as Antony
Flew and Alasdair McIntyre[24] admit that religious experiences often
produce subjective certitude in the subjects.
However, it does not follow that the experience is objectively
certain. Any experience could be
mistaken. No experience is
self-authenticating. In other words,
there is a logical gap between the psychological data and the ontological claim
of the religious experiences. To bridge
the gap, we need independent certification of the religious belief. Hence if the experiences are used to support
the religious belief, it is circular.
For example, Flew challenges the defenders of religious experiences to
answer this basic question:
"How and when
would we be justified in making inferences from the facts of the occurrence of
religious experience, considered as a purely psychological phenomenon, to
conclusions about the supposed objective religious truths?"[25]
3) The Theory-ladenness Objection:
The
religious experiences are heavily (or, some even claim, entirely) shaped by the
conceptual framework of the experients.
Hence they are not useful as evidence for ontological claims.[26]
4) The Naturalistic Explanation Objection
The
religious beliefs formed by having religious experiences are susceptible to
naturalistic explanations, psychological, sociological and the like. The religious experiences are hence
discredited. At least their evidential
force, if there is any in the beginning, is then cancelled.[27]
5) The Privacy Objection
According
to Rem Edwards, "the foremost accusation leveled at the mystics is that
mystical experiences are private, like hallucinations, illusions, and dreams,
and that like these "nonveridical" experiences, religious experience
is really of no noetic significance at all."[28]
6) The No Criteria/Uncheckability Objection
There
is no criterion to distinguish the veridical religious experiences from the
non-veridical ones. If so, it is not
rational to believe that a certain religious experience is veridical. Hence it can't be used as evidence for
religious claims. Even if there are
criteria from within the religious framework, we still lack objective,
non-circular criteria. In contrast, when
we doubt a sense experience, it can be subjected to further tests, e.g. others'
reports, photographs. C.B. Martin put it
this way:
"the presence of
a piece of blue paper is not to be read off from my experience as a piece of
blue paper. Other things are relevant:
What would a photography reveal? Can I
touch it? What do others see?"[29]
Since religious experiences cannot be
tested in similar ways, they are unreliable.
7) The Disanalogy Objection
This
objection actually consists of many related challenges to religious
experiences. But there is a common
structure. Usually the first step is to
assume that a certain kind of experience is reliable in general, e.g. sensory
experience. Then it is pointed out that
religious experiences are so disanalogous with this kind of reliable experience
that we must treat them with suspicion.
The commonly cited disanalogies are that religious experiences are not
universal, private, lacking in details, etc.
For example, critics commonly claim that while a religious experience is
private/ subjective, a sense experience is public. A chair is there for everyone to see but
religious experiences seem to be subjective states of a person which cannot be
shared by others.
8) The Conflicting Claims Objection:
Every
religion professes its own kind of religious experience. The claims of these religious experiences are
so various and mutually contradictory that we should regard all these claims
with suspicion. In other words, these
conflicts show that the alleged process to form religious beliefs is not reliable. Even if we grant some force to the religious
experiences, different religious experiences cancel one another's force in the
end.[30]
9) The Impossibility Objection
It
might be argued that from the concept of God (especially the transcendence of
God), it can be deduced that the concept of "an experience of God" is
incoherent.[31]
10) The Unrecognizability Objection
God
possesses infinite attributes and it is implausible to say these attributes are
given in the experiences. It is
difficult to see how we can recognize these from our experiences. If they are not given, they have to be
inferred but this inference is even more difficult to conceive.[32]
Although objections 8-10 are by no means unimportant,
due to limitations of space, I'll only deal with objections 1-7 in this essay
(but I can assure the readers that the rest have already been taken care of by
many theistic philosophers).
Theists' Response to Some Objections
I provide brief responses to the first six objections.
1) The Abnormal Condition Objection
One
might be tempted to reply as Broad did:
"Suppose that there is an aspect of the
world which remains altogether outside the ken of ordinary persons in their
daily life. Then it seems very likely
that some degree of mental and physical abnormality would be a necessary
condition for getting sufficiently loosened from the objects of ordinary
sense-perception to come into cognitive contact with this aspect of reality.
... One might need to be slightly
'cracked' in order to have some peep-holes into the super-sensible world."[33]
Anyway this objection is very limited in
its application because as a matter of fact most religious experiences,
especially experiences of a personal God, do not occur under such
conditions. Mystical experiences which
occur under abnormal conditions constitute only a small portion of the whole
family. Even if drugs could induce
hallucinatory religious experiences, it does not follow that non-drug-induced
religious experiences are then unveridical.
Nobody seems to be confused about the logic in the case of sense
experience: the fact that drugs can induce sensory hallucinations does not
impugn the trustworthiness of other sense experiences.
2) The Logical Gap Objection
It
is very interesting to compare this particular objection to religious
experiences with the sceptical arguments in various cognitive fields. Ayer points out that many sceptical arguments
have such a general form:
Step 1) Point out that for certain knowledge
claims we only have a certain kind of evidence.
Step 2) There is no deductive route from
the evidence to the claim.
Step 3) There is no inductive route either.
Step 4) Hence there is no justified route
from the evidence to the conclusion. The
knowledge claim then is not justified.[34]
The logical gap objection to religious experiences
basically conforms to the structure of the general sceptical argument. This can be seen from Gutting's parody of
Flew's question mentioned earlier on:
"How and when
would we be justified in making inferences from the facts of the occurrence of
experiences of material objects, considered as a purely psychological
phenomenon, to conclusions about the supposed objective truths about material
objects"?[35]
The certitude/certainty distinction applies
to almost all kinds of experience, including sense experience. A hallucination is exactly an unveridical
sense experience which nevertheless produces subjective conviction. If the certitude/ certainty distinction
threatens religious experiences, it will also threaten sense experience. So anyone who pushes this objection needs to
show why the logical gap is not damaging in other cases. If the critics only apply the objection to
religious experiences but not to other experiences, it would be extremely
arbitrary. This would also confirm
Alston's charge that critics of religious experiences often adopt a double
standard with regard to sense experiences (among other fallacies): "I have
identified certain recurrent fallacies that underlie many of these objections-
epistemic imperialism and the double standard.
The objections in question are made from a naturalistic viewpoint. They involve unfavorable epistemic comparisons
between mystical perception and sense perception; it is not difficult to show
that they either condemn the former for features it shares with the latter
(double standard) or unwarrantedly require the former to exhibit features of
the latter (imperialism)."[36]
3) The Theory-ladenness Objection
Again,
this objection raises a general problem in epistemology. Even ordinary perception is theory-laden[37] and a similar problem plagues scientific
realism. The empiricists and the
positivists have searched hard for the rock-bottom "given" which is
interpretation-free. In this way, it can
be the neutral arbiter of different theories or interpretations. However, the development of modern philosophy
and especially contemporary philosophy of science bespeak the downfall of this
project. All the major philosophers of
science, e.g. Popper, Hanson, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, agree that all
observations are to some extent theory-laden.
For example, Nancy Cartwright writes:
"We can be
mistaken about even the most mundane claims about sensible properties, and once
these are called into question, their defense will rest on a complicated and
sophisticated network of general claims about how sensations are caused, what
kinds of things can go wrong in the process, and what kinds of things can and
cannot be legitimately adduced as interferences."[38]
Modern psychology also confirms the idea
that interpretation "is absolutely essential to there occurring a
perceptual experience at all.... We are
not passive recipients of ready-made representations of our environment;
rather, stimuli from that environemnt must be processed by various interpretive
mechanisms before they can have any significance for us."[39] Since this is widely recognized, I won't
belabour the point.[40] Now
the critic requires that the interpretive elements of religious experience be
independently supported before we deem the experiences reliable. However, since sense experiences also have
interpretive elements, "if we were always required to provide independent
evidence that the beliefs in terms of which we had unconsciously 'interpreted'
a perceptual experience were probably true before we could take the perceptual
experience to be probably veridical, we would be trapped in [scepticism]."[41] So
if the critic is not a sceptic, he should explain in what way this is a special
problem for religious experiences.
Double standard again! Perhaps to
avoid scepticism, the wiser policy is to treat the incorporated interpretations
in our experiences as prima facie justified.[42]
Furthermore, prior religious frameworks need not be corrupting; they may
instead help to 'tune' people to perceive a reality that they would otherwise
miss.[43]
Anyway, the claim that religious experiences are
entirely conditioned by the pre-existing conceptual framework of the experients
is false. First of all, "examples
of spontaneous 'senses of a presence' unrelated to the subject's prior
religious concepts (if any) abound. Many
cases are documented in which the subjects had overwhelming, puzzling
experiences which they only realized were religious" afterwards.[44] For
example, many children have religious experiences unrelated to their
training. Secondly, many religious
experiences are in fact at odds with the received traditions, and the people
"emerged from their encounter with the Holy as moral and theological
reformers." For example, many
mystics in a supernaturalist tradition insist that "the relation between
man and God is much more intimate than supernaturalism allows."[45] It
does not seem that the content of religious experiences is just a reflection of
the experients' theological preconceptions.
4) The Naturalistic Explanation Objection
First
of all, many have the suspicion that there are as yet no general naturalistic
explanations of religious experiences which are empirically well-established
and theoretically plausible. For
example, the Freudian explanation of religion is a prominent example of
naturalistic explanation. But nowdays
Freudianism itself is in doubt.[46] Its
explanation of religious belief has been carefully examined and found wanting,
even by atheists.[47]
Indeed, Alston comments:
"the most
prominent theories in the field invoke causal mechanisms that themselves pose
thus far insoluble problems of identification and measurement: unconscious
psychological processes like repression, identification, regression, and
mechanisms of defense; social influences on ideology and attitude formation. It is not surprising that theories like those
of Freud, Marx, and Durkheim rest on a slender thread of evidential support and
generalize irresponsibly from such evidence as they can muster. Nor do the prospects seem rosy for
significant improvement."[48]
However, regardless of the merits of the naturalistic
explanations, there is one prior philosophical question to ask: in what ways is
the availability of naturalistic explanation relevant? If we infer from the availability of
naturalistic explanation of a religious experience to its unveridicality, we
seem to commit the genetic fallacy. Even
the fact that an experience of God has proximal natural causes seems to be
compatible with its ultimate origin in God.
As Wainwright says,
"Suppose we are
presented with a causal account of religious experience which is believed by
the scientific community to be fully adequate.
Are we entitled to infer that the experiences are not genuine
perceptions of God, etc? We are entitled
to draw this conclusion ... only if we have good reason to believe that the
causes which are specified in that account can, when taken alone, i.e. in the
absence of (among other things) any divine activity, produce the experiences in
question. Without a disproof of the
existence of God and other supra-empirical agents, it is totally unclear how we
could know that this was the case."[50]
Alston reinforces this point by pointing
out that sense experiences can likewise be "adequately causally explained
in terms of neural processes in the brain without mentioning the putatively
perceived external object."[51]
Since this does not in itself render sense experiences unreliable, it is
not clear why the corresponding fact will do harm to religious experiences.
5) The Privacy Objection
Let
us examine the allegation that unlike sense experience, religious experience is
private and subjective. In what sense is
a sense experience public? My
experience of a chair occurs essentially in my mind- it is every bit as
private as other experiences in this aspect.
I cannot directly experience how you experience the chair and vice
versa. There is a danger that the
critics are "confusing the claim that the experience is private with the
quite different claim that the object of the experience is private."[52]
What makes a sense experience public is that verbal reports of different
persons can be compared. However,
reports of people having religious experiences can also be compared. For example, experiences of God are present
in almost all ages, all places and all cultures. The reports also to a considerable extent
match. The experience also develops in a
tradition. So in these aspects religious
experience is also public. As Edwards
emphasizes,
"the experience
of the Holy seems to be very much unlike dreams and hallucinations. Extremely large numbers of people from
extremely diverse cultural backgrounds claim to experience the Holy One, and
there is a significant amount of transcultural agreement about what the
experienced object is like. This is not
the case with the objects of hallucinations- most hallucinators do not see pink
elephants... Pink elephant is
simply a convenient symbolic abbreviation for the immense variety of weird
entities encountered by people having hallucinations."[53]
It can also be added that even essentially
private experience, like introspection, can be veridical.
6) The Uncheckability Objection
As
a matter of fact, religious experiences can be checked in principle, for
example, by other experiences (religious or non-religious) or by the
Bible. The critics will surely say,
"These checks already assume some religious beliefs, and hence are
circular. We need some non-circular
checks."
This
requirement, however, is not even satisfied by sense experience. Check by others' reports depends on our
hearing experience and capacity for understanding. Check by photographs requires your visual
experience of the photographs. If you
doubt the latter, perhaps you can take a photograph of the photograph and so
on!? All these checks are ultimately
circular. This point is made trenchantly
by Mavrodes in response to C. B. Martin:
"Suppose that I
do try to photograph the paper. What
then? Martin asks, "What would a
photograph reveal?" To discover
what the photograph reveals I would ordinarily look at it. But if the presence of blue paper is not to
be "read off" from my experience then the presence of a photography,
and a fortiori what the photograph reveals, is not to be read off from
my experience either. It begins to look
as though I must take a photograph of the photograph, and so on ... The same sort of thing happens if I try to
determine "what others see." I
send for my friend to look at the paper...
But his presence is not to be read off from my experience either. Perhaps I must have a third man to tell me
whether the second has come and the infinite regress appears again. Interpreted in this way, Martin's thesis
fails because it converts into a general requirement something that makes sense
only as an occasional procedure. At most
we can substitute one unchecked experience for another."[54]
Ultimately, the veridicality of a sense
experience can only be checked with respect to other sense experiences (unless
we countenance an a priori proof of the veridicality of sense experience). So to hold this as a debilitating factor for
religious experience alone is again committing the double standard
fallacy. As Losin says, the critic
"has simply assumed that reasons drawn from experiences of God cannot
themselves be "reasons for thinking that particular experiences of God are
delusive," that experiences of God cannot themselves provide a (fallible
and provisional) means for the critique of other such experiences. I see no reason to think that this assumption
is true, and good reason to think that, when suitably amended and applied to
sensory experience, it is false. Nor do
I see the slightest reason why we cannot use knowledge or beliefs about God not
gleaned from experience of God to identify and dismiss particular experiences
of God as non-veridical." [55]
E) The Disanalogy Objection
The logic of this objection is as follows:
i) Religious experience does not resemble
sense experience.
ii) If a kind of experience is reliable, it
will resemble sense experience.
iii) Hence, religious experience is not
reliable.
Various
criticisms can be offered for this argument.
Firstly, (i) is often an exaggeration.
For example, it is often said that whereas sense experience is
universal, religious experience is not.
However the significance of this disanalogy is not clear.
1) Obviously a kind of experience shared
just by a minority of people can nevertheless still be veridical. Not all people can see or hear. So vision or hearing are not actually
universal. Conceivably a nuclear war can
happen which causes all but one to be blind.
In that case, the vision of the only sighted person left would not
become unveridical just because he is the only one to have visual
experience. Furthermore, many are
tone-deaf. This fact in itself does not
render others' experience of the tones unveridical.
2) The suggestion that religious experience
belongs only to a very small group may be an exaggeration. Firstly, religious experiences occur all
through the ages all over the world in all kinds of culture. Just consider the experiences of St. Paul,
Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, etc.
Nowadays religious experiences are reported in almost all the
continents.[56]
Secondly, we are not talking primarily of "bizarre" mystical
experiences. We are mainly concerned
with experience of the presence of God, awareness of God, etc. It is plausible that most religious people in
the theistic tradition have had such experiences on some occasions. Thirdly, according to recent research,
"it is a mistake to think that the realm of human experience I am choosing
to define as 'religious' is something remote, esoteric, or the preserve of an
aristocracy of spiritual adepts."[57] The
statistics show that in the West, at least one-third of the people asked
profess to have had religious experience, including atheists and agnostics
among them.[58]
Fourthly, plausible explanations
are available for the absence of reports of religious experience from the rest
of interviewees. Some may actually have
had religious experience but won't confess it openly because of a
"widespread taboo concerning religion, arising from Enlightenment ways of
thinking."[59]
Some others do not have religious experiences simply because they have
never sought the spiritual things due to absorption in materialistic
concerns. We should only be surprised[60] when those who are seeking actively and
are spiritually ready do not have religious experience. There may be a handful of these people but
the number does not seem to be great.
Finally,
if we count all the people in the whole history, people having religious
experience may outnumber those who haven't.
It might be the case that the opposite is true of our secular age. Daniels claims that "over the centuries
as more and more comes to be known about the universe fewer and fewer educated
people believe there to be veridical experiences of encounters with
God."[61] The
atheist will congratulate this as a victory over superstitions and attribute
this decrease to higher educational level and enlightenment. However, interpretation from the opposite
perspective is possible: this decrease may just reflect the prejudice of our age
and witness the fact that our religious sensibility can be "socialized
away". Alston comments,
"Fads and
fashions are at least as influential among the educated as among the
vulgar. If it is true that fewer of the
educated believe that there is genuine perception of God than in, say, the
fourteenth century, it is, I suspect, less because more is known about
"how things actually work" than because of the general decay of
religious faith in Western society and the spurious plausibility lent to
naturalistic metaphysics by the development of science. ...
The supposition that knowing more about the way things work in the
physical universe puts one in a better position to determine whether there is
veridical perception of God is the most blatant kind of question
begging."[62]
3) In view of the fact that religious
experiences occur to many diverse kinds of person, it is not implausible to say
that the capacity for religious experience is at least potentially
universal. This view can be strengthened
by some existentialist analysis of the structure of human existence.[63] It
is plausible to view religious experience as the culmination[64] of the human search for meaning and
wholeness. If it is true, the contingent
fact that religious experiences are not actually universal is not that
damaging. (Only a few men can actually
be completely rational and fair. This
fact does not detract from the ideal of rationality and fairness.)
I
don't have the space to go into detailed discussions of other
disanalogies. Fortunately, I don't need
to because the above argument has a very problematic premise (ii):
ii) If a kind of experience is reliable, it
will resemble sense experience.
This is just a bare assertion that sense
experience is the model for all reliable experiences. What is the ground of this assumption? Why should we expect that there is only one
kind of reliable experience? Isn't it
possible that our experience can have some access to different kinds of
contingent truths? If it is the case,
isn't it to be expected that there will be several kinds of experience
accordingly? Each may be reliable in its
own way and to different degrees. How
can we know a priori that it is not the situation we are in? It seems to me the contrary expectation reflects the a priori nature of
the presupposition of a narrow empiricism.
It is laid down beforehand that only sense experience can be reliable
and then it is used as the yardstick to measure all other kinds of
experience. Those who are disanalogous
with sense experience are then deemed unreliable. There is no obvious reason why we should
follow this question-begging procedure.
Furthermore, on the face of it, (ii) seems false because both memory and
introspection, which we deem reliable, do not resemble sense experience. In general, disanalogy with a
well-established principle is not a sufficient reason to discredit another
principle unless there is reason to think that the known principle and its like
are the only possible principles. In the
case of religious experience, it amounts to the assumption that
"we were
entitled to assume that, if it is veridical, religious cognition will be like
other kinds of cognition which are veridical.
Prima facie we should however expect it on the contrary to be very
different, since its object is so different."[65]
So the disanalogy of religious experience
with sense experience as such is not an adequate reason for asserting
the unreliability of religious experience.
Of course, considerations of disanalogy are important and the critics
are not mistaken in urging the defenders of religious experience to face them
squarely. It is because the relevant
disanalogies all point to the fact that sense experience has an extraordinary
degree of internal coherence relative to other types of experience.[66]prima facie reliable? However, they have drawn the wrong
conclusion that religious experience is thereby impugned. A more judicious conclusion is that religious
experience is less reliable than sense experience. Similarly, that a scientist is intellectually
inferior to Einstein does not entail that he is not a competent scientist at
all. The disanalogy objection seems to
presuppose a kind of epistemic imperialism, as Alston calls it, which
illegitimately elevates sense experience to the position of supreme cognitive
authority.
So
far I have argued that many common objections to religious experience do not
suffice to show that they are unreliable.
Conclusion
I do not claim to have proved that the argument from
religious experience is successful.
However, I hope to highlight the crucial issues surrounding the debate
on the validity of religious experience.
I also hope that sufficient has been said to show that it is not
implausible to claim that the common criticisms of religious experience may
weaken the force of the argument but they fail to show that religious
experiences are unreliable. I have also
mentioned the route of taking religious experience as prima facie evidence for
the transcendent realm- this is Swinburne's approach to religious
experience. I think his approach is a
promising one but his approach depends crucially on his Principle of Credulity,
the further denfense of which will inevitably raise many deep epistemological
issues. There are also some objections
to religious experience that I have not yet dealt with. These matters must be left for another time.
(6,945 words) (66 footnotes)
TITLE: CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSPHICAL DEBATE ON THE VALIDITY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
AUTHOR: Kai-man
Kwan, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Hong Kong
Baptist University, 224 Waterloo Road, Kowloon.
TELEPHONE:
23397291 (off.) FAX: 23397379
E-MAIL: kmkwan@hkbu.edu.hk
ABSTRACT:
In recent years, the field of analytic
philosophy of religion has greatly fluorished.
One hotly debated topic is the validity or veridicality of religious
experience. This is due to the revival
of the argument from religious experience which is ably defended by Richard
Swinburne, William Alston, Gary Gutting, and Jerome Gellman among others. In this paper, I first survey the revival of
this argument among contemporary philosophers, and then explain both its
intuitive force and prima facie difficulties (which are due to ten stock
objections to religious experience). Six
objections are briefly discussed:
1) that religious
experiences are induced under abnormal conditions;
2) that there is
an unbridgeable logical gap between subjective experience and objective
reality;
3) that religious
experiences are heavily theory-laden;
4) that
naturalistic explanations of religious experience are readily available;
5) that religious
experiences are essentially private;
6) that the
validity of religious experience is uncheckable and unverifiable;
I contend that
none of these objections succeed to discredit religious experiences.
I then discuss the objection that since
religious experiences are so unlike sense experiences, they must be
subjective. I argue that the disanalogy
is often exaggerated. I further point
out that the argument presupposes an illegitimate premise which amounts to a
kind of epistemic imperialism or chauvinism.
I conclude that although many objections still need to be assessed, the
argument from religious experience is alive and well, and well worth serious
investigation.
[3] William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (Collins, 1960); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford
University Press, 1924).
[4] The last phrase is added to safeguard
against the so-called deviant causal chains.
This condition is hard to specify in details. The same problem occurs for the explication
of the concept of veridical sensory perception.
See Grice's "The Causal Theory of Perception" in Jonathan
Dancy, ed. Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1988), ch.III.
[5] cf. H. H. Farmer, The World and God
(London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd, 1935); S.
L. Frank, God With Us (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1946); Eric S.
Waterhouse, The Philosophy of Religious Experience (London: Epworth,
1923); Albert C. Knudson, The Validity of Religious Experience (New
York: Abingdon, 1937).
[8] cf. C. B. Martin, Religious Belief
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959),
Ch.5; Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson and Co.
Ltd., 1966), Ch.6.
[9] See Keith E Yandell, The Epistemology
of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch.8. I also eschew the claim that religious
experience has to be ineffable.
Literally interpreted, this claim is self-defeating and contradicted by
the many accounts of religious experience produced by the mystics and the
like. I take the core of truth in this
claim is that God (or other objects of religious experience) is intrinsically
beyond the capacity of human language to describe it fully. This does not entail that human concept
as such is not applicable to God. See ibid.,
chs.3-5 for detailed criticisms.
[10] C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and
Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 197.
[11] A. C. Ewing, Value and Reality
(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1973);
H. D. Lewis, Our Experience of God (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1959); Elton Trueblood, Philosophy of Religion (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker, 1957), ch.11; John Baillie, The Sense of the Presence of
God (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Rem Edwards, Reason and
Religion: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1972), chs.13-14; H. P. Owen, The Christian Knowledge of
God (London: The Athleone Press,
1969).
[12] Charles Taliaferro, Contemporary
Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3. Ch.8 of this book also contains a elaborate
defence of religious experience.
[14] William Rowe, "Religious Experience
and the Principle of Credulity," International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion 13(1982):85-92; Michael Martin, "The Principle of Credulity
and Religious Experience," Religious
Studies 22(1988):79-93; Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical
Justification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Gary Gutting, Religious
Belief and Religious Skepticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
[15] Caroline Davis, The Evidential Force of
Religious Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); George Wall, Religious
Experience and Religious Belief (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
1995); Jerome Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic
Belief (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
[17] William Alston, Perceiving God: The
Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1991). Also see his earlier
articles: "Christian Experience
[19] Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current
Debate (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Warrant and Proper Function
(Oxford University Press, 1993).
[20] Jonathan L. Kvanvig, ed., Warrant in
Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).
[32] Brian Davies, Thinking About God
(London: Geoffery Chapman, 1985), 67ff; Michael Martin, "The Principle of
Credulity," 89-90.
[34] A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge
(Britain: R. and R. Clark Ltd., 1956), ch.2.
Also cf. Michael Williams, Groundless Belief: An Essay on the
Possibility of Epistemology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 14ff.
[38]
Nancy Cartwright, "How We Relate Theory to Observation," in Paul Horwich, ed., World Changes:
Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press), 259.
[40] The above is still necessary. Davis points out that although "a
narrowly empiricist and foundationalist position is rarely found now outside
discussions of religious experience," the philosopher of religion comes up
time and again against this outdated assumption. This is indeed frustrating (ibid.,
143).
[46] See Hans Eysenck, Decline and Fall of
the Freudian Empire (London: Penguin Books, 1985); Richard Webster, Why
Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Fontana, 1995).
[47] See Robert Banks, "Religion as
Projection: Re-appraisal of Freud's Theory," Religious Studies 9(1973); Adolf
Grunbaum, "Psychoanalysis and Theism," Monist 70(1987):152-192.
[49] See Davis, op. cit. ch.8; Yandell, op.
cit. chs.6-7; and Gellman, op. cit. ch.5. Wall, op. cit. is entirely devoted to
this issue and he utilizes concrete examples of religious experiences to point
out the inadequacy of various naturalistic explanations.
[51] Alston, Perceiving God,
249-51. I have a fuller treatment of
this problem: Kai-man Kwan, "Naturalistic Explanations of Religious
Experience: Do They Matter?" Paper
presented in the Fourth Sino-American Philosophy and Religion Conference, 19-23
Oct 1998, Peking University.
[54] George Mavrodes, Belief in God: A Study
in the Epistemology of Religion (Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1970), 75-76.
[55] Peter Losin, "Experience of God and
the Principle of Credulity: a Reply to Rowe," Faith and Philosophy 4(1987):69. Cf. Alston, Perceiving God, 249. I have dealt with this problem at length in
chapter 8 of my D. Phil. thesis: "The Application of the Principle of
Critical Trust to the Evaluation fo Theistic Experience."
[56] For
example, despite the great difference between the Chinese culture and Western
culture, the surprising fact is that many Chinese in mainland China, Hong Kong,
Taiwan, etc. do not have much difficulty in having "experiences of
God" which are similar to those of St. Paul, Augustine, and so on.
[60] This surprise is not, however, a decisive
objection. God may have good reasons to
withdraw from these actively seeking people. (cf. the dark nights of the soul
described by the mystics.)
[61] Charles Daniels, "Experiencing
God," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. XLIX(1989):487-499, 499. I am aware that Daniels is strictly speaking
talking about the number of people believing in veridical religious
experience rather than about the number of people claiming to have religious
experience. However, the two are closely
related and the points made by Daniels and Alston are relevant in our context.
[63] cf. John Macquarrie, In Search of
Humanity (London: SCM Press, 1982); Langdon Gilkey, Naming the
Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).
[66] However, sense experience is not
absolutely reliable and conceivably some ETs can have an (nearly) infallible
mode of sense perception. Is it correct
for them to argue from the disanalogy of our sense experience with their
perception that our sense experience is not even
