In recent analytic philosophy of
religion, one hotly debated topic is the veridicality of religious experience.
In this paper, I briefly trace how the argument from religious experience comes
into prominence in the twentieth century. This is due to the able defense of
this argument by Richard Swinburne, William Alston and Jerome Gellman among
others. I explain the argument’s intuitive force and why the stock objections
to religious experience are not entirely convincing. I expound Swinburne’s
approach and his application of the Principle of Credulity to religious
experience. Then I critically examine four major objections to Swinburne. I
conclude that the argument from religious experiences is not likely to be
conclusive but it should not be dismissed either.
CAN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE PROVIDE
JUSTIFICATION FOR THE BELIEF IN GOD? - THE DEBATE IN CONTEMPORARY ANALYTIC
PHILOSOPHY[1]
Kai-man Kwan
Department of Religion and Philosophy
Hong Kong Baptist University
The Experiential Roots of Religion
Religion is characterized by the passion
that it can arouse. 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.
Those people who experience God will echo with Job: "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 often world-transforming as well- just contemplate
the immense impact of people like Moses, St. 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
subjectivity in modernity. 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."[1]
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.
Some clarification of related terms and
concepts is needed 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[2].
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. Before discussing the epistemological issues
surrounding the argument from religious experience, let me introduce its
development in the twentieth century.
The Argument from Religious Experience in
the Twentieth Century
Earlier defenders of religious experience
included both theologians and philosophers, e.g., Farmer, Frank, Waterhouse,
Knudson.[3]
Some of them claimed that religious experiences provide immediate
knowledge of God, and that they were self-authenticating because within
the experience the subject directly encountered God and received 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."[4]
However, philosophers tended to be critical
of such claims to self-authentication.
They pointed out that religious experiences were heavily shaped by the
conceptual framework of the experient and that no knowledge could be inferred
from mere emotional states or conviction, no matter how intense they were.[5] They
also suggested it was hard to make sense of the notion of self-authenticating
experience. Keith Yandell, himself a defender of religious experience, was
highly critical of this notion.[6] No matter these criticisms were cogent or
not, they were influential and accounted for the rise of a form of argument
from religious experience which did not rely on claims to self-authentication.[7]
C.D. Broad was perhaps the most
philosophically competent among the early defenders. He anticipated 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."[8]
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.[9]
However, they had not drawn much attention from professional
philosophers because at that time, verificationism, roughly the doctrine that
only in principle verifiable sentences were cognitively meaningful, 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."[10]
Secondly, starting from the end of 1970's,
a number of analytic philosophers had 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.[11] The
Principle of Credulity said that it was rational to treat our experiences
(including religious experience) as innocent until proven guilty. In other words, religious experiences were
treated as prima facie evidence for the existence of God until there were
reasons for doubting them. This attracted
quite a lot of attention in the circle of philosophy of religion. There were of course many critics of
Swinburne, e.g., William Rowe, Michael Martin, but he had also inspired the
support of quite a few professional philosophers, e.g., the philosopher of
science Gary Gutting.[12]
Whole books were written on religious experience which basically followed
Swinburne's line of reasoning, expanding it, modifying it, and replying to
objections. They included 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).[13]
There were also other philosophers who worked independently towards a
similar conclusion, e.g., William Wainwright and Keith Yandell.[14]
One landmark of this debate is William
Alston's Perceiving God which was published in 1991.[15] In
this book, Alston brought his analytical skills to the issue of religious
experience and defended a doxastic practice approach to epistemology. This approach said that it was 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 organized
symposia to discuss his book in 1994.[16]
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 and helps us rethink deep issues in epistemology. Let us examine this debate in some details.
The Demise of Foundationalism and
Traditional Objections to the
Argument from Religious Experience
Foundationalists believe that our knowledge
has to be built upon the foundation of sense experiences because only they are
the indubitable given free from interpretations, and are open to public
confirmation. Religious experiences, if they are to be trusted, have to be
vindicated on the basis of this foundation- sense experience. However, 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."[17] 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."[18] The
allegation that religious experience as a type is unveridical 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."[19]
Suppose we come to know the life story of a
person who has dramatic experiences of God throughout his life. We find that person honest, sane, and
intelligent. We also find his story
corroborated by many others' stories throughout history in many cultures. Isn't it rash to say that all of them are
entirely and chronically deluded? Nevertheless,
for Western philosophers steeped in the tradition of empiricism, the
trustworthiness of religious experiences is hard to swallow. In the sections on
religion in introductory books on philosophy, the argument from religious
experience is often not even mentioned. When it is mentioned, it is usually
dismissed on the basis of stock objections like the following:
1) The Logical Gap Objection: We have to
distinguish the experience and the subjective conviction it produces from the
objectivity (or veridicality) of the experience, e.g., a very
"real" hallucination or dream is a live possibility. The critics such as Antony Flew and Alasdair
MacIntyre[20] admit that religious experiences often
produce subjective certitude in the subjects.
However, it does not follow that the experience is objectively
certain. 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. 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?"[21]
2) The Theory-ladenness Objection: The
religious experiences are heavily (or even entirely) shaped by the conceptual
framework of the experients. Hence they
are not useful as evidence for ontological claims.[22]
3) 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."[23]
However, many theists have provided
reasonable responses to these objections. Firstly, we should note that the
logical gap objection to religious experiences basically conforms to the
structure of the general sceptical argument.[24] This can be seen from Gutting's parody of Flew's question:
"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"?[25]
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 in
itself 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: "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)."[26]
The Theory-ladenness Objection again raises
a general problem in epistemology. Even
ordinary perception is theory-laden[27] 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."[28]
Some author has also suggested modern
psychology 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 environment must
be processed by various interpretive mechanisms before they can have any
significance for us."[29] 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]."[30] If
the critic is to avoid the charge of double standard, he needs to explain in
what way this is a special problem for religious experiences. So again the Theory-ladenness Objection in
itself is not decisive. Perhaps to
avoid scepticism, the wiser policy is to treat the incorporated interpretations
in our experiences as prima facie justified.[31]
Furthermore, prior religious frameworks need not be corrupting; they may
instead help to 'tune' people to perceive a reality that they would otherwise
miss.[32]
Let us examine the Privacy Objection, 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."[33]
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 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."[34]
It seems that the force of many stock
objections to religious experience depends upon the traditional foundationalist
framework. However, as Davis points out, 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.[35] The
demise of foundationalism does not mean an automatic victory for the argument
from religious experience. However, both defenders and critics of religious
experience need to take seriously this development. They need to spell out and
defend the epistemological framework they use to evaluate religious experience.
Let us examine Richard Swinburne’s attempt in this direction.
Swinburne's Defense of Religious Experience
via the Principle of Credulity
Swinburne proposes a defence of religious
experiences by espousing an epistemological principle that accord religious
experiences with prima facie evidential force (hereafter PFEF). An experience has PFEF if the claims of the
experience are probably true unless there are positive reasons to the
contrary. The idea is that all
experiences should be treated as innocent until proven guilty. Religious experiences should also be accorded
PFEF then, i.e. the claims of religious experiences should be trusted unless
counter-evidence can be brought forward.[36] This epistemological principle is called the Principle of Credulity
(hereafter PC):
(PC) If it
seems (epistemically) to me that x is present on the basis of experience, then
probably x is present unless there are special considerations to the contrary.
Swinburne argues that it is a fundamental
principle of rationality apart from which we cannot provide any noncircular
justification of either ordinary perception or memory. Then using this principle, Swinburne
formulates the following argument for the existence of God:
A) It seems (epistemically) to me that God
is present.
B) There is no good reason to think either
God is non-existent or not present; nor any good reason to think the experience
unveridical.
C) Hence probably God is present.
The PC does not stand alone in Swinburne's
epistemological approach. It has to be
used together with other epistemological principles like the following:
a)
The
Principle of Testimony: other things being equal, others' experiences are
likely to be as they report them to be.
b)
The
Principle of Simplicity: "in a given field, we take as most likely to be
true the simplest theory which fits best with other theories of neighbouring
fields to produce the simplest set of theories of the world."
c)
The
Principle of Charity: other things being equal, we suppose that other men are
like ourselves.[37]
These principles are important. If we just take the PC alone, the principle
may look unduly egocentric. However, the
Principle of Testimony shows that Swinburne is equally emphatic on trusting
others' experiences and the social dimension of knowing. Secondly, Swinburne's approach has to be
distinguished from an "anything goes" approach. It is recognized that man's ability to know
is far from perfect: his initial epistemic seemings are fallible. The hope lies in the ability of man to sift
and correct these initial data. For
example, an erroneous epistemic seeming can be corrected by other epistemic
seemings. However, to do this we need
some rational principles to organize our data.
For Swinburne the supreme principle is the Principle of Simplicity. This principle explains what can be
counter-evidence to a prima facie justified claim:
We should not
believe that things are as they seem to be in cases when such a belief is in
conflict with the simplest theory compatible with a vast number of data
obtained by supposing in a vast number of other cases that things are as they
seem to be.
So Swinburne's approach includes a way to
sift the data and establish an orderly noetic structure. I'll call this kind of epistemology the
'credulity approach'. Swinburne’s argument has engendered a lot of controversy.
Some critics challenge the validity of the PC, and others argue that (B) is
false, i.e., Swinburne has neglected some defeaters of the claims based on
religious experiences. Since space is limited, I can only discuss four major
objections below.
The No Criteria/Uncheckability Objection
Critics allege that 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?"[38]
Since religious experiences cannot be
tested in similar ways, they are unreliable.
The defenders point out that 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 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 and so on. All checks are ultimately circular. This point is made trenchantly by Mavrodes:
"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."[39]
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." [40]
Despite the above responses, Michael Martin
still insists that the PC should not be applied "unless one has a right to
assume that perceptual conditions hold under which the entity at issue is
likely to appear to an observer if the entity is present. This right may be justified on inductive
grounds, by one's background theory or in other ways."[41] He concludes that we have the right to use
a principle like PC in the case of sense experience but not in the case of
religious experience.
However, is it really the case that our
belief in the general reliability of sense experience can be justified by
inductive evidence? The story goes like this. Usually our perceptual claims can
be checked to see whether they are correct or not. In this way we can keep a track-record of our
perceptual process and see that it is generally reliable. If we accumulate enough inductive evidence
for validity of our perceptual claims in the past, we can be justified in
believing that they will continue to be reliable.
Let us not mention the problem of
justifying the principle of induction, i.e., the future is like the past in
certain sorts of respect. However, we
still have to ask, "How is the checking of a belief-forming process
possible?"
"The most direct
approach would be to compare its output beliefs with the facts that make them
true or false, and determine the track record of the practice in a suitable
spread of cases. Sometimes this is
possible. It is possible, e.g., when we
are dealing with what we might call "partial" or
"restricted" practices, like determining temperature on the basis of
mercury thermometers ... In these cases
we have other modes of access to the facts in question, modes which we can use
to check the accuracy of the practice under examination. But we fairly quickly arrive at more
inclusive practices where this technique is no longer available. If we are assessing SP (i.e sensory practice)
in general, e.g., we have no independent access to the facts in question ...,
i.e., no access that neither consists in nor is based on reliance on sense
perception; and so we have no non-circular check on the accuracy of the
deliverances of SP."[42]
If in the end we still insist that our
checks, e.g., asking for others' corroboration, provide justification for the
perceptual claims, it can only be because we already accord PFEF to others'
perceptual experiences. If others'
perceptual claims are to corroborate ours, besides the assumption of the
general reliability of our perceptual apparatus, we have to further assume that
they possess sense organs which are in good order and a brain which is
functioning properly. Otherwise it's
doubtful that their perceptual claims can be used to check ours. But how can one justify all these assumptions
apart from a basic prima facie trust in our perceptual experiences? The PC
seems to be inescapable.
The second problem concerning this argument
is pointed out sharply by Swinburne:
"an induction
from past experiences to future experiences is only reliable if we correctly
recall our past experiences. And what
grounds have we got for supposing that we do?
Clearly not inductive grounds- an inductive justification of the
reliability of memory-claims would obviously be circular. Here we must rely on the principle that things
are the way they seem, as a basic principle not further justifiable ... The principle that the rational man supposes
that in the absence of special considerations in particular cases things are
the way they seem to be cannot always be given inductive justification. And if it is justifiable to use it when other
justifications fail in memory cases, what good argument can be given against
using it in other kinds of case when other justifications fail?"[43]
So in the end to "justify"
ordinary perception inductively, we have to rely on the prima facie reliability
of memory. The attempt to provide non-circular justification for our memory
claims is notoriously difficult. Again we seem to need the PC as a fundamental
principle.
The Experience of Absence of God Objection
Another natural objection to Swinburne's
approach is: what about those who never have an experience of God? Shouldn't these experiences of absence of God
be taken as prima facie evidence against the existence of God? Michael Martin presses this objection by
insisting that Swinburne should also accept a Negative Principle of Credulity
(NPC) as above.[44]
This objection seems to be a smart one at
first sight but it is dubious that experiences of absence and experiences of presence
should be placed on the same footing with respect to the existence of an
object or a contingent state of affairs.
This is rooted in the asymmetry between positive and negative
existential statements with respect to empirical verification. Let C be the claim that there is a cow and -C
its negation. For C to be true, we just
need one alleged perception of a cow to be veridical. However, for -C to be verified we need to
examine all spatio-temporal locations and perceive no cow and all these infinite
number of perceptions have to be veridical.
That is why a principle of this form is utterly implausible:
If I have an
experience of absence of X, then probably X does not exist.
Moreover, I suggest that in general
experiences of absence are more defeasible than experiences of
presence. Firstly, "This is because
for the positive judgment to be reliable only one causal chain needs to go from
the object apparently perceived to the subject who seems to perceive it. But if the negative judgment is to be
reliable, causal chains need to go from all places where the object might be to
the subject who seems to perceive that the object is not present."[45] Consider the two claims: "there seems
to be a needle in the room" and "there seems to be no needle in the
room". Which will you trust
more? Secondly, when one reports an
experience of absence, we can never be sure that this experience is not due to
inattentiveness or inability to recognize the object in question. It is different in the case of a positive
experience. It is perhaps an analytical
truth that when one experiences X, one's attention is on X. In many cases a positive experience just
arouses and sustains the attention. So
the factor of attention is automatically provided for by the positive
experience. If this is the case, then
experiences of absence would normally have weaker force than experiences of
presence.
It is even more problematic to apply the
NPC to experiences of absence of God since God is by nature hard to
manipulate. Let us first consider an
analogy in the physical realm when the object in question cannot be manipulated
to some extent. Suppose a detector is
used to check whether there are radiations from one[46] nucleus which is suspected to be
radioactive. The absence of reading in
that meter does not show that that nucleus is not radioactive but a reading is
very good evidence for the radioactivity of that nucleus. In this case, we should distinguish the
probability of having a positive reading from the reliability of that positive
reading. Suppose the half-life of that
element is very long and the probability of decay very low. The probability of having a positive reading
in a short time will also be very low.
This would make the absence of reading even more insignificant but it
does not impugn a positive reading. It
is because whether the positive reading is trustworthy has to do only with the
reliability of its detecting mechanism.
The conclusion is that the elusiveness of the object of experience does
not diminish the evidential force of the positive experience while it does
render the negative experience much less forceful. This asymmetry is not ad hoc but
well-motivated. Consider these two
statements:
*) If
there is no counter reading, then (probably) the nucleus is not radioactive.
#) If
there is a counter reading, then (probably) the nucleus is radioactive.
The example brings out clearly two
points. Firstly, commitment to (#) does
not entail commitment to (*). Secondly,
in cases when the object of experience or detection is hard to manipulate,
it is rational to uphold (#) while rejecting (*).
Of course, God is not a manipulable
object like a table which we can experience at will. God is the perfectly free Creator and the
Sovereign Subject. If God exists, it
stands to reason that he has the prerogative to choose the right person and the
right time to reveal to. In general, in
the realm of personal encounter, positive experiences outweigh negative
experiences. If this is the case, how much more would it be true of experiences
of God who is perfectly free and wise!
Furthermore, human freedom also accounts for the implausibility of the
NPC: even if there is a God, there may be persons who do not want to have a relationship
with God. God may respect their free
choices and hence does not impose his presence on their minds.
So experiences of absence of God are not
clearly evidential. The above objection is far from conclusive.
The Naturalistic Explanation Objection
Many critics think that 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.[47]
However, 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 nowadays Freudianism itself is in doubt.[48] Its
explanation of religious belief has been carefully examined and found wanting,
even by atheists.[49]
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."[50]
Of course, this general assertion needs to
be supported by more detailed discussions.[51] Let us further examine two recent
proposals.
Evan Fales suggests that a sociological
explanation of mystical experiences can serve as defeaters of the argument from
religious experience because this sociological understanding of mystical
experience is superior to the theistic explanation. His explanation builds on
the studies by the anthropologist I. M. Lewis on spirit possession, which
claims that mysticism serves as a means of access to political and social
power.[52] However, Gellman responds by producing
counterexamples to Fales’ theory. In the cases of mystics like Jacob Boehme,
Abraham the son of Maimonides (1186-1237), Baal Shem Tov, and Rabbi Abraham
Isaac Kook (1865-1935), their mystical experiences have little to do with their
attainment of power. Moreover, there is the phenomenon of non-institutionalized
mysticism: mystical possession is often independent of social institutions, or
the mystic is not well placed for access to power. Gellman further argues that
even if Fales’ theory were convincing, it would not be successful as a
defeater. Suppose the mystics did manage to achieve improvements for their
marginalized group by force of their mystical authority. Gellman asks, “Isn’t
it fitting for God to appear to people for the relief of oppression and
injustice?”[53]
Critics’
another favorite type of naturalistic explanation is the neurophysiological
one. Some argue that the fact that mysticism can be induced by drugs provides a
reductive explanation of mysticism. However, some scholars contend that it has not been really
established that drugs are sufficient to produce genuine mystical experiences.
The experimental evidence only suggests that it can raise the likelihood and
enhance the intensity of the experiences.[54] Even if drugs are causally sufficient to
produce mystical experiences, it does not follow that they are unveridical. God
may have laid down some psychophysical laws to the effect that whenever certain
brain states are produced, a certain perception of the divine would be
produced. There is no reason why those brain states cannot be caused by taking
drugs. It has been argued that as long as the whole process is set up and
upheld by God, such perception of God should be counted as veridical. In any
case, even if drug-induced mystical experiences are unveridical, it does not
follow that non-drug-induced mystical experiences are also unveridical. What is
shown is that on the experiential level, mystical experience can be faked. This
is neither surprising nor uniquely true of mystical experience. Sense
experiences can also be faked.
Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg’s
neurophysiological theory of mysticism has also caught much attention. They
explain mystical states as the effect of ‘deafferentation’- the cutting off of
neural input into various structures of the nervous system. As a result, an
experience of ‘absolute unitary being’ occurs. In similar ways, the theory
proposes explanations of a continuum of mystical experiences, both theistic and
non-theistic.
The theory of d’Aquili and Newberg is by no
means proven at this stage. Moreover, they point out that “tracing spiritual
experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness… both
spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are
made real to the mind in the very same way- through the processing powers of
the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind.”[55]
They
also ask, “Why should the human brain, which evolved for the very pragmatic
purpose of helping us survive, possess such an apparently impractical talent?”[56]
They in fact tend to think their biology of transcendence is congenial to
religion. The neurophysiological theory by itself does not disprove the
mystical experiences just as psychophysical laws governing sense experiences
would not disprove those experiences.[57]
The above discussions already show that
regardless of the merits of the naturalistic explanations, one prior
philosophical question needs to be asked: 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."[58]
In fact, sense experiences can likewise be
"adequately causally explained in terms of neural processes in the brain
without mentioning the putatively perceived external object."[59]
Since this does not in itself render sense experiences unreliable or cancel
their evidential force, it is not clear why the corresponding fact will do harm
to religious experiences.
The Conflicting Claims Objection
Many critics point out that every religion
professes its own kind of religious experience.
Since the claims of these religious experiences are so various and
mutually contradictory, they argue, 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.[60]
The first question we should settle is that
whether the existing contradictions between religious experiences make the PC
inapplicable to them. It is a totally
different one from the question: "if we grant some evidential force to
religious experiences, will such conflicts cancel this force?" To apply the PC to some experiences is to
have initial trust in them and, if they are defeated, to salvage as much
as possible from them. It does not
entail that they are all or mostly reliable.
There is no contradiction in saying that we should have initial trust in
conflicting experiences. (Of course, the
conflicts have to be dealt with. We'll
come to that later.) Let me illustrate
this by the Parable of the Remnants.
Suppose a nuclear holocaust occurs and the
remnants are badly hurt by radiations.
Mutations occur such that during their seeing the proximal stimuli
produced by external objects are always blended with internally
generated noise. The result is that the
apparent size, shape and color of a nearby object can vary for different
individuals and can also vary from time to time for the same individual. The saving grace is that the noise level does
not exceed the threshold which would destroy altogether the capability of
object recognition. So the people can
still, with difficulty, know that certain object is around. The result is a kind of "vision"
which can roughly locate a medium size object nearby but all else are blurred
and unstable. Notice that the erroneous
perceptions are always integrated with the roughly correct
identifications. Phenomenologically
speaking, we can't separate these two kinds of perceptions: the bare
recognition of object versus the more detailed perception of color, shape and
size. In this case should those people
accord some evidential force to their perceptions? Suppose they don't and instead they adopt
initial scepticism towards their 'perceptions'.
Namely, they insist that their perceptions have to be treated as
"guilty until proven innocent".
Can they demonstrate the reliability of their 'perceptions' by another
means? Hardly! What about the availability of tests? There may not be effective tests which have
consistent results. Scepticism surely results and it would rob the people of
the only little information they still possess! This consequence seems to be counter-intuitive. Instead it is plausible to say the PC is
applicable here. By applying it, the
remnants will come to trust their ability to locate medium size objects while
not giving undue confidence to their color and shape perceptions. The PC is "charitable" enough here
without being unduly uncritical. The
idea here is that although the 'perceptions', described at the highest level of
epistemic seeming, are grossly inconsistent, they do convey information about
the reality at a lower level of description.
Indeed the parable is suggestive.
It shows that it is quite conceivable that even though religious
experiences as a whole are not entirely accurate, they can be reasonably informative
at a lower level of description. There
is no a priori reason for believing that contradictions of experiences would
entail their total unreliability.
Furthermore, almost all sorts of experience
or doxastic practices produce conflicting beliefs sooner or later. Empirically speaking no experience which we
commonly regard as reliable is completely free from this problem. (Just think of the empiricists'
"argument from illusion".) So
why do we think that the presence of contradictions in religious experience
should debar us from having initial trust, at least to some degree, in
religious experience?
The above argument, however, does not
license the irrationality of swallowing a grossly inconsistent set of
belief. To have initial trust in
contradictory experiences does not mean to accept them all. This, contrarily, is only the first step to
ensure a proper initial base on which then, and only then, we can exercise our
critical faculty rigorously. First let
us consider an alternative, the Sceptical Rule (SR):
SR When
experiences or claims conflict with one another, we should reject all of them.
Should we adopt the SR instead? I don't think so. Consider the conflict of witnesses in the
courts. It would be indeed stupid to
reject all their accounts just because they conflict! It seems to be a rational strategy to try to
reconcile their reports as much as possible.
For example, a common core[61] can be identified. Another example: suppose a phenomenon
occurred very briefly which led to conflicting reports: A reported seeing an aeroplane,
B a spaceship, and C an air-balloon. It
is absurd to suggest that we should reject all their statements and think that
nothing has ever happened! It is
possible that one of them may actually be correct. At the very least we should accept the common
content of their experiences. Unidentified flying object, vague though
it is, is not a completely uninformative term.
Moreover if the SR is adopted, history would also be imperiled. It is well known that historical documents
are liable to massive contradictions.
However we don't deduce from this phenomenon that historical enquiry is
entirely pointless. The job of the historian
is to utilize all these materials to reconstruct the past by harmonizing them
without producing too much strain in the overall interpretation. Many historical accounts of a momentous
historical event, e.g. China's Cultural Revolution, are contradictory. It is difficult to determine the exact course
or nature of this event but it would be preposterous to deny that the Cultural
Revolution has happened. All the above
examples count against the sceptical policy and show that conflict of
presumptive data is not irremediable.
We can now come back to Martin's
conflicting claims objection to religious experience:
"Swinburne
advises us when considering a new sense to assume first that by and large
things are what they seem. ... this
initial assumption must be quickly abandoned in the case of religious
experiences. religious experiences are
often conflicting, and thus things cannot be what they seem. We must distinguish what is veridical and
what is not, and there is at present no non-question-begging theory that
enables us to do this."[62]
Suppose he is correct about the degree of
conflicts of the religious experiences.
Does it follow then the whole lot of religious experiences has no
evidential force at all and we can just dismiss them? If my arguments are so far correct, this
conclusion is unwarranted. The conflicts
of religious experience may indeed show the type-unreliability of religious experience
at the highest level of description.
However, a certain common core can still be extracted from the diverse
religious experiences at a lower level of description. Let's elaborate the Parable of the
Remnants. Consider their 'perceptions'
of the sun. When they look at the sun,
they see some object up there but one sees it as round while another as
square and so on. Even worse, for an
individual he sees it as square on Monday but round on Tuesday and hexagonal on
Wednesday and so on. Obviously an object
can't be both round and square at the same time. So the object cannot be identical to
what it seems at most of the times.
However, by the application of the PC, the people at least can arrive at
the conclusion that there is a bright object of some shape up
there. There is no need to adopt a
reductionist account of the 'sun' as nothing but productions of their minds,
i.e., to discount their experiences of the sun as absolutely unreliable. Similarly, despite the conflicts of the
religious experiences, they still point to the fact that there is another realm
up there or beyond. In
other words, although the religious experiences taken as a whole hardly point
to a determinate supernatural reality, they still cohere in that they all point
to something beyond the naturalistic world, i.e., the Transcendent
realm.
The most important contradiction remains
that concerning the nature of the ultimate reality. Is it personal or impersonal? I believe the
“contradiction” is not as stark as it is commonly made out. For example, Davis
carefully sifts through the data of diverse religious experiences and suggests
a common core.[63] If this attempt can be backed up by
detailed and substantial arguments, then it can plausibly be maintained that we
can extract a common core from the diverse religious experiences which at least
point to the fact that this spatio-temporal world is not the Ultimate. There is more to what we can see. Religious experience as a loose type at least
supports this modest conclusion. It is a tricky question whether the argument
from religious experience can be used to support some particularistic religious
traditions. I have a fuller treatment elsewhere.[64]
Conclusion
The argument from religious experience is
hotly contended. There are some important critics like Richard Gale and Matthew
Bagger whom I cannot discuss here.[65] I just hope to highlight the crucial
issues surrounding this debate, and show that there are weighty considerations
for both sides. Swinburne’s route of
taking religious experience as prima facie evidence for the transcendent realm
is a promising one but his approach depends crucially on the PC, the further
defence of which will inevitably raise many deep epistemological issues. In the
end, the epistemic assessment of religious experience will probably depend on
the ability of this radically new epistemology to withstand objections. The
controversy is still raging.
It is difficult to have a quick solution here
because problems of circularity always loom in the background. How one deems
the epistemic status of religious experience depends crucially on one’s
fundamental epistemic principles. Since there is no consensus about fundamental
epistemic principles, each side of this debate needs to defend his
epistemology. However, in the process of defending one’s epistemology, one
needs to appeal to pre-theoretic intuitions about which types of beliefs and
experiences are acceptable, and with respect to religious experience and the
like, our intuitions may tend to diverge. So contemporary arguments from
religious experience may never be able to gain consensus, but in any case,
philosophical arguments rarely achieve this. At the same time, it is not as
easy as some critics think to show that religious experiences are entirely
unreliable, and some forms of the argument from religious experience may well
be defensible and reasonable.
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NOTES
[1] Published: Kwan, Kai-man. “Can Religious Experience Provide
Justification for Belief in God? The Debate in Contemporary Analytic
Philosophy.” In Philosophy Compass, November 2006.
[1] William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (London: Collins, 1960); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of
the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).
[2] 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 H. P. Grice's "The Causal Theory of Perception" in
Jonathan Dancy, ed., Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988), ch.III. It should also be noted that this is offered as a
sufficient condition for veridicality and this may not be identical to its
necessary condition.
[3] 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).
[5] 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.
[6] 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.
[7] Robert Oakes continues to defend some form
of self-authentication. See his “Transparent Veridicality and Phenomenological
Imposters: The Telling Issue,” Faith and Philosophy 22 (Oct 2005):
413-425.
[8] C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and
Psychical Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 197.
[9] 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).
[10] Charles Taliaferro, Contemporary
Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3. Ch.8 of this book also contains an elaborate
defence of religious experience.
[12] 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 (Notre dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
[13] 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).
[14] William Wainwright, Mysticism
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1981); Keith Yandell, The Epistemology of
Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[15] William Alston, Perceiving God: The
Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1991). Also see his earlier
articles: "Christian Experience 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.
[16] Perhaps another influential figure, Alvin
Plantinga, ought to be mentioned as well. He started with an attack on
classical foundationism in order to leave room for belief in God as a properly
basic belief (Plantinga and Wolterstorff, passim). He then
embarked on an ambitious epistemological project. In 1993, he published two books: Warrant:
The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford
University Press). In the first, he surveyed and criticized almost all
the major epistemological approaches in vogue.
In the second, he expounded his new approach to epistemology, Proper
Functionalism. His third book, Warranted
Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000) elaborated this approach
and applied it to defend the Christian faith. His work was more epistemological
in nature and strictly speaking, he had not committed to the argument from
religious experience. However, he made it clear that his epistemological
project was intended to be compatible with the sensus divinitas as a
basic source of epistemic warrant. In
this way, his work could be seen to be complementary to the work of other
defenders of religious experience. His
work had also caught the attention of analytic epistemologists. Many leading epistemologists (e.g. Keith
Lehrer, Laurence Bonjour, Bas C. van Fraassen, Ernest Sosa) paid him a tribute
by collaborating on a book about his proper functionalism, offering criticisms of
it (Jonathan L. Kvanvig, ed., Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays
in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge [(Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1996)). Plantinga in turn
responded vigorously to their criticisms.
This project showed that the old-fashioned empiricist epistemology,
which was one major obstacle to the acceptance of religious experience as a
source of justification, could no longer be taken for granted.
[24] 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.
[28]
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), p. 259.
[29] Davis, p. 149. As one referee
points out, this claim is rather strong, and some philosophers still defend at
least the possibility of an interpretation-free perception. I think it is not
absolutely essential to claim the impossibility of an interpretation-free
perception as far as my paper is concerned. It is enough to point out that in
the case of sensory perceptions, although by and large they are theory-laden
and not interpretation-free, we can still rely on their prima facie epistemic
force.
[39] George Mavrodes, Belief in God: A Study
in the Epistemology of Religion (Washington, D.C.: University Press of
America, 1970), pp. 75-76.
[40] 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.
[41] Michael Martin, “The Principle of
Credulity,” pp.85-6. Evan Fales also raises a similar objection in “Do Mystics
See God?” in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, ed. by
Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon (Oxford, Blackwell, 2004).
[45] Richard Swinburne, "Does Theism Need
a Theodicy?" Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1988), p.294.
[46] This example is artificial in the sense
that practically speaking, it is very difficult to isolate one nucleus for
testing. However, the example still
serves to illustrate the epistemic principles involved.
[48] 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).
[49] 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.
[51] See Davis, ch. 8; Yandell, chs. 6-7; and
Gellman, Experience of God, ch. 5. Wall is entirely devoted to this
issue and he utilizes concrete examples of religious experiences to point out
the inadequacy of various naturalistic explanations.
[52] Evan Fales, "Scientific Explanations
of Mystical Experiences, Part I: The Case of St. Teresa," Religious
Studies 32(1996):143-63; "Scientific Explanations of Mystical
Experiences," Religious Studies 32(1996):297-313.
[53] Jerome Gellman, Mystical
Experience of God: A Philosophical Inquiry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), ch.
5.
[54] Davis, p. 220; John J.Heaney, ed., Psyche
and Spirit (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 116; Antoine Vergote, Religion,
Belief and Unbelief: A Psychological Study (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp.
197ff.
[55] Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili and Vince
Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New
York: Ballantine Books, 2001), p. 37.
[61] Indeed it is not the case that a
"common core" has to be shared by all the eye-witness
accounts. Sometimes it is
sufficient that it is shared by the large majority of the accounts, provided
that either the error of the deviant witness in that aspect can be explained or
overwhelming explanatory power is attained by adopting the common core. Admittedly there are borderline cases in
which we have to rely on our judgments.
[64] Kai-man Kwan, “Is the Critical Trust
Approach to Religious Experience Incompatible with Religious Particularism? A
Reply to Michael Martin and John Hick,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 20
no.2 (April 2003), pp. 152-169.
[65] Richard Gale, On the Nature and
Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Matthew C.
Bagger, Religious Experience, Justification, and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999). For responses to Gale, see Gellman, Mystical
Experience of God, ch. 3, and Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief,
pp. 335-42. For a response to Bagger,
see Gellman, Mystical Experience of God, ch. 4.
