In order to stress that the experience was truly experienced and not simply a conclusion of a series of inferences (caused by consideration of a set of hypotheses), experiences are described through the undeniable, self-authenticating interaction of the five senses. For example, when you see a football heading straight towards you and subsequently colliding with your head, you not only see the football coming towards you but also feel the football when it hits your head. Through the interaction of the two senses of sight and touch it would seem illogical to deny the existence of the football and, indeed, the event itself. An analogy to this effect is often cited because the direct experience that comes from a spiritual sense and that not to believe in God’s presence after this experience would seem absurd.
The point of the example of experiencing God ‘something like the way that you would experience people’ is not the idea of how we experience each other’s bodies but how we experience each other’s ‘being’. This is further clarified by the suggestion that we also experience other people’s minds, souls, selves or spirits as well as their physical manifestation. This helps supporters of the argument because a likeness is alluded to between experiencing God’s ‘being’ and experiencing a human’s ‘being’.
Explain the principal criticisms of the argument and evaluate how successful they are (12)
One of the most basic (but also hard-hitting) criticisms of the argument is that we are naturally suspicious of religious experience claims because it is contrary to most people’s experience and knowledge of the world around them. The idea of God appearing to someone is often rejected because the cynic believes that the idea of a God existing is intrinsically incoherent. That is, the claim is rejected on the grounds of non-belief; on the grounds that the descriptions of religious experience are contrary to our normal experience of this world and its limitations.
Another criticism placed against the argument is that of a case of ‘mistaken identity’ of which there are two major instances. Firstly, there is the complete misidentification of the experience as an experience of God. For example, people have often mistaken someone for someone else and made assumptions and judgements built on these false premises; it is argued that the same line of reasoning could be applied to religious experience. Secondly, there is the more pressing issue of the misinterpretation of religious experience. It is argued that since we can all be so easily deceived by experience, it is unwise to use an experience to claim that something is the case. However, there are those who disagree with these criticisms because they do not imply a complete rubbishing of the experience argument; just because people can misinterpret events or experiences, this does not mean that every religious experience (or indeed any of them) have been results of misinterpretation.
A main criticism of the argument is that the content of arguments for God from religious experience are far too vague to constitute anything approaching a proof. A major point to consider is that there are many varying descriptions of religious experience, both within a single religion and from multiple religions. Critics argue that, whilst there may be an experience (and not necessarily a religious one), believers make inferences about these experiences and come to the conclusion that they have been experienced God. These detractors emphasise how reported religious experiences always seem to tally with the regional descriptions and concepts of God that are prevalent in area where the experience happened. It has also been argued that not only do regional cultures influence experiences but that religious experiences from different religions seem to contradict each other. Replies to this criticism have stated that the regional variations are simply people’s attempts to contextualize an indescribable event and that just because two people give two different accounts of an event, it does not make either of the two accounts ‘less true’.
One of the major issues with religious experience is that it does not address the problem of recognition. Critics argue that to experience God, or at least to know that you are experiencing God, you must have some idea of what it is actually like to experience God. They argue that unless you are able to describe what God would be like if you were to experience him, there is no actual way of verifying that you are experiencing a spiritual entity. Believers argue that God can be recognised by his attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence but critics argue that there is no way to actually acknowledge these abstract concepts and thus, no way to acknowledge the presence of God.
Sceptical critics have argued that there is no way to prove religious experience because there are no ‘agreed’ tests, and no way to carry them out, to discover the validility of religious experience. Because there is no way of checking people’s religious experiences, this group of critics dismiss religious experience as non-sense. However, it has been counter-argued that just because there is no way to prove something, doesn’t mean that there it is not true. For example, you can love someone but it would be nearly impossible for this to be proven by tests of any kind.
Some people have rejected the religious experience argument on the ground that some scientists seem to have found ways of explaining such a phenomena. Ludwig Feuerbach rejected religious experience on the grounds that God is the creation of human imagination; the product of a desire for there to be something else that the experiences of the world we normally inhabit. Neurologists from the University of California have also proved that stimulating a certain region of the brain brings about the sense of a spiritual experience. Believers do not think that this is a major criticism, however, because they argue this simply proves that God designed humans with an ability to receive religious experiences.
The argument that the existence of God can be proved by religious experience relies on the assumption that the experience itself can give some sort of guarantee that you are right. In conclusion, I believe that is hard to believe in an argument that does not and cannot distinguish between feeling that something is right and actually being right. This is emphasised even more when we consider that nearly every human has, at one point in their life, been sure about something and then they have consequently been proved wrong. It is this misplaced optimism in subjectivity that makes believe that this argument has failed.
