Board index ‹ Assorted Bible Questions

[Shafford]

Religious experiences cannot be distinguished from sheer imagination even for the person having them.

People often have dreams so vivid that they become disoriented when they wake up. The only way to know the difference is that there is a lot more of the real world than there is of the dream world

Of course it goes without saying that people believe in things that are not true all the time. Sometimes people are misinformed. Sometimes they are subject to mental illnesses: psychosis and hallucination. Sometimes mass delusion causes people to believe something for no other reason than the number of people who believe it. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the mind to have experiences ranging from the mundane to the seemingly otherworldly, both through drugs and disorders as well as routine processes like dreaming

So considering how easy it is for your mind to imagine things that even you can't tell are imagined, and given that God never appears except through testimony or an individual's experience, it is impossible to determine that God is the source of an experience

[jimwalton]

It sounds as if you're arguing that no one can ever distinguish, in any situation, reality from imagination.

From Richard Swinburne ("The Existence of God"):

If there is a God, we might reasonably expect that there would be some contact and communication with humans. If His existence were too evident, man’s freedom would be vastly curtailed. One might expect, however, private and occasional manifestation by God to some people. Many claim to have experienced this phenomenon.

On the nature of religious experiences: What are we supposing? An experience is a conscious mental going-on. Experiences can be effects of reality (I think I hear a car outside the window, and there is one) or effects of sensation (I think I hear a car outside the window, but there isn’t one). Into which category do religious experiences fall? It could be either: (1) God or an angel may actually appear to me, or (2) I may have a sensation of “the room going around” or of “a timeless reality outside myself.” Sometimes the car appears to moving when it is not; sometimes it actually is. ... What constitutes a religious experience? It is an epistemic event where the subject is metaphysical.

Experiences can be public (shared by others) or private. One is no less or more legitimate than the other.

On the principle of Credulity: Philosophers sometimes claim that an experience is evidence from nothing beyond itself, and therefore religious experience has no evidential value. Quite obviously, if you literally walk into a table that is physically there and raise a bruise on your thigh, there is good evidence for the table and your experience with it.

It is also verifiable that your experience of reading what I have written is both rational and valid. Perception is how we process reality.
In the absence of special considerations, experiences can be taken as genuine, and there is no rational reason to isolate religious experiences as being in a different category. There are substantial grounds to believe in the existence of God. It is intuitively right to take the way things seem to be as the way they are.

The principle is phrased in a specific way. How things seem to be positively is evidence of how they are, but how things seem not to be is not such evidence. If my experience tells me there is a table in the room or a statue in the garden, then there probably is. But if it seems to me there is no table in the room, then that is only reason for supposing there is not, if there are good grounds for supposing I have looked everywhere in the room and, having eyes in working order and being able to recognize a table when I see it, would have seen one if there were one there. An atheist’s claim to have had an experience of its seeming to that that there is no God would only be evidence that there was no God if similar restrictions were satisfied. Perhaps they haven’t looked everywhere or are not able to recognize God when they see Him.

Efforts to restrict religious experience from validity are either unjustified or unsuccessful.

[Deuteros]

How can we distinguish genuine religious experiences from imaginary ones?

[jimwalton]

In the same way we distinguish genuine experiences from imaginary ones. How do you know you're not dreaming, that you actually exist, or that you aren't just a Matrix-persona in someone else's video game?

[Frosty]

Well, you don't and can't. You just assume it.

However, that doesn't mean that all experiences are created equally, or that all assumptions are equally valid. Can I prove the chair I'm sitting on is real and external to my mind? No. However, my experiences with the chair are reliable and repeatable, and predictable. Most importantly it can be independently confirmed by other parties who will -- virtually 100 percent of the time -- agree with me about the basic nature of the object.

With religious experiences, this is never the case. It's usually a vague one-off that is willfully interpreted to confirm pre-existing beliefs. People of all religions have had them, so either every Muslim who claims to have had one is lying or they were somehow contacted by the Christian God (or whatever one believes is responsible for the experience) in such a way that left them believing even more firmly in Islam, not Christianity.

[jimwalton]

> With religious experiences, this is never the case.

I disagree. As Swinburne says, there is nothing in a religious experience that puts it in a different case. In every experience, we rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality. But even in alleged experiences that are real, there is no foolproof criteria for certainty and knowledge.

The ideal of certainty of knowledge is this: I must accept as true only those claims of which I am rationally certain, having no shadow of doubt. But if that’s true, how can I be certain of it? The ideal doesn’t even meet its own standard.

Knowing God, and validating religious experiences involves an epistemic act that has the same basic features that our ordinary, workday epistemic acts do. Touching and hearing is not necessary to knowing. Seeing doesn't guarantee knowledge, either, since sometimes our eyes deceive us.

But we still make assumptions, as you mentioned. And these assumptions are the same with assuming my brother lives in Chicago (even though I can't see him or touch him) as they are with religious experiences: we go by past evidences, past experiences (I visited him there), the continuation of coherent patterns, clues, integration of these patterns and clues, and trust in the reliability of the mind and the consistency within the variability of the real world.

[Frosty]

The fact that religious experiences do not have the quality of being repeatable, predictable, reliable, and externally confirmable, is not an opinion that can be dismissed off-hand by saying you disagree, it is a true fact about the vast majority of people's described religious experiences. I am not asking for your opinion of the wholesale categorization between the two, I am asserting specific objective differences that have epistemic implications, and you have not engaged with any of those differences, and simply reasserted your opinion that they shouldn't be categorized differently. There is no value in that.

[jimwalton]

There are many valid experiences that have nothing to do with repeatability, predictability, reliability, and external confirmation. All historical inquiry is like that. Suppose you and I were going to study something about the life of Abraham Lincoln or Josef Stalin. None of it is predictable, repeatable, or externally confirmable. At best we can check sources, try to determine reliability, look for other confirming sources (not knowing if they are also lying in the same way), etc. We use reason, evidence, sources, and discernment to infer a reasonable conclusion. But you know as well as I that historians are going to come up with different interpretations of such things. It's no different with religious experiences. We use reason, evidence, sources, and discernment to infer a reasonable conclusion.

Suppose I told you I had the hiccups yesterday. You can't confirm that by the agents of predictability, reliability, repeatability, and external confirmation. You either believe my experience or you don't.

Even science admits to broaching the limits of certain kinds of testability (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/falsifiability/). Not everything is repeatable or predictable. We can't do experiments on stars, yet we can observe their consistency. Studies in evolutionary paleoscience are certainly not reproducible. And there are enough mutations that when only a singular specimen is available, we treat it as a curiosity, not an illegitimate experience.

[Frosty]

> There are many valid experiences that have nothing to do with repeatability, predictability, reliability, and external confirmation. All historical inquiry is like that. Suppose you and I were going to study something about the life of Abraham Lincoln or Josef Stalin. None of it is predictable, repeatable, or externally confirmable.

And that is why historical inquiry has epistemic limitations. You have to create an aggregate picture from the sources you have available, and sometimes sources conflict.

However, this epistemic limitation is acceptable because the consequences are often moot. The specific details of Stalin's personal life are little more than intellectual curiosity. This evidential standard is not acceptable for determining whether or not something supernatural exists, and it's truly outrageous for someone to suggest that.

> You can't confirm that by the agents of predictability, reliability, repeatability, and external confirmation. You either believe my experience or you don't.

It's easily confirmable by the fact that hiccups are a very common and casual phenomenon. I've seen other people have hiccups. I've had hiccups. They are a documented medical phenomenon.

The question of whether there is anything beyond our universe, or if there are supernatural agents at work, has enormous existential consequences and there is -- so far -- literally no confirmable evidence. It remains an open question. The subject of which supernatural being is real is the cause of war, discrimination, et cetera.

This is not so casual a subject that "I heard god's voice while I was alone praying" has the kind of epistemic credibility required.

[jimwalton]

> This evidential standard is not acceptable for determining whether or not something supernatural exists

I was not claiming that experiences are a way to determine whether or not something supernatural exists. Instead, the conversation is about the difference of religious experience from sheer imagination. I am supporting the position that religious experience is potentially as valid as any other experience.

> It's easily confirmable by the fact that hiccups are a very common and casual phenomenon

Actually, though the point may not be helpful at this turn in the conversation, religious experiences are probably more common than hiccups.

> The question of whether there is anything beyond our universe, or if there are supernatural agents at work, has enormous existential consequences

I definitely agree.

> literally no confirmable evidence.

I'm wondering what sort of evidence in this situation you would consider to be valid. How can science even enter this conversation? I fear that if it tries, it is no longer doing science, and so self-defeating. But I'm truly curious what your answer might be.

> The subject of which supernatural being is real is the cause of war, discrimination, et cetera.

You've chosen to identify two severe negatives. Let's not forget the positive benefits of religious belief as a balance to your chosen examples.

> "I heard god's voice while I was alone praying" has the kind of epistemic credibility required.

This statement also qualifies for the query, "And what kind of evidence is even possible, not to mention credible for you?"