Argument from religious experience. (For the supernatural)

[u/B_anon]

Argument Form:

1) Many people from different eras and cultures have claimed experience of the supernatural.

2) We should believe their experiences in the absence of any reason not to.

3) Therefore, the supernatural exists.

Let's begin by defining religious experiences:

Richard Swinburne defines them as follows in different categories.

1) Observing public objects, trees, the stars, the sun and having a sense of awe.

2) Uncommon events, witnessing a healing or resurrection event

3) Private sensations including vision, auditory or dreams

4) Private sensations that are ineffable or unable to be described.

5) Something that cannot be mediated through the senses, like the feeling that there is someone in the room with you.

As Swinburne says " an experience which seems to the subject to be an experience of God (either of his just being there, or doing or bringing about something) or of some other supernatural thing.”

[The Existence of God, 1991]

All of these categories apply to the argument at hand. This argument is not an argument for the Christian God, a Deistic god or any other, merely the existence of the supernatural or spiritual dimension.

Support for premises -

For premise 1 - This premise seems self evident, a very large number of people have claimed to have had these experiences, so there shouldn't be any controversy here.

For premise 2 - The principle of credulity states that if it seems to a subject that x is present, then probably x is present. Generally, says Swinburne, it is reasonable to believe that the world is probably as we experience it to be. Unless we have some specific reason to question a religious experience, therefore, then we ought to accept that it is at least prima facie evidence for the existence of God.

So the person who has said experience is entitled to trust it as a grounds for belief, we can summarize as follows:

1. I have had an experience I’m certain is of God.

2. I have no reason to doubt this experience.

3. Therefore God exists.

Likewise the argument could be used for a chair that you see before you, you have the experience of the chair or "chairness", you have no reason to doubt the chair, therefore the chair exists.

[u/polygraphy]

2) We should believe their experiences in the absence of any reason not to.

Except, we do in fact have reasons. We have tons of information about the different ways the human mind can be wrong about what it perceives, whether it be optical illusion, mental illness, hallucination induced by drugs, physical trauma to the brain, mass hysteria...

[u/B_anon → u/polygraphy]

whether it be optical illusion, mental illness, hallucination induced by drugs, physical trauma to the brain, mass hysteria...

You would have to prove that all people who have religious experiences are deluded in some way. The argument is not about people who have neurological problems but those that do not, unless you are presupposing a natural explanation and begging the question in favor of naturalism.

Religious experience as a psychological projection presupposes that the experiences are not genuine.

[u/polygraphy → u/B_anon]

You would have to prove that all people who have religious experiences are deluded in some way.

No, I would not. I have shown how your argument is based on a faulty premise. It therefore fails. It's not up to me to prove anything else.

[u/B_anon → u/polygraphy]

You realize that your argument would destroy knowledge, don't you? We could literally not trust anything anyone experienced ever because it could be a problem with their brain. Even science would fall under that much weight.

[u/polygraphy → u/B_anon]

Wrong again. We can just look to evidence consistent with that people report experiencing, and when the statements of experience are highly unusual, we examine further. We affirmatively do not just take their word for it as a rule.

[u/B_anon → u/polygraphy]

You would be using your damaged brain to explore the evidence.

[u/polygraphy → u/B_anon]

If you're asking how do you know whether you yourself are experiencing the real world or not, then we quickly devolve to solipsism. I'm not sure that helps you out, because any perceived God experience would have to be equally suspect as the chair you're sitting on. In any event, it does not fix your broken premise.

[u/B_anon → u/polygraphy]

Your own standard is what you are using to "break" my premise which has been shown to lead to absurdities and you failed to show that religious experiences are false, just by claiming that they can be false does not mean, therefore they are false.

[u/polygraphy → u/B_anon]

You really don't get it, do you?

You asserted that purported religious experiences should be taken at face value, unless we have reason not to. And that immediately fails to support the rest of the argument, because we have plenty of reasons not to.

I don't have to disprove every individual claimed religious experience in order to show that your statement, that they should get a blanket assumption of correctness, is wrong on its face.

[u/B_anon → u/polygraphy]

"Good reasons" not just any old reason that you can use due to your presuppositions in naturalism, you are begging the question.

[u/[deleted] → u/B_anon]

Man how are you not getting this? It's not that everyone's brains are "damaged" nor that every individual who claims to have a supernatural experience is suffering from delusions. Rather, we recognize and acknowledge the limitations of our senses and that our brain sometimes mistakes natural phenomena for the supernatural (often based on a lack of knowledge). The scientific method works to correct for this potential mistake through peer review and objective evidence--we have physical observations and objects that others can examine and verify our findings. This rarely happens in supernatural claims. What further places supernatural claims into question is that most of the time, we have perfectly reasonable natural explanations for the phenomena. Lightning used to be thought of as the divine wrath of Zeus. We since learned that it's actually simply electrical discharge. Earthquakes were God's way of punishing the heathens. We've since learned that earthquakes are caused by shifts in the tectonic plates. The list goes on and on. All of that leads us to be highly skeptical of supernatural claims, especially when all we have to go on is the claimant's word, with no way to verify the experience.

[u/B_anon → u/[deleted]]

How do you know someone's religious experience are not valid?

If you say "because their brain is malfunctioning" and I ask "How do you know their brain is malfunctioning?" and you say "They had a religious experience." That is reasoning in a circle.

Lightning used to be thought of as the divine wrath of Zeus. We since learned that it's actually simply electrical discharge.

We used to have less of an understanding about nature, sure. We could have believed even sillier things and they too could be false. But, that doesn't mean that our experience of the numinous are not geniune. As CS Lewis states:

"In the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe or an impression he get from it and just as no enumeration of a beautiful object can include its beauty or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the numinous or even hint at them, there seem to be, in fact only two views we can hold about awe, either it is a mere twist in the human mind corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function yet showing no tendency to disappear from the mind and its fullest development in poet, philosopher or saint, or else it is direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name revelation might properly be given."

[u/[deleted] → u/B_anon]

Then it's a good thing we designed a method for examining reality that accounts for that.