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The arguments for and against the existence of God which I have discussed so far have been arguments from very general and evident features of experience. The premiss of the cosmological argument, for example, that there is a universe, is both a very general feature of experience and one which is evidently true. The same applies to the argument against the existence of God from the existence of evil. The existence of evil in the world is evident to everyone, and it is a general feature of the world manifest at many places and many times. I am coming gradually to arguments for the existence of God from more particular goings-on. If there is a God, one might well expect him to make his presence known to men not merely through the over-all pattern of the universe in which he placed them, but by dealing more intimately and personally with them. In this chapter and the next chapter I shall consider claims that he has done so. In this chapter I consider the claim that God has made himself known in ancient and contemporary public events within history and the moulding of history thereby. |
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The Principle of Credulity is concerned with a subject's grounds for believing that things are as they seem to him. Clearly in ordinary life we use a wider principle, for we usually believe to have occurred what other people tell us that they perceived occurring. Other things being equal, we think that what others tell us that they perceived, probably happened. By 'other things being equal' I mean the absence of positive grounds for supposing that the others have misreported or misremembered their experiences, or that things were not in fact as they seemed to those others to be. Clearly most of our beliefs about the world are based on what others claim to have perceived—beliefs about geography and history and science and everything else beyond immediate experience are thus based. We do not normally check that an informant is a reliable witness before accepting his reports. And we could not do so because we form our beliefs about what they are saying, the meaning of the claims which they are making, on the assumption that other people normally tell the truth.
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In discussing religious experience philosophers have sometimes made the claim that an experience is evidence for nothing beyond itself, and that therefore religious experience has no evidential value. That remark reflects a philosophical attitude that those philosophers would not adopt when discussing experiences of any other kind. Quite obviously having the experience of it seeming (epistemically) to you that there is a table there (i.e. your seeming to see a table) is good evidence for supposing that there is a table there. Having the experience of its seeming (epistemically) to you that I am here giving a lecture (i.e. your seeming to hear me give a lecture) is good evidence for supposing that I am here lecturing. So generally, contrary to the original philosophical claim, I suggest that it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations) if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present, then probably x is present; what one seems to perceive is probably so. How things seem to be is good grounds for a belief about how things are. From this it would follow that, in the absence of special considerations, all religious experiences ought to be taken by their subjects as genuine, and hence as substantial grounds for belief in the existence of their apparent object—God, or Mary, or Ultimate Reality, or Poseidon. This principle, which I shall call the Principle of Credulity, and the conclusion drawn from it seem to me correct. It seems to me, and I hope to my readers, intuitively right in most ordinary cases such as those to which I have just been referring, to take the way things seem to be as the way they are. |
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