Theology

With these points in mind it will be useful to classify the different kinds of religious experience. In due course I shall make similar points about all of them, but it is worth while at this stage pointing out the diversity of experiences which fall under our definition. First, we have experiences which seem (epistemically) to the subject to be experiences of God or something else supernatural, but where he seems to perceive the supernatural object in perceiving a perfectly ordinary non-religious object. Thus a man may look at the night sky, and suddenly 'see it as' God's handiwork, something which God is bringing about (in the way in which a man may see a vapour trail in the sky as the trail of an aeroplane). He has, it may be said, an experience of contingency. Secondly, there are the experiences which men have in perceiving very unusual public objects. (The occurrence of the unusual object may or may not constitute a violation of a natural law.) The experiences had by those who witnessed 'the Resurrection appearances of Jesus' or the 'appearance of Mary' at Fatima, or (as far as the auditory phenomena are concerned) St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus are in this category, if the accounts of these events are in any minimal way reliable. Take the appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples as described in Luke 24: 36-49. A man looking and talking like Jesus who had been crucified three days earlier suddenly turned up among them and ate some fish (looking and talking like Jesus in the comparative sense, that is, looking and talking the way that Jesus used to look and talk). Yet in perceiving this public event, the disciples had the religious experience of taking the man to be the risen Jesus Christ. Their religious experience was that he looked like Jesus in the epistemic sense, and so they believed him to be. A sceptic might have had the same visual sensations (described comparatively) and yet not had the religious experience.

Let us begin by investigating the premiss. What are the 'religious experiences' whose occurrence is supposed to be evidence for the existence of God? An experience is a conscious mental going-on. It may be described in such a way as to entail the existence of some particular external thing apart from the subject, beyond the stream of his consciousness, normally the thing of which it is an experience; or it may be described in such a way as to carry no such entailment. Thus 'hearing the coach outside the window' is not unnaturally described as an experience; but if I have such an experience, if I really do hear the coach outside the window, then it follows that there is a coach outside the window. Yet if I describe my experience as 'having an auditory sensation which seemed to come from a coach outside the window', my description does not entail the existence of anything external of which the experience was purportedly an experience (or its non-existence). The former kind of description I will call an external description; the latter an internal description. Now when people talk about religious experiences, they often give external descriptions of them. Such external descriptions may be fairly precise—'I talked to God last night', or 'I saw Poseidon standing by the window', or, rather more vaguely, 'I became conscious of a timeless reality beyond myself'. The trouble with taking any external description as the premiss of an argument from religious experience is that there is going to be considerable doubt about the truth of the premiss, but once you accept the premiss, you are quite obviously most, if not all, of the way to your conclusion. If you accept that Joe talked to God last night, then of course there is a God—it hardly needs an argument to show it. If you accept that Joe became conscious of a timeless reality beyond himself, then, admittedly, that does not demonstrate the existence of God, but you are quite a lot of the way towards such a demonstration. So, it seems natural to say, all arguments from religious experience must be phrased as arguments from experiences given internal descriptions. There are various ways of giving internal descriptions of one's experiences, but in the case of most experiences, including those which the subject believes to be of something outside himself, a normal way is to describe how things appear or seem to the subject—one may say 'the room seemed to be going round and round', or 'the carpet appeared to be blue', or 'he appeared to be moving away from me'. One may use in giving such descriptions verbs which describe how things seem to the subject, the use of which is confined to connection with particular modalities of sense, verbs like 'looks' or 'feels' or 'tastes'—I may say 'It looked as if the coach was moving away from me' or 'it felt smooth' or 'it tasted of pineapple'.