MODULE 4 LECTURE NOTES: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE PERCEPTION OF GOD [This elec

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MODULE 4 LECTURE NOTES: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE PERCEPTION OF GOD
[This elec

MODULE 4 LECTURE NOTES: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE PERCEPTION OF GOD
[This electronic presentation to be used with Pojman/Rea. Philosophy of Religion, 7E. From Pojman/Rea. Philosophy of Religion, 7E. © 2015 Wadsworth, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. Text/images may not be modified or reproduced in any way without prior written permission of the publisher. www.cengage.com/permissions]
Encounters with the supernatural, a transcendent dimension, the Wholly Other are at the base of every great religion. Abraham hears a Voice calling him to leave his family in Haran and venture out into a broad unknown, thus becoming the father of Israel. Abraham’s grandson Jacob wrestles all night with an angel and is transformed, gaining the name Israel, “prince of God.” While tending his father-in-law’s flock, Moses has a vision of “I am that I am” (Yahweh) in the burning bush and is ordered to deliver Israel out of slavery into a land flowing with milk and honey. Isaiah has a vision of the Lord “high and exalted, and the skirt of his robe filled the temple” of heaven. In the New Testament, John, James, and Peter behold Jesus gloriously transformed on the Mount of Transfiguration and are themselves transformed by the experience. After the death of Jesus, Saul is traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians, when he is met by a blazing light and hears a Voice, asking him why he is persecuting the Lord. Changing his name to Paul, he becomes the leader of the Christian missionary movement. The Hindu experiences the Atman (“soul”) as the Brahman (“God”), “that art Thou,” or beholds the glories of Krishna. The Advaitian Hindu merges with the One, as a drop of water merges with the vast ocean. The Buddhist merges with Nirvana or beholds a vision of the Buddha. Allah reveals his holy word, the Qur’an, to Mohammed. Joan of Arc hears voices calling on her to save her people. Joseph Smith has a vision of Angel Moroni, calling him to do a new work for God.
What shall we make of religious experience? Is it a source of information, or justified belief, about God? Does it, in other words, have evidential value? Is it perhaps a mode of perceiving God? Or is it somehow to be dismissed, perhaps as a mere trick of the brain? These are some of the key questions that will occupy us in the present section. We begin our study in this part with four descriiptions of particular religious experiences from four different traditions: Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist. It is important to note that, although the sorts of religious experience reported in these excerpts are hardly isolated instance, religious experiences fall on a continuum of vividness and intensity, and experiences of a less vivid and less intense sort than the ‘‘mystical’’ experiences reported here seem to be far more common. Many religious believers will report having had experiences like feeling overwhelmed by the love or forgiveness of God or feeling at one with nature or the cosmos. Experiences like these are much more ordinary, and it is as important to consider their evidential value as it is to consider the evidential value of mystical experiences like visions of Jesus or the experience of total loss of one’s individuality.
One of our selections is an excerpt from William James’s classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In this selection, James describes mystical experience, which he considers to be the deepest kind of religious experience. It is something that
transcends our ordinary, sensory experience and that cannot be described in terms of our normal concepts and language. It is ‘‘ineffable experience.’’ The subject realizes that the experience ‘‘defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words,’’ James writes. ‘‘It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.’’ And yet it contains a ‘‘noetic quality,’’ a content. It purports to convey truth about the nature of reality, namely, that there is a unity of all things and that that unity is spiritual, not material. It is antinaturalistic, pantheistic, and optimistic. Further, mystical states are transient—that is, they cannot be sustained for long—and they are passive—that is, the mystic is acted upon by divine deliverance. We may prepare ourselves for the experience, but it is not something that we do; it is something that happens to us. James is cautious about what can be deduced from mystical experience. Although he thinks that mystical states ought to be taken seriously by the individuals to whom they come, he denies that the rest of us are under any obligation to ‘‘accept their revelations uncritically.’’ Nevertheless, he thinks that the mystical experiences of others can still have value for us by opening us up to the idea of alternative modes of experience and alternative ways of acquiring information about spiritual reality.
In our next selection, provocatively titled ‘‘Perceiving God,’’ William P. Alston defends the idea that religious experience might reasonably be construed as a form of perception. His basic idea is that, because of the ways in which religious experience is analogous to sensory experience, religious experience ought to be taken seriously as a source of justified belief about God. On his view, many of the reasons why people deny that religious experience is a source of evidence about spiritual reality would count equally as reasons to deny that sensory experience is a source of evidence about the external world. But, of course, few of us are willing to deny that sensory experience is a source of evidence. Thus, we should likewise be willing to grant that religious experience has evidential value
One concern that people sometimes raise about the idea that religious experience has evidential value is that religious experience is typically private. If your friend says that she hears a pleasant tune, and you listen and say, ‘‘Yes, I hear it now too,’’ there is no problem; but if you listen carefully and do not hear it, you (and your friend) might well wonder whether your friend is just imagining the sounds she thinks she hears. But the matter does not have to end there. You could try to bring in others to see if they hear the sound. You could also bring in scientific instruments—an audiometer, perhaps. But we can’t really do the same with religious experience. You might have the sense of God forgiving you or of an angel speaking to you while your friend, in the same room with you, neither hears, nor sees, nor feels anything unusual. You might be praying and suddenly feel transported by grace and sense the unity of all reality while your friend sitting next to you simply wonders at the strange expression on your face and asks if something is wrong. Unlike in the case of perceptual experience, you cannot seek verification of your experience by bringing in other people, instruments, or other methods to ‘‘settle the matter.’’ According to Alston, the demand for some sort of external verification for our religious experiences is illegitimate because it amounts to holding
religious experience to a higher standard than that to which we hold ordinary perceptual experience.
In our next selection, however, Evan Fales defends a different perspective, arguing that religious experience can count as good evidence for religious belief only to the extent that it can be cross-checked, and that it cannot be cross-checked—or, at any rate, it cannot be cross-checked well enough to allow it to provide ‘‘serious support’’ for theistic religious beliefs.
WHAT ARE MIRACLES, and are they possible?
Can we sensibly believe someone else’s testimony that a miracle has occurred? These questions are intertwined. Some say that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and that it is never reasonable to believe testimony that a law of nature has been violated. But, of course, each of these claims is controversial. The idea that miracles are natural law violations has been disputed on the basis of the contention that in the Bible, which is the witness to the most significant alleged miracles in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is no concept of nature as a closed system of law. For the biblical writers, says R. H. Fuller, miracles signify simply an ‘‘extraordinary coincidence of a beneficial nature.’’ This view is also endorsed by R. F. Holland in his article ‘‘The Miraculous,’’ in which the following story is illustrative:
A child riding his toy motor-car strays on to an unguarded railway crossing near his house and a wheel of his car gets stuck down the side of one of the rails. An express train is due to pass with the signals in its favor and a curve in the track makes it impossible for the driver to stop his train in time to avoid any obstruction he might encounter on the crossing. The mother coming out of the house to look for her child sees him on the crossing and hears the train approaching. She runs forward shouting and waving. The little boy remains seated in his car looking downward engrossed in the task of pedaling it free. The brakes of the train are applied and it comes to rest a few feet from the child. The mother thanks God for the miracle; which she never ceases to think of as such, although, as she in due course learns, there was nothing supernatural about the manner in which the brakes of the train came to be applied. The driver had fainted, for a reason that had nothing to do with the presence of the child on the line, and the brakes were applied automatically as his hand ceased to exert pressure on the control lever. He fainted on this particular afternoon because his blood pressure had risen after an exceptionally heavy lunch during which he had quarreled with a colleague, and the change in blood pressure caused a clot of blood to be dislodged and circulate. He fainted at the time when he did on the afternoon in question because this was the time at which the coagulation in his blood stream reached the brain.
Is this a miracle, or not? It is if we define miracles in Fuller’s biblical sense. It is not if we define them as violations of laws of nature. We can certainly understand the woman’s feeling on the matter, and perhaps in some mysterious way God had ‘‘allowed’’ nature to run its course so that the little boy would be saved. Perhaps we need not be overly exclusionary but say that if there is a God, each sense is valid: the weaker sense of an
extraordinary coincidence and the stronger sense of a violation of the laws of nature. Philosophical discussion of miracles has tended to focus primarily on the stronger sense, that of a violation of the laws of nature by a divine force. It is this stronger sense of the idea of miracle that is in play in our first selection, by David Hume, as well as in many of the subsequent discussions of his famous argument. In section 10 of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume sets forth an argument for the conclusion that it is not rational to believe testimony that a miracle has occurred. The essay provoked a lively response in his own day, and it has continued to be the subject of vigorous dispute up to the present.
Hume begins his attack on belief in miracles by appealing to the biases of his Scottish Presbyterian readers. He tells of a marvelous proof that Dr. Tillotson has devised against the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the doctrine that the body and blood of Christ are present in Holy Communion. Tillotson argues that because the evidence of the senses is of the highest rank and because it is evident that it must diminish in passing through the original witnesses to their disciples, the doctrine of transubstantiation is always contrary to the rules of reasoning and opposed to our sense experience. Thus:
1. Our evidence for the truth of transubstantiation is weaker than the sensory evidence we have against it. (Even for the apostles this was the case, and their testimony must diminish in authority in passing from them to their disciples.)
2. We are never warranted in believing a proposition on the basis of weaker evidence when stronger evidence supports the denial of that proposition.
3. Therefore, we are not warranted in believing in transubstantiation. (Even if the doctrine of transubstantiation were clearly revealed in the Scriptures, it would be against the rule of reason to give our assent to it.)
No doubt Hume’s Protestant readers were delighted with such an attack on the doctrine of transubstantiation. But the mischievous Hume now turns the knife on his readers. A wise person always proportions one’s belief to the evidence, he goes on. One has an enormous amount of evidence for the laws of nature, so that any testimony to the contrary is to be seriously doubted. Although miracles, as violations of the laws of nature, are not logically impossible, we are never justified in believing in one.
The skeleton of the argument contained in the reading goes something like this:
1. One ought to proportion one’s belief to the evidence.
2. Experience is generally better evidence than testimony (if for no other reason
than that valid testimony is based on another’s sense experience).
3. Therefore, when there is a conflict between experience and testimony, one
ought to believe according to experience.
4. Miracles are contrary to experience. That is, experience testifies strongly to
the fact that miracles never occur, laws of nature are never violated.
5. Therefore, we are never justified in believing in miracles, but we are justified in believing in the naturalness of all events.
Because we have enormous evidence in favor of the uniformity of nature, every miracle report must be weighed against that preponderance and be found wanting. Or, at any rate, it must be found wanting unless we have some reason for thinking that the falsehood of the testimony would itself be miraculous. Thus, as Hume writes: That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more marvelous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of argument, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior. The best one can hope for, then, is a kind of agnostic standoff. But what if we believe that we personally have beheld a miracle? Aren’t we in that case justified in believing that a miracle has occurred? No, for given the principle that every time we pursue an event far enough, we discover it to have a natural cause, we are still not justified in believing the event to be a miracle. Rather we ought to look further until we discover the natural cause—unless, again, we have very good reason for thinking that the event’s having a natural cause would somehow be miraculous.
Our second reading in this section is a contemporary defense of Hume’s line of reasoning by the late J. L. Mackie of Oxford University, a man who loved Hume and exemplified his thought. Mackie argues that the evidence for miracles will never in practice be very great. The argument is epistemological, not onto logical. That is, whereas miracles may be logically possible (and may indeed have occurred), we are never justified in believing in one. The concept of a miracle is a coherent one; but, Mackie argues, the double burden of showing both that the event took place and that it violated the laws of nature will be extremely hard to lift, for ‘‘whatever tends to show that it would have been a violation of natural law tends for that very reason to make it most unlikely that it actually happened.’’ Correspondingly, the deniers of miracles have two strategies of defense. They may argue that the event took place but was not a violation of a law of nature (the event simply followed an unknown law of nature); or they can admit that if the event had happened, it would indeed have been a violation of a law of nature, but for that reason, ‘‘there is a very strong presumption against its having happened, which it is most unlikely that any testimony will be able to out weigh.’’
In our third reading, Peter van Inwagen attacks Hume’s argument. Hume’s argument, as we have seen, rests in part on the idea that miracles are the sorts of things that run significantly contrary to our experience. But, van Inwagen argues, it is hard to see what this idea really amounts to. Thus, he writes: It is very hard indeed to find a sense in which experience testifies in any direct or immediate sense that events of some sort never happen—or in which stories of events of some sort are contrary to experience. If direct, immediate experience testifies to anything (truly or falsely) its testimony seems to be essentially ‘‘positive’’: it testifies that events of certain sorts do happen. Failing to find any other sense of ‘‘contrary to experience’’ that could drive Hume’s argument, van Inwagen concludes that Hume’s argument is a failure.
References
Rea, M. & Pojman, L. P. (Eds.). (2014). Philosophy of religion: An anthology (7th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage, pp. 394-395; 457-460.

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