This is part of a series on C. Stephen Layman’s excellent Letters to Doubting Thomas: A Case for the Existence of God, published 2007 by Oxford University Press. The index can be found here.
Layman begins Chapter 2 with what will become an argument from religious experience by drawing heavily from Richard Swinburne and William Alston to prepare the ground. A few terms first:
The Principle of Credulity
From Swinburne’s The Existence of God:
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 (that is, 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 (that is, 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 (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic); what one seems to perceive is probably so. (p. 303)
There’s probably no need for me to summarize, but the implication for religious belief is that, if one has an experience of the supernatural, which, in the absence of defeaters or reasons to think it suspect, one can rationally accept it as true, just as we would in accepting the existence of a tree we see before us. Layman spends some time to address the challenge of radical skeptics, pointing out that they accept some form of the Principle of Credulity in respect of their introspection and cognitive experience (p. 46).
The Principle of Testimony
Swinburne again:
Another inductive criterion which almost everyone accepts is what I called the Principle of Testimony: that, other things being equal, if someone tells you that p, then probably p. What other people tell us is the main source of our knowledge about the world beyond our immediate experience. Our complex beliefs about the history of the human race long before our birth; the geography of the Earth beyond our narrow experience; the structure of the heavens and of the atom come from what others have told us. (p. 49, Faith and Reason)
Specifying this principle for religious experiences: if agent A tells you that he experienced E, then probably he experienced E and E is present. You may notice that this principle includes the Principle of Credulity within it; if you’d rather, you can accept that if agent A tells you that he experienced E, then probably he experienced E. So, all other things being equal, we have no a priori reason to reject the reports of mystics and others.
The Foundations of the Argument
On Layman’s account, then, in order to accept religious experiences as veridical we need three principles. Two have already been mentioned, and the third is the idea that sense perception and religious perception appear to be analogous. If there are no significant disanalogies, we can accept this latter concept on the strength of PC, since it appears that religious experiences are a form of perception (and are therefore probably perception).
A few obstacles to accepting religious experience
Thomas puts forward a list of objections to accepting religious experience as veridical, the first being that religious experiences are suspect by virtue of interpretation. Layman simply responds by pointing out that, to the degree this is true, the same holds for sensory experience. While this satisfies Thomas, a better point might be mustered here: “It’s not clear how it would be possible for finite human beings to experience the presence of a being who is supposedly infinite in power, knowledge, goodness, etc”(p. 50).
Both Layman and Alston admit to helplessness on this point; there doesn’t appear to be any faculty we have that can detect the attributes of God.Layman points out that such a faculty wouldn’t be impossible, given God’s existence, quoting Alston that “the main point here is that the credentials of this alleged mode of perception do not depend on our understanding of how it is effected.”
Layman argues that one need not infer dispositions like omnipotence and omnibenevolence, but rather that, just as we can apprehend certain qualities from sense experience, we can do the same for experiences of God. But we never actually do apprehend powers or dispositions directly from objects external to us; for example, the potential energy of the top floor of a skyscraper is not visible to the eye. So it is with the intelligence, kindness and deceit of those around us; such qualities are mere inferences. Moreover, the direct apprehension of a being’s qualities are only available to that being, such that this sort of perception is only available for introspection. Nicholas Everitt makes the same case in The Non-Existence of God:
The reasoning would have some such form as the following:
(1) I had some sort of conscious experience.
(2) I would not have had this conscious presence unless God were good. So:
(3) God is good.
Consider a parallel case: I look at Fred and thereby acquire the belief that Fred is good. How is this belief to be justified? On the assumption that I am not actually witnessing Fred do or say anything which is good, the justification must surely refer (a) to Fred’s visible appearance, and (b) to some correlation between people having that sort of appearance and their being good. In other words, the justification of the belief requires some inference. It appears, then, that despite the protestations of those who appeal to religious experience to ground a belief in God, we are entitled to treat the appeal to experience as essentially argumentative or inferential in form…(p. 154)
This is where things begin to get a little odd. In response to Thomas’s challenge of religious diversity, Layman begins to articulate a set of criteria to tease out support for Theism from diverse religious experiences: “…the more tradition-specific the terminology of the report, the more likely it contains interpretation or inference (going beyond what was actually presented in the experience)…for example, suppose the word Allah is used but other aspects of the report indicate that the experience was of an infinitely powerful and merciful being”(p. 56). This seems to be more-or-less flagrant question-begging. For example, it’s also possible that there is no inference occurring here at all, that an infinitely powerful and merciful being whose identity as Allah was directly apprehended. The issue here is why one should accept Layman’s criteria at all; they’re deliberately configured to deliver results in traditional Theism’s favour.
Besides, if one can directly apprehend God through some supernatural faculty, then one would also expect the capacity to directly ascertain God’s identity (be it Allah or otherwise), especially given that a benevolent deity would prefer humans to avoid these sorts of mix-ups.
The following statement is in bold because it needed to be conspicuous:
Mr. Layman disregards the Principle of Testimony when convenient
Aren’t we to accept peoples’ reports as probably true? If so, and Mr. Layman would have us believe we should, then on what grounds ought we to say that such and such a person did not have an experience with such and such an attribute, despite that person reporting otherwise? Cultural conditioning? Layman’s monotheism is itself culturally-conditioned, so why should I eliminate experiential details to reveal Theism? Why don’t I simply eliminate non-Hindu elements as unwarranted inferences? This is how religious apologists the world over deal with religious diversity; Mr. Layman offers no reason to prefer his generalized Theistic criteria over what, say, a New-Ager would distinguish as genuine and inferential. Perhaps he will answer this critical question in the next chapter.
Till next…
Adamoriens 