Countering the ‘Nothing But’ Argument

Abstract

My purpose in this article is to counter one type of argument often put forward in order to debunk religious experience. Those making this argument most aggressively are dogmatic naturalists who offer alternative explanations of religious experience, and then announce that, regardless of what the believer may think, all that is really going on is nothing but electrical and chemical changes in the brain, or regression to an infantile state (to mention only two examples). There are also, of course, people who are generally skeptical about religious experience and who think that it is impossible to decide between naturalistic and theistic explanations. And those of a Calvinist bent may have theologically based doubts about religious experience as a result of their deeply suspicious attitude toward the religion of the “natural man.” In this essay, I will discuss the naturalistically based doubts and not the theologically based ones, because the latter raise a whole different set of issues. I focus on Christian religious experience, and have written the paper as though it is addressed to an intelligent believer (sometimes addressed as “you”) who has had at least some experiences which he takes to be experiences of God, but who feels a bit shaken and at a loss about how to defend his conviction that he was, indeed, experiencing God against these types of doubts. Philosophers, in part under the influence of William James, have tended to concentrate on the dramatic, Damascus Road types of religious experiences, but that, I think, is misleading. Experiences of God are often quite subtle, and for that reason it is easy to begin to wonder afterwards whether what you experienced was really the presence of God, or whether there might be some other explanation for it.2 Naturalists who make the “nothing but” argument are not merely arguing that on occasion you might take something to be an experience of a COUNTERING THE ‘NOTHING BUT’ ARGUMENT