The evidential value of religious experiences

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to answer the following two closely related questions: (a) Are there any experiences which provide evidential support for religious beliefs? (b) If so then how, generally speaking, do they provide such support? As I am using the expression, a religious belief is any belief in the existence of God, disembodied human souls, angels, or other beings that could be termed supernatural or immaterial in the relevant senses of these terms. I am using the expression "religious belief in a very broad sense. My main reason for doing so is that, as I shall argue later in the paper, the beliefs which I am calling religious can best be defended on the basis of experience if all of them are treated together as a class. I will use the expression "religious experience" to mean any experience that by itself or in conjunction with other experiences may appear to provide evidential support for a religious belief. There is a special philosophical problem in regard to the support for religious beliefs on the basis of experience primarily because the kinds of experience that can be appealed to in any attempt to provide such support are not shared by the common run of people. The relative numbers of people who have any of the various kinds of religious experience do, of course, vary considerably from one kind of experience to another. Some occur to only, say, one person in ten or twenty thousand (e.g., mystical experience), while others occur to, say, one person in 3 or 4 (e.g., the apparent sensing of God's presence in the appreciation of nature). But for none of these kinds of experiences are there criteria for a "normal observer" or a "normal subject." That is to say, there is no objectively specifiable set of circumstances such that should a normal human being be in those circumstances, that person would have the religious experience in question, were the experience genuine. As a consequence of this, the sort of philosophical treatment that is appropriate for assessing the evidential value of experiences such as seeing colors and feeling pain under normal circumstances is not appropriate regarding religious experiences. The claim in the preceding paragraph is made from a modern "sophisticated" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16:189-202 (1984). ©1 984 MartinusNijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.