9

Can We Know God Directly?

People who appeal to religious experience as indicating the existence of God will sometimes deny that this is an argument. They mean to imply that their experience is more persuasive than any argument, that they just know there is a God because they experience him, and that’s that.

This claim does not hold water, for two reasons.

First, the theist who appeals to her own religious experience as evidence is usually talking to someone else who has not had any such experience. She is therefore offering her own experience as evidence of the existence of God, and this is nothing more nor less than an argument.

Second, while we can accept that someone who reports an experience has actually had that experience—we may assume that she is truthful and that her memory is good—the claim that the experience is an experience of God, a God who actually exists outside her imagination, is a fallible intellectual conclusion on her part.

Just as Monsieur Jourdain had been talking prose all his life without realizing it, the theist who appeals to her religious experience is offering an argument, whether she appreciates this fact or not.

Is Religious Experience a Form of Perception?

A standard argument for God goes like this:

Common-sense knowledge (there’s a tree in the yard) and scientific knowledge (water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen) both ultimately depend on the evidence of the five senses. Subject to certain precautions and conditions, we rely on the data we get by looking, listening, touching, and so forth. When people report that they have experienced God, they are similarly reporting their perceptions. So why shouldn’t we grant the reliability of these perceptions?

As Swinburne puts it, “Just as you must trust your five ordinary senses, so it is equally rational to trust your religious sense” (1996, p. 132).

Nearly everyone can see the tree in the yard, and can see it whenever they want to just by going and looking, whereas many people never report having perceived God, and the overwhelming majority don’t report that they can routinely perceive God. The theist’s response to this is that some kinds of perception (such as correctly ‘seeing’ what is under a microscope) require training and practice. By such arguments, it’s possible to show that there are parallels between perception of the physical world and ‘perception’ of the spirit world.

When we see a tree in the yard and conclude that there is, in fact, a tree in the yard, we are applying a theory, the theory that we are surrounded by physical objects. It may seem unfamiliar to call something we all take for granted a theory, but after all, we can reconsider what we have hitherto taken for granted, and in some cases, perhaps, reject it (as Neo does by popping the red pill in The Matrix).

In making sense of the experience of our senses, no other theory is a serious rival to the theory that there are physical objects. There is no need to belabor this point, as theists do not dispute it. When we turn to ‘religious experience’, however, the situation is different.

We can’t help noticing that the objects of religious ‘perception’ are a lot less well defined and more culturally molded than anything in the realm of common-sense knowledge. Numerous people—perhaps not a majority but certainly at least a very substantial minority—have had experiences they may variously describe as experiences of God, experiences of Heaven, peak experiences, mystical experiences, experiences of oneness with the cosmos, or transcendental experiences. In this broad sense, ‘religious experience’ is a normal human attribute, like love of music or delight in competitive games.

It looks very much as though these same kinds of experiences are interpreted, by people in theistic cultures, as experiences of God, and are interpreted by people in nontheistic cultures as experiences of something other than God. (Alternatively, it’s possible that the experiences may differ somewhat, and the quality of the experience is itself partly determined by the prior interpretation.)

Thus, Buddhists have such experiences, and many Buddhists systematically cultivate such experiences. There is a long history of Buddhist discussion of what happens in meditation and other ‘altered states’, but no Buddhist ever interprets such an experience as an experience of God, because Buddhism rejects belief in God and people raised in Buddhist cultures just don’t think in terms of God. I have never heard of a case where some practitioner of Buddhist meditation says, ‘Because of my recent experiences, I now see that Buddhism is in error: there is, after all, an almighty Creator God’.

My impression (which could be tested by quantitative research) is that, inasmuch as there is input from the raw experience itself, as opposed to cultural preconceptions, it is rather away from the God of classical theism and towards something more general and more diffuse. In Abrahamic cultures, mystics tend to be suspected of the heresy of pantheism.

Roman Catholics (as well as Orthodox Christians and Anglo-Catholics) routinely report religious experiences in which they perceive the Blessed Virgin, whereas Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Zoroastrians never report anything remotely like that. There are people living in communities in which witchcraft is believed to be omnipresent, and in such communities (whether they also believe in God or not), individuals frequently report that they have directly felt the baleful influence of witches. In cultures where there is no such belief, there are no such reports. Everything that can be said in favor of people’s reports that they have experienced God can equally well be said in favor of other people’s reports that they have experienced abduction by space aliens, with its attendant surgical operations in space ships. Yet most believers in experiencing God are skeptical of reports of alien abductions.

If only a quarter of the world’s population reported that they could see oak trees, while the other three-quarters just insisted there was just nothing there, this would be an amazing anomaly in the realm of sensory experience, of a kind which has never actually occurred. The analogy with ordinary sense experience is not, after all, very tight. But no doubt this could be accounted for somehow—it would be unreasonable to insist that religious perception be exactly like ordinary sense-perception. The theist could claim, for instance, that Buddhists never perceive God because when they meditate they are doing something analogous to ‘not looking in the right place’.

Delusional Interpretations of Experiences

We have experiences which we classify as perception, and we have other experiences which we don’t classify as perception. If we have the experience of seeing a tree, we usually accept that there is a tree there to be seen, whereas if we ‘see stars’ from receiving a bang on the head, we don’t accept that those stars are there to be seen. The ‘stars’ are just products of our own internal make-up; they are not entities existing outside of us. The question arises, with religious experience, whether there is ‘really something out there’ or whether the experience is of something internal, without an external object.

By taking ‘perceive’ in a broad sense, any experience may be described as perception. If you feel cold, you may think the temperature of the air has dropped, but a thermometer may convince you that you’re wrong. You may then say that you wrongly supposed that you were perceiving a lower atmospheric temperature. You were really perceiving a sickness of your body.

If I have a toothache and you have a toothache, this doesn’t mean that we’re perceiving the same thing. I am perceiving something wrong with one of my teeth, whereas you are perceiving something wrong with one of your teeth. The fact that the two experiences are similar does not mean that both relate to the same object. If there were some environmental features, say electrically charged rocks, which brought on toothache in people who went near them, then we might say that two people having toothaches were perceiving the same thing: electrically charged rocks. But since nothing like this actually occurs (as far as I know), we say that two people having toothaches are aware of something within themselves that just coincidentally happens to be similar.

There are science-fiction stories in which ordinary people encounter beings who can read their minds and talk to them telepathically. Usually in such stories, the people picking up these telepathic messages are in no doubt that this is what they are doing—the messages are so specific, concrete, detailed, and testable in their implications, that there is no question about it. But suppose someone starts to receive what are seemingly telepathic messages, but has doubts about this. They begin to wonder: Are these messages what they seem, or is that a misinterpretation on my part; are they really more like vivid dreams or hallucinations?

How would the person in this predicament decide? At first he might be influenced by the intensity and vividness of the perceptions. But this is not reliable. We know from the experiences of people who have swallowed drugs like LSD, or have had their brains stimulated by the instruments of brain surgeons, that the most powerful impression of ‘reality’ can be created artificially. We also know that a minority of people (some of them diagnosed as ‘psychotic’) frequently have these experiences without artificial aids.

In science-fiction stories where people start to receive telepathic communications from alien beings (or, as in The Chrysalids, from mutated humans) the question usually doesn’t arise whether they are deluded. The reason is clear: the messages cohere and provide information that is sometimes independently confirmed. However, outside fiction, whenever God speaks to devout believers, he always talks exactly like a fortune cookie. He rarely says anything specific enough to be tested, and when he does, what he says is wrong approximately fifty percent of the time.

Of course, the experience itself is real. That’s not in dispute. What’s in dispute is the interpretation the person has placed upon the experience, the inferences he has made about entities existing outside himself.

If the person’s own conviction that he has perceived God, or angels, or the Blessed Virgin, is not itself evidence that he has really done so, what would count as evidence? The answer, of course, is—we all know this already—independent corroboration.

Corroboration does not in itself directly substantiate a theory. What is involved in corroboration is always (at least tacitly) a comparison of two or more theories. We compare the theory that religious experiences are forms of perception of external realities with the theory that religious experiences are essentially private and subjective, that is, they are primarily perceptions of internal realities, realities within oneself, probably associated with realities within one’s brain. We fail to find a single piece of evidence that can most easily be explained on the theory that these experiences are perceptions of external realities, whereas we find many pieces of evidence that can most easily be explained by supposing that these experiences are internal.

A theist might claim that my request for corroboration merely shows my materialist bias. I ask for perceptions of a spirit world to be corroborated by observable indications within the physical world, but I do not ask for perceptions of the physical world to be corroborated by observable indications within the spirit world. Hence, I am not being fair to the spirit world.

However, theists began this discussion by claiming that religious experience is a form of perception, similar to ordinary perception of the physical world. Their argument fully acknowledges that everyday perception of material objects is the gold standard of ‘perception’. The materialist bias is in the theist’s argument from the beginning. Furthermore, on a practical level, if you and I disagree and try to resolve our differences, it’s a good idea to start from those areas where we agree. In the Abrahamic world—the world of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—there’s virtually no disagreement that the realm of physical objects does exist, whereas there always are, and always have been, people who suspect that there is no spirit realm.

We might conceivably meet someone, perhaps an adherent of some kind of mystical sect, who maintained: ‘The entire physical world is just one vast hallucination. It has no existence and all the evidence of our senses means nothing. But there is a real world of which we can become aware, a world of gods and other spirits.’ This doesn’t sound very promising. I would ask such a person: ‘Why do you think that?’ and take it from there.

Some advocates of the Religious Experience Argument seem to think that we accept the evidence of our senses because each act of physical perception is, so to speak, sharp, crisp, and compelling. As you may have guessed, I reject this. The vivid nature of an individual instance of perception, in my view, counts for next to nothing. However, to those entangled in this way of thinking, I point out that to liken the devout believer’s experience of God to the ordinary person’s experience of seeing a tree looks like a bit of a stretch.

We do have information about what religious experience is like. Former believers are able to testify to what the discourse about such experiences used to be like for them. Believers talk among themselves about such experiences, and their conversation never has any of the precision of a discussion of the buds opening on that tree in the yard or of the sadly wayward brass section in last night’s performance of the Brahms Requiem. They also report on their arduous struggles to retain their ‘faith’. No one who can see a tree in the yard talks about struggling mightily to keep his faith in the existence of the tree. We can form a fair notion of what the devout believer’s ‘experience of God’ is like. It sounds, by turns, very much like wishing hard, or compulsively pretending, or claiming to experience something that it is felt to be meritorious to experience, or getting a thrill out of daringly affirming something evidently untrue (‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus’), or regressing to the mental state of the five-year-old who says he has a big, chatty, invisible companion.

Just suppose that someone who claims to have directly perceived God really has directly perceived something external to himself. There would still be the possibility that he has radically misconstrued what he has perceived. Sensory perception does not automatically come with an accurate analysis of the object perceived. When I see a tree, I see a machine for using sunlight to make sugar, but this information is not given to me directly in the act of seeing the tree. When someone perceives something they take to be God, they obviously cannot immediately perceive that this entity made the universe and knows everything.

The Lesson of Nunez

‘The Country of the Blind’ is one of H.G. Wells’s most intriguing and memorable stories. Climbing in the Andes, a man named Nunez falls over a precipice and lands in an isolated valley inhabited by a population of humans, every one of whom is totally blind. Not only are they blind, but they have no notion of what it would be to see. When Nunez tries to explain to them that he can see, they take him to be insane, and eventually they propose that he must be operated on surgically, to remove his eyes, which are apparently the cause of his wild delusions. This story, written by an atheist, has been cited by theists as a good illustration of why we should credit the testimony of religious experience.³⁸

But Nunez would easily be able to prove to these blind people that his ability to see was no delusion. ‘Just stand over there, twenty feet away from me, and I’ll tell you exactly what you’re doing.’ At first, such demonstrations might be seen as tricks. But they would be so reliable and consistent that given half an hour’s experimentation there could be little doubt remaining. This person, it would be clear, has an ability that no one else has.

One brief attempt of this approximate sort is made in the Wells story, but Wells the adroit story-teller makes it come out that the demonstration is unconvincing. However this failed demonstration does occur, and both Nunez and the blind people readily understand what is being attempted—the corroboration of an apparently fantastic claim. Wells had to include some such incident, or the reader would think of it for himself, and dismiss the story as unconvincing. But a lot of narrative skill is needed to make the reader accept that the sighted man could not convince the blind people he can do something they can’t.

Among other elements, Wells’s story is helped along by the fact that the blind people’s non-visual senses are prodigiously developed, and that they sleep by day and stay awake by night, when Nunez’s vision is not so sharp, furthermore they have no windows on their buildings, so that the interiors are in darkness. But an even more fundamental premiss of the story is that no one in the blind population is a dissident thinker. Everyone is enthusiastically orthodox in rejecting, not only the possibility that Nunez can see, but also many other facts such as the possibility that there might be other humans outside the valley.

Now compare this with the theistic parallel. The conventional view in our world is, not that there is no spirit world, but that there is such a world. Millions of people are eager to believe in such a world, and seize upon everything that could, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be construed as evidence for it. Transparent frauds like John Edward and Sonya Fitzpatrick easily win the loyalty of millions of TV viewers.

Just imagine, for comparison with Nunez, some religious entrepreneur proposing to a number of journalists, theologians, or other credulous types, that he could demonstrate the existence of supernatural phenomena only at dead of night, only under very strict and unusual condition s, and only if they will pay attention over a long period of time. They would be falling over themselves to witness and document this marvel, and to give him the benefit of any possible doubt. The dogmatism of the blind people in the Wells story is all in the wrong direction. In our world, people thirst mightily for some corroborative demonstration, but no corroborative demonstration has been produced. Further, the story would lose all plausibility without the feature that the blind people are greatly superior to Nunez in their senses of hearing and touch—do we want to say that people who have religious experiences are always deficient in their ordinary perceptions of the physical world?

And so the example of ‘The Country of the Blind’, properly considered, tells against the theistic interpretation of religious experience.