Are Religious Experiences Proof? Three Kinds of Evidence

Born a sheep in a fold shepherded by an anthropomorphic God who didn't hold up to critical inquiry, I became agnostic in my teens, but I was a convinced atheist with regard to the god of Moses, the all-smiting Sky King who offends morality as much as common sense (if that is possible). A white-bearded genocidal Paul Bunyan enthroned on puffy clouds compels disbelief. Anthropomorphism may be unavoidable because of human vanity, but it works only if bracketed as metaphor. Otherwise, it's a high road to atheism. Still, I hunger for some reason to entertain the half-comforting, half-absurd tropes of the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad and understand at least three experiential bases for belief.

     I recently discussed the easiest one. It's pretty simple, even cold blooded. Even if the existence of God (however defined) can't be proved, still, without some overarching value system, life can seem absurd, the empty repetition that Albert Camus relates to the myth of Sisyphus. Belief creates a theoretical framework that enables us to interpret life as meaningful, what James Hall describes as "a network of intention, fulfillment, and frustration" (p. 224). It underwrites a "language game" that grows value in the otherwise sterile ground of scientific materialism (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/07/if-creator-of-universe-god-of-judaism.html).

      Some reductive versions of this justification, such as Kant's, make meaning all about morals, but the problem of Job can't be left out of the equation, his satisfaction at hearing a voice from the whirlwind. Anomie hurts. A vacuum of meaning can kill, so many people of faith--maybe a majority--embrace it as an antidote to absurdity. The salve of ritual and the image of a patron upstairs can help us through the valley of the shadow of death. Marx called it "the opiate of the proletariate." I think it runs deeper. It's no mere fabrication of the rich for the purpose of hoarding economic toys. Even a brimming toy box can't defeat the absurdity of meaningless existence. Even the rich grow sick, die, and wonder why. Belief grounds ritual participation and morallty that make life not so tragic and confusing.

     The above has to do with the effects on ourselves, our world-view, of believing that there's a benign order in the universe--maybe an orderer whom we can trust personally. It's a way of feeling in relation to a hypothetical state of affairs. It's quite different the second "argument from experience," the sense of having actually met God, the sense that prayers are two-way communication. Some people not only speak to the beyond, but hear answers. "Do this." "Stop doing that." "It's OK, son." Usually mundane things, nothing prophetic, but feelings of guidance, accusation, or blessing that deeply affect them because of the divine source. Or maybe the messages seem divinely sourced because of their deep affects; it's a logical circle. 

     One woman in discussion group with me remembered the day that God "showed up" (her words) in her bedroom (apparently an intuited presence, not a whiskered gentleman). She begged him to forgive her sins. Other members of the group a shared times God "showed up" in their lives, but their experiences were less corporeal and local, not so much about omnipresence squeezed into a bedroom, but more about intuitive "soundbites" felt to transcend the natural order. Bishop Steven Charleston assumes that divine soundbites are common experiences (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/06/hearing-voice-of-god.html):

     "Spirituality," Charleston wrote, "is a message that many of us receive from somewhere else, from Someone else, from a source and power beyond our own intellect or comprehension. We believe we have experienced these messages; we believe that we have heard the voice of God, perhaps only in snippets, in sound bites, in digital flashes of intuition in our brains, but we are convinced it is there and it is real” [italics mine].

     This kind of experience--which could be interpreted as impulses from the unconscious--seems to occur on a continuum from Jehovah-in-the-room encounters to sudden bright ideas. The degree of our inclination to interpret such things supernaturally seems to determine whether a digital flash is God or not, and this is conditioned by culture and personality. Suppose that the woman who sensed God in her bedroom and sought forgiveness had been a Hindu or a convinced atheist. Her response to the same intuition would surely have been different. "Vishnu" might have showed up--and not with a burden of Original Sin--or maybe she'd believe she was suffering a mental breakdown. 

     There seems to be very little objective, structural content in such experiences. All St. Teresa of Avila saw was a golden light.

Even the raw experience--all that can be known of it--filters into the conscious through the deeper layers of the mind, formed and colored  by a lifetime of associations and assumptions. It's subjective. Bertrand Russell puts it bluntly in his book, Religion and Science: "From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes." Subjective experience, especially unshared, cannot yield objective truth.

     Of course, Russell begins his famous quotation with "from a scientific point of view," words often left off when it appears in posters and memes, and, in the same chapter, he affirms the truism that "science is not enough" because it "does not include art, or friendship, and other valuable elements in life." He doesn't dismiss everything that can't be quantified, measured, and replicated, but we still have the case of the drunk seeing snakes--an apparition that nobody takes for real, even the drunk after he sobers up. He gladly embraces a construction of reality without snakes. In contrast, the mystic embraces his construction of reality because the mystical vision is deeply satisfying. Calling it pleasant is, from all accounts, an understatement. It is said to be a happiness compared to which all other pleasures are dim shadows. The difference between drunk and mystic may be indistinguishable from a scientific point of view, but only one generates belief. Heaven is a blessing. Snakes are a curse.

     I admit to being a mystical window-shopper, to standing on the sidewalk and longing for the transcendence on display but unable or unwilling to afford the purchase price and ashamed to enter the shop without it. I take Russell's point but can't help myself. A near-convert to the Bhagavad Gita, convinced that the Christian author of The Cloud of Unknowing knows something, I still meditate very rarely and remain a convinced but second-hand mystic. 

     But (to wander back some semblance of a conclusion) I understand three common experiential bases for religion: (1) the sense of meaning, as opposed to absurdity, that a theistic hypothesis underwrites, (2) the experience of soundbites or visions from an inexplicable beyond, and (3) rare and elusive mystical encounters (even unification) with apparent absolute Being. 

     There may be a blurry continuum between the last two. Both are subjective. They don't "prove" the existence of what they reference even as they persuade people experiencing them. Your supernatural experience doesn't demand disproof from me: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A religious vision has no more force than a solitary sighting of a ghost in an old house. How persuasive it is to the one experiencing it depends on prior belief, the need it satisfies, and its raw force. Unlike some people I know, I don't take mundane events--say, a near-miss in traffic--as supernatural manifestations, but if I meditated and felt unity with eternal Being, I don't see how I could resist.