The Argument from Religious Experience

As I suspected most of Con's attack seems to be on premise (D) with a little bit of (A) and (B) thrown in. I will be arguing that Con's arguments do not undermine the ARE.Inference to the Best ExplanationFollowing Con's numbering.#1 Con is mistaken here in that theism does not entail that there would not be religious experiences. Given that there are beings such as us - If we think that God is an all-good, personal being (as I defined him in the beginning of the debate) we might think that there are very good reasons think God would want to get in contact with his creations. As an all good being God has reason to value good states of affairs and want to actualize those state of affairs. Besides the value of having creatures who can display and actualize various good state of affairs (virtues like courage, sympathy, forgiving, compassion, etc), being in a state of affairs - a relationship - with those beings would be a great good in and of itself. The way persons (as God is personal) enter into relationships with other persons are multitudinous but obviously they would need to experience each other as a prerequisite for entering into that relationship. That would seem to entail that if God and finite persons like us exist there is great value in having personal relationships between God and finite persons and so God would want to actualize that state of affairs. #2 Here is where the analogy and similarities between sense experience (SE) and religious experience (RE, of which TE is a subset) - which Con did not challenge, I might add - are useful. Con argues that naturalism is simpler because it does not have to suppose that TE is of anything external; it's all internal. But that is like saying that solipsism is simpler than the hypothesis that there exists an external world of mind independent matter because SE would all be internal; it's not external. If Con would not say that the simplicity of solipsism in this sense is reason to prefer it over naturalism then we have seen no reason to prefer naturalism over theism in this respect. And Con seems to simply beg the question here in saying that theism invokes non physical entities not know otherwise; of course if something like interactive dualism is correct than we have abundant evidence for non-physical entities interacting with brains.#3 I will get to this later on and address it more fully as Con brings up this topic of religious diversity again. Again the analogy with SE comes into play here; why should we expect that just because there is one object that experience be more or less uniform? If we set a few people in different places in the world who had no knowledge of the earth as a unified whole, they might indeed say that all these regions of earth (the desert, the mountain, the ocean, the forest, etc) were not spatiotemporally connected. In short the earth is too big to be perceived by just one perceive. The same with God - she might be too big to just be perceived by one perceiver.(a) Since God is the transcendent and holy creator, numinous experience and experience of contingency are to be expected. (b) If man is created in the image of God and their selves are ultimately grounded in God’s sustaining activity, then God can also be approached from within (theistic mysticism). (c) Since God is Himself the Absolute Good, it is no surprise to have experiences of His unconditional imperative as well as love and succor, and also mediated TEs through conscience and morality. (d) Since God is personal, we can have experiences of personal encounter, divine speech, emotional healing, and so on. (e) God’s wisdom and power over nature makes it possible for Him to reveal His purposes through providential and miraculous acts (mediated and interpretive TE). (f) God as the source of personality and community nicely explains the personalizing character of TEs and the occurrence of corporate TEs. (g) God as Redeemer is correlated with our experiences of grace and conversion. (h) God can act directly on the mind, and hence intuitive apprehension is possible. [1] #4 Con argues that naturalism has significant basis on pre existing knowledge; this would be true had there not been the "exclusive" clause here:"The hypothesis that everything within the universe (including mind & subjects) obeys natural laws exclusively,..."There is no possible way one could know that. The theist and naturalist can agree there are natural processes; no argument there. But Con goes beyond the evidence and posits that nothing above or beyond these natural processes interacts with the universe. That is exactly the question at hand, so it should be an open question or Con would be guilty of assuming his conclusion in his premise.#5 Again, given that there are physical finite beings on theism, then I don't see how this provides any advantage to naturalism here as we would also expect that physical laws will in principle effect the mind.OverviewCon is mistaken here; if there is good reason to think (believe) that religious experiences are veridical, then it follows that the object of the veridical experience exists. That's just what veridicality means. I am having an experience of you, and it is a veridical experience, that entails that you exist.Type PCTCon says that human construct models of reality and these models develop over the course of interacting with reality and this offers PFJ for beliefs about reality but when we think about it it we see that Con actually can't accept this model of the PFJ of beliefs about reality without implicitly relying on something like the Type PCT. Since we have to start somewhere in constructing our models of that also means that we have to start with an experience - or set of experiences - that we initially give PFJ - that is that we initially trust. And these base set of experiences have to be taken as innocent until proven guilty otherwise they would not serve as a base for the models that need developing. But that means that we have to accept that how that experiences appears to us is how that aspect of reality it represents actually is. But we can only do that that if we accept the Type PCT. So far from undermining the Type PCT, Con actually gives support for it.Type PCT deals with non-inferential beliefs - beliefs not inferred from anything else. Much like with SE - when I see something red I form the belief that it is red based on that experience. What I don't do is infer from something appearing "red-ly" to the belief that that thing is indeed red. The same with Con's computer screen example. There doesn't seem to be any separate attribution with your synthetic belief about that set of sensations.Con's examples don't affect the PFJ accorded to basic experiences by the Type PCT one bit, as the Type PCT admits that the PFJ is defeasible. Meaning, if I see a stick in water that appears bent then I have PFJ for believing that that stick is indeed bent. But supposing I learn later on that due to the properties of water and light that the stick would appear bent even if it was not, I no longer should believe that stick is bent on the basis of my seeing the stick bent in the water.TE is a well-established type of experienceWhile religious experience often does not appear uniform many who have studied the literature on RE concluded, that a common core to these religious experiences can be identified:(i) the mundane world of physical bodies, physical processes, and narrow centres of consciousness is not the whole or ultimate reality. (ii) . . . there is a far deeper ‘true self ’ which in some way depends on and participates in the ultimate reality. (iii) Whatever the ultimate reality is holy, eternal, and of supreme value; it can appear to be more truly real than all else, since everything else depends on it. (iv) This holy power can be experienced as an awesome, loving, pardoning, guiding (etc.) presence with whom individuals can have a personal relationship . . . (v) . . . at least some mystical experiences are experiences of a very intimate union with the holy power . . . (vi) Some kind of union or harmonious relation with the ultimate reality is the human being’s summum bonum, his final liberation or salvation, and the means by which he discovers his ‘true self ’ or ‘true home’. [2] And just as when we have conflicting claims about regular objects of sense experience we usually try to sift through them in order to identify a common core. For example: Babylonian astronomers said there were holes moving through the firmament, Greek astronomers said there were physical objects moving through the heavens. Just because these claims conflicted doesn't mean they weren't referring to the same objects in space. Con seems mistaken here. With sense experience, we do not directly experience other peoples' experiences - we can only experience our own. What we do is take the testimony of other people who claim to have the same general type of sense experience as you and compare them. This is the same as what we do with religious experience. So if Con's argument about RE being subjective, personal, and not shareable works against RE it also works against SE, in any case.And, again, SE doesn't escape from the objection that is largely dependent on socio-cultural factors. It is widely accepted in philosophy that all perception is theory laden. [3] Furthermore, psychologists have argued that humans are not tabula rasa - blank slate. We come with inbuilt interpretation mechanisms that help us readily make sense of experiences. That is, we couldn't even understand we are experiencing without these factors. Much could be the same with religious experiences; religious interpretive structures could aid in helping on interpret an experience of God.Sources[1] TBCNT - (Kindle Locations 13497-13505). [2] TBCNT - (Kindle Locations 13933-13940). [3] http://plato.stanford.edu...