The Argument from Religious Experience

Inference to Best Explanation1. This completely begs the question of moral cognitivism, and makes claims about what “good” and the nature of God is without any justification whatsoever. Assuming God is good, and thus the ultimate standard of good, there is no reason to believe that it has anything to do with our normative societal conception of “good”. Moreover even assuming this, Pro’s argument is complete speculation.2. Yes, solipsism is preferred by the law of parsimony, thus is conceded by Pro which hurts Pro’s case. Metaphysical naturalism is always going to be more parsimonious than theism since metaphysical naturalism depicts the natural world. Theism entails the natural world *plus* something else (be it separate entity in classical theism, or separate attributes, such as in pantheism etc.). All things equal, the simpler explanation is preferable. It doesn’t beg the question since God is by definition personal, mandating something extraneous to the natural universe.3. “The same with God - she might be too big to just be perceived by one perceiver” - this is the very definition of an ad hoc justification, lol. Naturalism very elegantly explains the diversity in religious experiences while theism needs to introduce extraneous explanations to account for the (massive) observed differences and flatly contradictory observations. One person observing water, and another ice isn’t inherently contradictory due to the contradiction needing to be in the same spacio-temoral location. However, observing Thor as the greatest being and observing Jesus as the greatest being is inherently contradictory. Different moral natures is inherently contradictory, etc. Witnessing Allah by definition the only God is going to contradict another witnessing Vishnu, etc.4. Our pre-existing knowledge is that the world behaves naturalistically, we can predict what stuff will do with existing physics. Thus, an ontology based on this pre-existing knowledge is preferable to one that directly contradicts it. Thus, Pro completely misses the point, since I am contrasting metaphysical naturalism with theism based on our pre-existing knowledge on the virtue of being a better explanation.5. Only if one proposes a specific form of theism, thus its ad hoc, theism doesn’t necessarily entail such, but naturalism does.Argument From Religious ExperienceOverviewHaving “good” reason to think religious experiences are verdical =/= that object exists. That’s the fundamental divide between epistemology and ontology which Pro has completely ignored. The argument does not, and cannot in principle establish the likelihood of an experience being verdical, that’s the entire problem.Moreover, having PFJ for belief that God exists doesn’t entail that one has sufficient justification for belief that God exists. For sufficient justification that God exists it needs to be established that at least epistemologically it is more likely that God exists than he doesn’t. PFJ may well raise the likelihood of God existing than without PFJ, but justification would require knowledge of prior probabilities, and other factors regarding religious experience, which even Richard Swinburne implicitly concedes.[12]Prima Facie JustificationJust how on earth does PFJ justification gives one “good” reason to belief the religious experience is verdical. Given that prima facie justification is primarily intuitive, which is usually incorrect outside of our everyday experience. Methodologies such as inference to best explanation, inductive or deductive reasoning are much more potent than PFJ since PFJ itself has no justification in that it relates at all to reality. PFJ itself is thus unjustified, it automatically begs the question.Logical Structure & RephrasingRewriting Pro’s argument without changing the content yields the following:1.If it seems (epistemically) to S that p on the basis of a noetic experience E, and E belongs to a well-established type of experience, then S has PFJ for belief that p2. TE belongs to a well-established type of experience. 3. It seems (epistemically) to S that God exists (p) on the basis of a noetic experience E (TE). 4. If S has PFJ for belief that p and there are no defeaters, then S has justified belief that p5. There are no defeaters for PFJ for belief that p6. Therefore, (E) S is justified to believe that God exists.I have separated Pro’s premise (A) into two portions, the portion that argued for PFJ (P1), and the portion that argued for justified belief (P4). This is logically possible because of the law of simplification.[13] Thus, my attack on “[A] Type-PCT is correct” will be on each premise (1 & 4). Note the argument is logically invalid unless “there are no defeaters” operator is substituted for “The TE, E, is not defeater” in premise D, thus this has been corrected.Type-PCTPremise 4Pro is ambiguous by what he means by “which is sufficient for justified belief that p simpliciter in the absence of defeaters” I can only assume it refers to the experience itself from the context. IF it is the latter, then there is no reason to accept this premise since it assumes the following premise:"If the experience is not verdical, then there will exist defeater(s)"However, we simply have no reason to believe this will be the case in principle, let alone in practice. If somebody had a vivid experience of flying, which he recalled later in life, and the experience felt real, then there would be virtually no defeaters for an experience that is obviously not verdicial. To make things worse, the production of false-memories, of which people clearly believed to be genuinely the case (problematic in court-trials & eye-witness testimony use) are not increasingly well documented and accepted.[14]Premise 1Note that Pro doesn’t affirm that we actually assume Type-PCT to make PFJ beliefs about reality in our everyday experience, thus most of Pro’s arguments in favour of accepting Type-PCT’s validity are flat out false. While I can agree that we do have to start somewhere in constructing our models of reality, Type-PCT is quite frankly an absurd place to start.Logically, the most obvious place to start is via. cogito ergo sum, where we can affirm our own existence, the subject, based off the perception of our incorrigible mental state. Note this doesn’t say anything to begin with about the external, but it is a starting point. Pro makes this massive error since basic beliefs refer to the experience itself. E.g. the content of the experience experience of having colour sensations of a TV is basic, but what those sensations ontologically represent is not basic.Pro simply asserts we assume Type-PCT in our everyday experience, but ignores my evidence that this is false even on a pragmatic level, our beliefs are formed from continued interaction with reality, with beliefs tested and challenged over and over again, with beliefs shaped by new experiences. Thus Pro’s “innocent until proven guilty” analogy is irrelevant since the defendant is not unindicted.Premise 2I would like to actually see Pro’s references on this, no studies/surveys/reviews were cited by Pro, only an inaccessible book reference.Does Pro have research on the types of TE that occur in:1.Different sociocultural environments2.That take into account prior beliefs/experiencesSince if TE was naturalistic, then we would expect them to be shaped mostly by sociocultural factors. Thus the commonalities are rather insignificant, IF strong commonalities were found that were both uniform across sociocultural environments and in fact violated what we would expect naturalistically form these environments, then Pro would have a strong case that there is a real shared experience. This is not what is observed however, and Pro concedes this “While religious experience often does not appear uniform”, thus we have good reason to reject TE being a well-established type of experience.Remember, Pro is attempting to draw an analogy here from noetic experiences in everyday life to TE, however when we have people confer on the experience they have of “seeing a television” or “experiencing a statue”, we simply do not get anywhere near this level of disagreement. People looking at the same statue are virtually all going to agree on its colour, shape, gender, location, details, etc. (even via. testimony, as Pro puts) Given religious experiences are attributed to virtually all major religions, then we have a massive diverse range of these experiences, more in line with what we would expect if naturalistic mechanisms were explanatory.Moreover, the very term “religious experience” is necessarily going to entail certain elements being the same (since religious automatically entails divinity), thus attributes generally associated with theism experience in religious experiences are going to be automatically favoured by the sharpshooter’s fallacy – since we have already selected a set of experiences we label as “religious”, thus the experiences are going to be biased automatically by that selection (e.g. surveying a selection of toddlers is automatically going to introduce a bias that the subjects are going to exhibit infantile behaviour).[15] Premise 5Pro’s objection to the fact that religious experiences being subjective, personal and not shared is a tu quoque fallacy, and doesn’t address the argument at hand, thus we can conclude that religious experience being personal, subjective and not (epistemlogically) shared indeed refutes premise 5.Also, Pro’s objection only works if one accepts epistemological solipsism, question begging - unless you are going to believe people are lying/in your imagination when they say “they see a black television with the football playing on it” which matches your sensory experience of it, then it’s a very reasonable defeater, much like it is in the case of dreams, abductions, etc.References12.http://tinyurl.com...13.http://tinyurl.com...14.http://tinyurl.com...15.http://tinyurl.com...