The Argument from Religious Experience

Now, on to the argument! I will now put forward an argument from religious experience to the reasonableness of believing in God. My expose will rely heavily on Kai-Man Kwan's presentation of the argument in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. The Argument from Religious Experience(A) Type PCT is correct. (B) TE is a well-established type of experience. (C) It seems (epistemically) to S that God exists on the basis of a TE, E. (D) The TE, E, is not defeated. Therefore, (E) S is justified to believe that God exists. [1]The controversial premises will be (A), (B), and (D). In this round I will only defend premises (A)and (B). (D) can come under fire in many ways but basically it would mean any sort of reason that undermines theistic experience (which is a subset of religious experience, hence "TE" from now on) - ranging from psychological explanations to reasons to doubt the epistemological force of TE such as religious diversity - can be brought forward. It would not be productive to try to anticipate what sort way my opponent will try to undermine (D), so I will respond accordingly. (C) should be utterly uncontroversial: it just states the simple empirical fact that people (millions and possibly billions, including yours truly) often believe that God exists on the basis of TE. (E) is merely the conclusion of the argument that one should accept if they accept (A) - (D). (A) Type PCT is correct. Type PCT - 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 p, which is sufficient for justified belief that p simpliciter in the absence of defeaters. [2]A noetic experience is an experience of which - on the basis of that experience - I spontaneously and am strongly inclined to believe the content of that experience. For example, if I am looking at TV, I am inclined to believed that I am actually watching TV based on that experience. That's an epistemic seeming about the external world. If I remember something from when I was 21 or I introspect about my current emotional/psychological state then those are epistemic seemings as well. All these types of experiences have in common is that the beliefs derived from them are typically called basic beliefs - they are non inferential beliefs and they depends on no other beliefs for their justification. [3] Noetic experience refers to these types of experiences (sense experience, introspection and memory) with a basic source of justification (BSJ). All BSJ have PFJ. PFJ is prima facie justification which is merely the notion that if an experience has PFJ they are considered innocent until proven guilty. Meaning we have reason to think that experience is veridical/probably true unless given good reasons to think it isn't probably true. Much like my experience that I am typing this debate right now has PFJ, the simple fact that I am experiencing me looking at the screen and the feeling of the keys under my finger gives me good reason to think that I am indeed typing this round; I should think it's very probably true that I am typing this round. Now, if I later found out that I was dreaming typing this or that someone had slipped me LSD then that would give me good reason to doubt that my experience of typing this round is good reason to believe that I am indeed doing so. So PFJ is defeasible - it can be defeated by other considerations. It should be no stretch of the imagination that most religious experience (and thus theistic experiences) would indeed fall into this category and thus it would be under the jurisdiction of the Type PCT. In the next section I will explain a little more about what a "well-established type of experience" is, so I will skip that for now. If you think about it Type PCT seems to cohere with our every day process of reasoning. I maintain that it is eminently plausible to treat this every day process of reasoning as innocent until proven guilty. Take sense experience: we do treat sense experience as innocent until proven guilty. If I have the experience of eating cereal in the morning before I go to work that experience itself gives me PFJ for beliefs that I am indeed eating cereal in the morning before I go to work. If I later woke up from a dream about me eating cereal in the morning before work then that gives me good reason to believe that I did not eat cereal in he morning before going to work. But absent me finding out I was dreaming or any other special reason the simple fact that I am having the experience of eating cereal in the morning before going to work renders me entirely rational in believing that is the case. Now, don't we all treat our sense experiences that way? Unless there is special reason to doubt the content of, say, sense experience then we treat it as veridical and probably true and give it the benefit of the doubt. That really is the only way to reasonably go about our lives if you think about it. Imagine if for sense experience we had to treat it as guilty until proven innocent - we could never reasonably believe anything on the basis of sense experience until it had been corroborated. But how do you corroborate sense experience? Obviously by comparing it to other sense experiences. But by doing this, in order to compare them, you have to assume that on the basis of those experiences alone that they are representing the world as it probably is. Hence they have to rely on something like the Type PCT in order to check a sense experience against another. It seems inescapable. The same applies to memory and introspection. This is why these type of (noetic) experiences are considered BSJ with PFJ. But, notice, that often people believe in God on the basis of experiences like these. So it seems natural that Type PCT should apply to these sort of experiences as well. The Impartiality Argument for Type PCT(T1) Impartiality Thesis If we adopt a certain epistemological attitude toward a certain type of noetic experience, we should adopt the same attitude toward other types of noetic experience when we can find no epistemologicallyrelevant distinction. (T2) Applicability Thesis The Type PCT should be applied as a fundamental principle to at least some types of our noetic experience. (T3) Seamless Web Thesis We can find no clear-cut distinctions within the whole web of our noetic experience which are epistemologically relevant with respect to the applicability of the Type PCT. Therefore, (T4) The Type PCT should be applied as a fundamental principle to all types of noetic experience. [4] (T1) is plausible because it goes by the general principle that we should treat similar cases similarly until the relevant differences are shown. If this principle is abandoned we can treat similar cases differently for no other reason than simply because we feel like it. This would devastating for many areas of human endeavor (like science for instance). (T2) is plausible because, as I laid out above, there is non non-circular way of justifying noetic experiences. Thus they should be accorded PFJ as BSJ. (T3) is plausible because, again, all these of noetic experiences are similar in that one is inclined to believe the content of the experience simply on the basis of that experience alone. (T4) Follows from (T1) - (T3). (B) TE is a well-established type of experience. I take this as an obvious fact. Millions, if not billions, of people all over the world have had TE. That TE occurs to countless individuals is blindingly obvious. That alone should be enough to show that TE is a well-established type of experience. An experience is well established if:(a) Shared experiences: This experience is not altogether idiosyncratic. Similar experience occurs repeatedly and is shared by a substantial amount of people, preferably across cultures and eras. (b) Common ontology: The tokens of the type have to largely cohere with one another before they can be grouped into a kind. Namely, the group of tokens does not have massive internal contradictions. They also need to share a common ontology such that different tokens can be mapped onto that ontology, exhibiting different sorts of epistemic relation among themselves (e. g. mutual support, explanatory dependence). (c) Conceptual coherence: To enable mutual communication of the experiences, which is the prerequisite of our identification of a type of non solipsistic experience, the experiences have to be, to some extent, describable. It also requires a conceptual framework which is not obviously incoherent. [5] (a) Should be obvious. As I stated, countless people across countless different cultures have had TE ranging from the beginning of recorded history to the present. (b) A variety of TE are had - from experiencing God through nature, to feeling "small" and "contingent" (i. e. feeling that the physical world is not ultimate and that it depends on something else), to feelings of talking to a personal being, to feeling an all-encompassing love, to too numerous to count. That there is a God would explain that we have all these different sort of experiences quite nicely. (Remember, there is absolutely no reason that a transcendent God would only have one or a few ways of communicating with humans; we would have reason to expect unity in diversity)(c) Given that so many have the experience of God, I think we should at least grant, at first glance, the God-experiences are coherent concepts. That is, it should be given the benefit of the doubt that it is a coherent concept until positive reasons for thinking it is not are adduced. Sources[1] The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology - William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Kindle Locations 13372-13373). [2] TBCNT (13351 - 13353)[3] . http://en.wikipedia.org...[4] TBCNT (13745-13751). [5] TBCNT (13354-13360).