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WillowOne's Positions

Experiential Argument

Form

  1. I (or many people) have had a direct personal experience of God.
  2. Experiences are generally reliable evidence of their objects.
  3. Therefore God exists.

William Lane Craig goes further and argues that the "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" is self-authenticating, and that it would be rational to retain belief even in the face of contrary evidence.

My Positions

  1. Anecdotal reports of subjective experience are inherently unreliable as evidence of anything beyond the experience itself.
  2. Personal experience, even one's own, is inherently unreliable as a guide to its cause.
  3. Even if the reported experiences are accurately described, they are evidence only that the experience occurred, not of the nature or origin of that experience. Feeling the presence of God is evidence of a feeling.

Notes

  1. Religious experiences are reported across all religions and attributed to whichever god the experiencer was raised with. Hindus experience Krishna; Catholics experience Mary; Muslims experience Allah. The experiences cannot all be veridical, since the gods are mutually exclusive, and there is no principled way to privilege one set. The most parsimonious explanation covers all of them: the experience is generated by the brain and interpreted through the available cultural framework.
  2. The same experiences (presence, unity, timelessness, overwhelming significance) can be reliably produced by temporal lobe epilepsy, psilocybin, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and rhythmic group activity. That a state can be induced chemically is strong evidence that it is a brain state.
  3. The claim that the experience is "self-authenticating" is simply a refusal to allow it to be tested. It places the belief beyond evidence (Popper's Razor) and is, in effect, an admission that no argument is being offered.
  4. Craig's position, that one should retain belief even against contrary evidence, is a definition of irrationality. If I adopted the same stance toward my own experiences, no one could ever correct me about anything.
  5. That I have never had such an experience is not, on its own, evidence against theism. But it is notable that the experience is unavailable precisely to those who do not already expect it, which is not how perception of a real object usually works.

Also see