Experiencing God

Some believe that they have an almost palpable direct experience of God which, cognitively speaking, is analogous to sense experience, and conclude that God exists or, minimally, that belief in god is rational. This is a complex area of psychological and neurological investigation we skip over.

A. God exists because of mystical experience

Problems

· Mystical experience and sense experience have important disanalogies:

1. There are objective, agreed upon criteria to determine the proper functioning of sense perception (e.g. proper position is space, absence of barriers, and so on), but not for mystical experience. Some get their experience when under the influence of drugs, others when fallen from a horse.

2. Sense perception is taken to be working properly when one has sufficient reason to believe that the appropriate causal connection exists to the thing sensed. However, as God is a supernatural being it’s unclear what the appropriate causal chain would be.

· Mystics do not agree on whom, or what, they experience, as practitioners of different religions come to different conclusions as to what they experience.

· There may be natural explanations of mystical experiences.

B. The belief in God is rational because of the Sensus Divinitatis (Plantinga)

Plantinga holds that a belief is rational if and only if it is warranted, and a belief is warranted just in case it results from the proper functioning of a cognitive faculty in the circumstances in which that faculty was designed to operate effectively.

If the theistic god exists, then presumably He would want to make us, or some of us, so that we could rationally believe that He exists. This could be achieved by endowing us with a sensus divinitatis, a special cognitive faculty that in the appropriate circumstances produces a powerful feeling of God’s presence, thus warranting our belief in God. So, if God exists, very probably we have such faculty which, however, Plantinga holds, in some has been corrupted by sin. Hence, unbelief is the result of the malfunction of a cognitive faculty, and theistic belief is rational.

Problems:

• Sensus divinitatis for which of the main 2500 gods we know of?

• When in a “haunted” house, at night, with howling wind, many have a sensus spiritus, which may be warranted if ghosts exist. But on reflection, we don’t believe in ghosts.

• There are attempts at providing naturalistic explanations of the belief in gods in terms of systematic malfunctioning of cognitive faculties (e.g., Boyer), which would indicate that our belief in god is unwarranted, which in turn would show that very likely theism is false.