Internal experience and rationality
There’s this post on Talking Philosophy about religious experience and the fact that it can be or seem to be veridical, and the questions that fact raises.
The religious experience as veridical thing is interesting. If the experience genuinely has that quality – is it rational to take it at face value? Okay, I guess most people reading this will answer ‘no’ (and tell me off for suggesting such a thing). But I wonder…
I would say it isn’t entirely rational to take religious experience at face value as veridical, for reasons that don’t seem to appear in comments on that post; not exactly, anyway. I would say it isn’t rational because we know that experience can be misleading. That’s all. It’s pretty simple. That’s why (isn’t it?) experience on its own (internal, private, unsharable, unduplicatable) experience is not considered scientific evidence (or legal evidence either). We know our minds can play tricks on us; we know human beings can hallucinate; therefore we know, or ought to know if we want to claim the title ‘rational,’ that any purely internal experience may be overwhelmingly convincing to us but that it doesn’t follow that it can or should be convincing to anyone else.
I think the claim is that the experience is so convincing (so powerful, overwhelming, veridical) to the person who has it that that person can’t believe it’s not veridical – is literally unable to believe that.
But…I’m not sure that works – not in the sense of deserving the term ‘rational.’ If one really is rational, one ought to be able to have an intense internal experience and still remain aware that that is what it is and that it cannot of its nature be legitimately convincing to anyone else – and that therefore it is not genuine evidence, and should not be taken to be genuine evidence, even by the person inside whose head it played itself out. Not even if that person is a brilliant philosopher or physicist.
That’s not to say that it’s not understandable that the experiencers would find the experience convincing, just that the label ‘rational’ is – not really earned. I think there are good reasons why it is not rational for people to be convinced by their own purely internal experiences, and that therefore it’s understandable but not rational to be convinced by them.
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“Truthful veracious: veridical testimony. Coinciding with future events or apparently unknowable present realities: a veridical hallucination”.
I may be on the wrong ‘religious experience’ veridical track but sure, I will give it a shot.
What springs to mind with me are the Marian Shrines and Moving Statutes etc. There have been a myriad, of ostensibly, ‘religious experiences’ pertaining to visions throughout the generations in Ireland. For illustration, an almost contemporary one in terms of purported apparitions was during the wrong half of the eighties in Mount Melleray Co Waterford.
It gave way to hordes of pilgrims from all over Ireland, [most especially those from the North] going there on all night vigils irrespective of intemperate cold weather temperatures.
The tiny little Grotto [of which there are copious ones dotted around the whole of the country, not to forget ones even devotionally displayed in front windows of homes.] is in close proximity of the Mount Melleray Cisterian Monastery.
The monks, in fact, own the grotto of our Lady of Lourdes. The nearby Knockmealdown mountains are also a cooler delight, and the crisp hill air favours some of the most remarkable rhododendron blooms to be found anywhere.
A spectacular view can also be had from the heights wherein the holy simle grotto is in situate.
I once witnessed in the beautiful surroundings people going into trances. They truly believed they saw the face of the Virgin Mary, St Joseph, Padre Pio – and not to mention too, the devil himself, and a polish nun called Sister Faustina.
This occurred as they transfixed their vision on the face of the blessed Virgin Mary. They got so carried away with their religious experiences that I also started to get fierce dizzy.
Everything went spinning spinning around just like they had said it would. Auto suggestion was becoming alive in front of me at the grotto outside Mount Melleray.
At the height of the excitement, during the eighties there were coachloads of pilgrims day and night, visiting the simple grotto.
Everyone was having visions. I remember some saying that the Virgin Mary had a big swollen belly
I often wondered if the sheep that would not shift themselves from the mountainy roads had visions as the moving traffic could not move them?
Today, it’s all gone quiet again. People still go there to recite the Rosary regularly, but the apparitions and messages have stopped.
The following is another person’s take on Mount Melleray veridical religious experiences.
“So you see why I start going “Oh, dear…” when people start throwing terms like ’shamanistic’ about. To me, that suggests fly agaric and the (pseudo)scientific explanation that we think of Santa Claus as having flying reindeer because they were high on the psychotropic drugs.
Or to be kinder, it’s reminiscent of the Prophet in Terry Pratchett’s “Small Gods”, whose religious visions in the desert around which a whole book of the Omnian scriptures is based are very strongly hinted to result from the mushrooms which were his only food.
Yes, fasting and mortifications can make you see things, but I have better grounds for religious belief than ‘oh, it’s just an event in your brain chemicals’. “
If experience of “the divine” is veridicial then how do we reconcile the experience of polytheists with that of monotheists?
I think that how one reacts to a prima facie religious experience in one’s own case has much to do with one’s existing basic metaphysical framework. If one is already a religious believer, then the experience will probably just reinforce this existing belief. If one is not a believer, but is inclined to be credulous, then the experience might encourage religious belief. However, if one is of a sceptical nature, then I think that one would likely try to rationalise the experience.
For example, I would be inclined to rationalise any such experience in myself as follows:
• I am aware that the brain is capable of creating hallucinatory and other experiences that can seem to be extraordinarily authentic. So is it intrinsically more likely that my experience was a product of some mental state or other, or that it was God communicating with me? That is, which of these prior probabilities is the greater?
• I am aware that many people throughout history and in all cultures have claimed similar experiences, but have attributed them to different gods (or devils, spirits etc). What reason have I for thinking that my particular experience is veridical (other than the fact that I am the one experiencing it), when it may conflict with many of these other experiences (mutually exclusive gods etc)? Would it be just special pleading on my part to say that mine is veridical, where many of these others are not?
• Is there anything about my experience that I can verify or test in some other way? Have I been given any information that I didn’t know beforehand, and that I couldn’t have possibly come to know by any other means? Some previously unknown scientific or mathematical knowledge, for example. The more extraordinary and counterintuitive the information the better for testing this. After all, it should be no problem for God to give me such information, although theists might argue that by doing so He would be giving me less opportunity for faith. However, even if we were to grant that argument, it doesn’t help me to decide for myself whether the experience is veridical or not. Also, if God wanted to give me the greatest opportunity to have faith (by providing me with no evidence), then He perhaps shouldn’t have communicated with me at all, as any such communication might be interpreted as constituting evidence.
In my case, I feel that my current worldview (Metaphysical Naturalism) has a strong foundation – both epistemologically and empirically. This I have determined not by taking it to be self-evidently true, or by having some dogmatic attachment to it. Rather, I have sought to test it as thoroughly as I am able, in order to see if it fails – which it so far has not done. So, if I was to have a prima facie religious experience, I would not be inclined to change my whole worldview to the Christian one (for example), based upon that one experience. To me, this would be analogous to throwing Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection out of the window if one fossil was found that is apparently out of sequence in the rock strata. The evidence for Darwin’s theory is so strong that I would want to subject this apparent contradiction to very stringent tests and analysis before making any such decision. And so it would be for my prima facie religious experience.
It might be superficially tempting if I had such an experience to presume it to be veridical. However, as I feel that the Christian worldview makes a number of extraordinary claims (existence of God, resurrection of Jesus, existence of the soul, afterlife etc), I would have to decide if my apparent religious experience constitutes the extraordinary evidence that I would need in order to completely re-structure my worldview. In my case, I think it is unlikely.
If I was to consider my religious experience as being good supporting evidence for the Christian worldview (for example), I think that I should be prepared to examine the worldview as a whole, and consider all of its implications before making such a decision. The point is that the Christian worldview comes as a package deal. Whilst there are variations between the beliefs of the different denominations, there are still certain basic core beliefs that need to be signed up to if one is to be considered a Christian at all. Therefore, before taking my religious experience to be veridical, I should be able to justify belief in these other tenets too, or my worldview would be in danger of being incoherent or inconsistent.
For this reason, I think it would not be reasonable for me to adopt the Christian worldview, without further analysis, based on a prima facie religious experience. Even if we could somehow discount the possibility of my experience being due to a mental aberration, it might have been some other god, or a Cartesian demon, or somebody communicating with me telepathically, or it might have been a glitch in our universe-running simulation (see: http://www.simulation-argument.com/) etc. Not that I think that these possibilities are at all likely either, but rather that there is much room for doubt or rival interpretations here.
After all, how can I know for sure that it is the Christian God that I am hearing, rather than any of these other possibilities? I think that for me to profess certainty in such a situation would be irrational. After all, in such a case, what would ever convince me that my religious experience has some other explanation? If I am absolutely impervious to any contradictory evidence or reasoned argument, then I think I could justifiably be accused of irrationality.
“After all, how can I know for sure that it is the Christian God that I am hearing, rather than any of these other possibilities?”
That is indeed the question. Stannard is oddly convinced of that in the interview – I think that’s the bit that’s not rational.
And another point. Would the claims of somebody that God told him to murder women be considered veridical? How about if no other signs of psychosis could be found? What would Stannard make of any such claims, I wonder. Presumably he would consider them to be false – but how would he justify that opinion?
He might say that the murderer’s claims couldn’t possibly be true, since God would never command such a thing, as God is perfectly loving.
However, there are several problems with that type of explanation:
1) It might all be part of God’s bigger plan that the murderer kill these women. We are not in a position to judge what such a plan might be, or why this might be to the greater good. This is standard Christian apologetics for other things that need excusing.
2) God is described in the Bible as commanding many atrocities, so there is some precedent here.
3) It begs the question, since it assumes the voice can only be God’s if it conforms to what we would expect God to say. So, in that way it becomes just self-fulfilling. But that all hinges upon one assuming God’s character in the first place. What if Stannard is mistaken about that character?
And, as outsiders, how are we to judge the merits of these competing claims? Are Stannard’s claims intrinsically more veridical than the murderer’s? On what grounds could we ever make such a judgement? Some might suggest that people hear God tell them what they want to hear in the first place. So, nice people such as Stannard only hear nice things, but violent deranged people hear these types of things from God.