The size of a grapefruit
There’s a post at Talking Philosophy called In Defence of Religious Belief. I would comment on it there but I can’t because I’m banned from commenting, so (since I want to say something) I’ll do it here.
It’s a thought experiment. You’ve been having hallucinations of a monster following you. You believe the shrink who tells you you’re mentally ill. ‘You’re a logical sort of person. If you weren’t too classy, you’d even consider becoming a New Atheist.’ But the experiences feel real.
And then it happens. It’s late at night. You’re alone in your bathroom, and the monster comes crashing in through the window – at least this is what you experience – and it’s on you. It doesn’t attack, but it’s right in your face, and you can smell rotting flesh on its breath. You close your eyes hoping it’ll just disappear, but you can hear its breathing, sense its malevolence, and in your head there’s this insistent thought: What if it’s real?
Well of course there is, with an experience like that.
At this point, given how high the stakes are, isn’t it reasonable to believe that the monster is real? Imagine yourself in that situation. What would you say to somebody who told you it was unreasonable or irrational to take evasive action? You wouldn’t be impressed, I suspect. Moreover, it’s not simply that you wouldn’t be impressed at the time – which is not particularly interesting, since you’re in a freaked out state – you wouldn’t be impressed afterwards either, you wouldn’t be impressed on calm reflection (with the claim that you were unreasonable to believe then).
That last parenthesis is important – I overlooked it at first, and objected, but then I went back and saw the parenthesis and my objection became superfluous. But given the parenthesis, the overall claim is a pretty narrow one – too narrow for the rest of the work it’s supposed to do. No, I wouldn’t be ‘impressed,’ or convinced, by anyone who told me I was unreasonable to be terrified by the hallucination while it was going on. That would be absurd. But I don’t think I know anyone who would say that. Of course a terrifying convincing hallucination is terrifying while it is happening.
But so what? That doesn’t translate to the claim that I would be reasonable to go on thinking the hallucination was real after it was over – which I thought was the claim itself, until I noticed that last parenthesis. That’s not the claim – but then what is the claim?
Well maybe it is the claim.
Clearly belief in the monster isn’t epistemically warranted: the perilousness of a situation is not part of that story (though this is not to accept that the belief is entirely without epistemic warrant – the fact that the experience has a verdical quality surely counts for something). But the belief is warranted in a certain kind of rationally defensible way. You’re not making a cognitive mistake if you believe: given how high the stakes are, given the fact that the experience seems to have a veridical quality, it’s reasonable for you to believe it.
This is in the present tense, so apparently the claim is after all that it’s reasonable to believe in the monster in general – not just during the hallucination but indefinitely afterward. I don’t think that claim is right. It could be right if ‘you’ had no knowledge of brain science, but the implied ‘you’ has gone to a psychiatrist and knows what hallucinations are, so that’s ruled out. So no, I don’t think it is reasonable for you to believe it, despite the veridical quality. At least not without asking a few questions first.
The monster came ‘crashing in through the window’ – so there would be broken glass if it were real. Is there any broken glass? Is there any physical evidence at all? Have you looked?
What about the fact that there was no contact? That’s very odd, isn’t it, if the monster is real? It’s ‘in your face’ but it doesn’t actually touch you? It goes to the trouble of crashing through the window (what floor is your bathroom on, by the way?) but it doesn’t attack you or touch you – well what kind of creature is that? Maybe not a real one? Eric MacDonald makes the same objection over there.
And then – if there is no physical evidence, and it didn’t touch you, then it certainly looks as if you had a very powerful hallucination. If that’s the case – there could well be something very wrong with you. You could have one hell of a brain tumor. The reasonable thing to do is go to a specialist, it’s not to go on thinking the monster is real as you did while it was (it seemed) breathing in your face.
The rest of the post of course makes an analogy with religion, but since the monster thing, as written, doesn’t work, I won’t bother with that.
Seems like you’ve got it right, OB. But maybe the implications might be drawn out with a real-life example.
So as it happens, I have what you might call “religious experiences” every so often due to depression/anxiety. So I respond, sometimes, with prayer. It helps at the time, it’s morally excusable, and I won’t beat myself up about it, and it makes me feel better at the time.
But prayer is not epistemically justified. And if I said it was, I’d be wrong, just as I’d be wrong to ascribe epistemic worth to being frightened when watching Freddy Kruger films (or playing Dead Space on Xbox). I’ll give myself latitude to think whatever I want at the time, for various moral and epistemic reasons, but that’s not saying much or anything at all about epistemic warrant.
Stangroom has relied upon an intuitive response to a particular case in order to make his argument. But a one-off intuition provides zero evidence — not even prime facie evidence — of the things we’re thinking about. The claims are ephemeral, a way of saying “hey look I have an interesting thought”. And while I agree it’s interesting and fun to think about these matters, warrant plays no part in our reactions.
As a child I twice had experiences of phenomena (similar to the monster of the thought experiment) that were utterly vivid and utterly unreal. They were not the sort of thing where physical evidence could be sought. This leaves me both sympathetic to people who have had such experiences and unsympathetic to those who claim they must be accepted at face value.
Is this Pascal’s Wager wearing a clown suite ?
At least they got the part about religion being a monster with really bad breath right.
Why on Earth were you banned? Surely a forum with Baggini and Stangroom would be the last to ban you!
As someone who has experienced sleep paralysis – the inability to move coupled with the sensation of ‘something or someone’ in the room, just out of my range of vision – I know how powerful hallucinations can be.
But religion is plainly not about actual ‘experience’ even at the dodgy level of hallucination. It’s about being indoctrinated from infancy to believe that the hallucinations (or downright fibs) of someone long dead were not only true experiences but somehow reveal eternal verities.
It also begs the question of whether such vivid and realistic hallucinations are possible.
Yes – I think that’s another problem. He’s loaded the thought experiment up with so much extra stuff that his claim almost becomes true by definition. Yes, sure, if you were in a permanent hallucination that was really really convincing and if religion were exactly like that, then it would be reasonable to believe religious truth claims. But the ifs are way too big, and that is question begging.
Jacopo – nothing to do with Baggini! Stangroom runs the blog and TPM Online.
So….. religion is a big imaginary monster? Okay, I’ll grant you that.
I really get tired of these hypothetical situations that are constructed in such a way that you just have to agree with the inevitable conclusion. Can’t they come up with any actual real-world examples?
What if you go around telling everyone a butterfly is following you, but it doesn’t interact with anything and nobody else can see it, including you? But you just know it’s there. Wouldn’t it be unreasonable to continue to believe in it?
See, I can make up thought experiments that are completely rigged toward my conclusions, too.
“It could be right if ‘you’ had no knowledge of brain science, but the implied ‘you’ has gone to a psychiatrist and knows what hallucinations are, so that’s ruled out. So no, I don’t think it is reasonable for you to believe it, despite the veridical quality. At least not without asking a few questions first.”
I am with you on this, Ophelia. A couple of years ago, like Valdemar, I experienced sleep paralysis. Even as it happened, I thought “oh, this is that phenomenon. If I open my eyes, there won’t be anything there.” I did and there wasn’t. My first thought upon fully awakening was that if this had happened to me in the Middle Ages I would have found the incubus/succubus explanation convincing.
Had sleep paralysis once – a very long time ago: SCARY.
I didn’t find out what it was until a couple of years afterwards (I was only about 11 at the time …)
I’m suprised at Mr Stangroom – unless he is coat-trailing, of course.
These kind of hypothetical arguments are always irritating. I do not believe that it is possible for the ‘encountering’ of God to be anything like as ‘real’ as the monster in that thought experiment.
No, neither do I. That’s not what people report. It’s not external, it doesn’t crash through windows, it doesn’t have a smell – but it seems real anyway. That’s simply a different issue.
Ben, sure, and I think ‘prayer’ doesn’t necessarily even need to be epistemically justified, because it can mean something less than ‘address a god’; it can also mean ‘address a god without actually thinking the god exists’; and so on. In that sense I don’t disagree with Armstrong that it’s practice that counts. Self-soothing is fine, and whatever works, works.
I had an auditory hallucination once, and I didn’t realize it was a hallucination until long afterwards, when I read somewhere that being woken up from a deep sleep (as I had been, by the phone) could trigger auditory hallucinations. Ohhhhh, I thought – that’s what that was then. I’ve told this story here before, I think, so apologies if you’re bored with it. But the point is that the mere knowledge of hallucinations makes it much harder to think, reasonably, that a monster was really there, yet not making contact.
I commented there too. My main problem was that religious experiences are NOT veridical. Mystics talk about falling in love, a merging, that sort of thing. Everyday sort of religionists, as opposed to mystics, seem to engage in a twisted sort of logic to justify beliefs which soothe certain emotional concerns. God or angels don’t really appear: religious people only have second-hand stories in Bibles for that, events which apparently happened thousands of years ago when no-one else was looking. So I don’t think this argument justifies religious belief at all.
Interesting post. Seeing as you put it out there, why on earth would your own coauthor ban you? That seems extreme.
I have night terrors that involve completely realistic hallucinations (not often, thankfully). I will see a hand coming through a wall, a flood of water on the floor, and exciting stuff like that. While this is going on, it is exactly as if I’m seeing something real. I really see these things, and it is scary.
When I think about it later (as in, 10 minutes later), I do give it a brief think–was there really a hand there? Is my bedroom floor actually covered in a foot of water? No, that just couldn’t be. The wall looks fine, the floor is dry, etc. etc. I don’t think the realistic quality of the hallucination has any tendency whatever to make it reasonable for me to believe these things really happened. It would be a “cognitive mistake” for me to think they did.
So if there’s something about religious experience that gives believers warrant to believe (maybe…who knows?…I don’t have such experiences), the comparison to hallucinations doesn’t explain what it is.
As my pal hambydammit noted on his blog just today, the interpretation of such experiences varies wildly based what the experiencer expects/anticipates. The meaning of such experiences are constructed so heavily that the experience itself is essentially meaningless. That’s why people started “experiencing” alien visitations instead of ghosts in the night when those narrative tropes became a part of pop culture.
There are hallucinations, delusions, whatever with the subjective realism described here – I actually had one once, a several-hour-long hallucination that revolved around the conviction that I had sold my soul to the devil (OK, not as physical as the hallucination described, but absolutely, wholly, 100-per-cent convincing at the time).
Subsequently, of course, I was able to view the experience as terrifying, as a real experience – and as a delusion (I’m actually persuaded it was a psylocibin flashback and have been rather strongly anti-hallucinogen ever since).
What really amuses me though is that the experience – not dissimilar to the one described in the thought experiment! – is one of my main reasons for not giving credence to subjective experiences of the Holy Spirit (or whatever) as a reason to believe in the possibility of a deity.
And I’m not even talking about incredible monsters; this was an actual religious experience, firmly couched in good old-fashioned Christian theology.
Many years ago when I worked in a prison, there was a prisoner who said he could see monsters – literally, monsters; and he painted pictures of them and they were scary – across the room. He was a diagnosed schizophrenic.
It goes without saying that I agree entirely with you OB. In fact, as you may have seen, I’ve gone on with commentary over on the TPM site. I simply do not see how you can reasonably use the idea of reasonable belief without dragging the idea of reasonable epistemic claim behind you. In fact, if anything, surely your and Jeremy’s book Why Truth Matters stresses that point. Which is why – in your next post – the “the War on Terror’s neo-imperialist project of knowledge construction”, which is built solely on the foundation of some imagined conceptual reality, in which, without reference, we can give meaning to the words ‘colonial’, ‘neo-imperialist’, etc., without looking to see what is going on in the lives of real women in Afghanistan. Which is also why religions are reduced to apoplexy when you question their bona fides, because they are self-contained conceptual universes. Try to force them to look at things as they actually are, so far as evidence will carry us, and they are overcome with existential insecurity.
God, Jean, those sound horrible! Good that they’re rare. (Horrible the way dreams sometimes are, I suppose, but worse because waking.)
G – snap. I was just thinking about the alien abduction stuff, and the way it’s culturally determined. That would be another question to ask about the ‘monster’ – what was it like? Was it like other monsters, or was it new and different? If the former, that’s another indication that it’s a hallucination.
Michael – well I put it out there to explain why I hadn’t commented over there, because it would look invidious otherwise. Yes it seems extreme to me too. My coauthor hates ‘New’ atheism, the way I resisted Mooney’s campaign against ‘New’ atheism, B&W, etc. He officially ‘defriended’ me in every way possible last September.
Thanks, Eric. Yes I have seen. I think Jeremy’s response is a little inadequate! Just saying Eric’s and Patrick’s responses are not particularly convincing is…well, not particularly convincing.
The Russell Stannard example is interesting, but not all that interesting. He claimed to have an inner experience of knowing God via prayer, of a kind that he is unable to doubt. That’s it. It’s ‘veridical.’ JS thinks that’s a real stumbling block; I don’t. I think it would be reasonable for Stannard to realize that inner experience is just that – that however real it feels to him, it’s still inner experience. He should be able to doubt it – the way Jean is able to doubt hers.
I can think of two supposed encounters with the divine where evidence was claimed to be left behind – Moses and the stone tablets and Joseph Smith and the golden plates. Were these like the hallucination in that the tablets and plates appeared real to the person, but no evidence was actually left behind?
Don’t forget all the bits of the True Cross, and the shroud of Turin, and all those tortillas and lids of Marmite jars with Jesus or Mary on them. Lots of physical evidence, really.
I wasn’t thinking about the whole relic business. I should have; I am reading Wolf Hall and Cromwell and his associates are laughing at the jars of Jesus’ blood and Mary’s milk on display at various churches.
Well, then Stannard and Armstrong need to have some words don’t they? Ineffability and veridicality strike me as bald opposites. How can god be both?
I’m genuinely saddened to hear about the “defriending” – for you and for your readership. WTM and DGHW were such bracing, erudite and lucid works. It would have been wonderful to see further collaborations.
Eric – “I simply do not see how you can reasonably use the idea of reasonable belief without dragging the idea of reasonable epistemic claim behind you. In fact, if anything, surely your and Jeremy’s book Why Truth Matters stresses that point” – I too was thinking something along these lines, and Jeremy’s responses were pretty inadequate.
Thanks Michael.
“JS thinks that’s a real stumbling block; I don’t.”
Another (much later) childhood experience of mine was waking from a dream convinced that I had killed someone. I had not (by which I mean the place and person did not exist and the events had not and could not have occurred), but I could not shake the absolute conviction that I had for several days afterward.
Would this be a stumbling block if I was trying to prove that I was innocent? ;-)
Well, OB, if you’re ever looking for a replacement collaborator … well, you know where to call me. And if it comes to that, I can think of a few others who comment here and would do a good job.
His problem is in his usage of the word “reasonable”. The mere fact that you have reasons to believe something doesn’t make it reasonable. They actually have to be good reasons. In all the examples he gives, the reasons to believe something are emotional, not rational. So while it may be understandable that people have these beliefs, it is not reasonable.
I’m all of a heap, Russell – thanks!
Deen – well that’s what I think. I can see ‘understandable’ but not ‘reasonable.’ Did you notice that he rejected and corrected precisely that distinction? A commenter said yes, belief could be understandable in those circs, and JS said no, not understandable, reasonable, adding that accuracy is important here. He’s insisting on ‘reasonable.’ Well he hasn’t made the case.
Dan L makes a key point over there, I think. (Sorry about absurdity of discussing in two separate places, but I can’t help it – except by ignoring the whole thing, which I did at first, but then the evidential problems started bugging me.)
Dan L – “you elide the difference between beliefs about things happening within the realm of sensory perceptions and beliefs about metaphysics.”
Quite. The monster has a smell – as well as visibility and audibility. It’s not the same kind of thing as Stannard’s inner experience of meeting God in prayer. Stannard explains it this way:
“…when you are talking to a religious person, they feel that they have such strong internal evidence. It’s like Jung said, I don’t have to believe in God, I know that God exists – that is how I feel. So when I come across somebody who tells me that they have tried prayer, but they have no contact, what am I supposed to say except that they must be doing something wrong?”
At that point the interview changes direction, which I’ve always found frustrating, because that answer is obviously less than decisive.
I’ve tried commenting, but I’ve given up. Apparently he doesn’t even feel the need to define what he means by “reasonable”, as he’s clearly not the dictionary definition of it.
Ah well – it looks as if Dan L has deployed a sufficiently sophisticated vocabulary to merit a reply.
Hmph – reply is useless though. It ignores most of the real objections, in particular the difference between belief that the monster is real during the hallucination, and the same belief afterwards. It just treats the whole belief as one – even though JS did mention the distinction between the two in the original post.
Maybe he has to ignore that, because I’m the one who brought it up. But the result is that his claim still doesn’t make any sense.
Also it suddenly turns out that both ‘you’ and the monster are male. Odd; that was never stipulated.
He says it may be that critics have different intuitions. It’s not just intuitions – it’s things like the difference between the immediate experience and reflection on it afterward. Jean gets that, Ben gets that, others get that – it’s not so mysterious.
He’s just playing games. He pretty much says outright that he’s making an argument that he’s not really buying himself. And he won’t tell us where the error is – but he sure is certain that it’s not in one of the many places where everybody else thinks his argument goes wrong. He also seems to want to control the rules rather tightly. Most of his responses appear to be of the type “you can’t make that argument”.
I don’t feel inclined to play along right now, though.
Yes – there’s an awful lot of “I’m right of course” and “I know what you’re going to say and it’s wrong.” Argument by superiority; not really legit.
Yes, that’s a problem. It’s kind of a guessing game. He knows the secret, and so any other answer won’t do, no matter how apparently valid it is. (I’ve had teachers like that, and, of course, they knew what they wanted as an answer, even if there were other perfectly good responses.) In fact, there have been a number of good responses to the thought experiment, and it is simply not the right way to go to say, I know the answer, but I’m not going to tell you just now; you, however, I can say, are wrong. But this is silly, because there are a number of ways of being right here, and turning it into a guessing game is not playing by the rules of reasoned discourse. It can be very frustrating.
On the other hand, it would work, if Jeremy would say something like: “Well, that’s interesting, but here’s why you’re wrong. You’ll have to try harder.” And then, at least, you would have something to answer, and you could see where you’ve gone wrong – if you had – or you could press on and point out why you think you’re still right. But the intellectual lottery approach to argument simply isn’t working for me.
I’m thinking of a number from one to one hundred. Therefore God exists. ;-)
“You close your eyes hoping it’ll just disappear, but you can hear its breathing, sense its malevolence, and in your head there’s this insistent thought:”
Namely, “Why oh why did I take the brown acid??”
Ha!
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