Experience is usually a good guide to truth. The paradigmatic experience for discovering the truth is scientific experiment: public, repeatable, consistent, describable and (for those repeating the experiment at least) disinterested.
Religious experience has none of these features. It is private, occasional, conflicting, ineffable and greatly cherished by those who experience it. If I were to spend 15 minutes a day meditating, I would have an enormous vested interest in discovering a mystical sensibility. Imagine two people drinking the same bottle of wine. One has paid £500 for it. The other has no idea that it is meant to be anything special. The buyer will discover notes of flavour in it that are quite lost on the friend he is treating.
For these reasons, not only is your experience of God not a good reason for me to believe in God, it is not a good reason for you to either. You should apply a sterner test of sceptical distrust to evidence for a proposition you know you want to believe than for one you find objectionable, in order to counteract your natural bias.
The retreat from the intellectual and public sphere to that of private feeling is supposed to put someone beyond the reach of argument: in a "well" of their own which is permanently inaccessible to others, and therefore beyond all criticism. How can anyone else tell you what you feel? But that is to glide from one meaning of "feel", "experience" to another - from a sensation to a contact with something outside the self that stands behind that sensation: real pins and needles as opposed to figurative ones. Given the infinite, unsolicited power of the imagination in dreams, why should we suppose there are any feelings we cannot create if we put our mind to it?
On Sep 1, 2010 Jason wrote :
Experience is usually a good guide to truth. The paradigmatic experience for discovering the truth is scientific experiment: public, repeatable, consistent, describable and (for those repeating the experiment at least) disinterested.
Religious experience has none of these features. It is private, occasional, conflicting, ineffable and greatly cherished by those who experience it. If I were to spend 15 minutes a day meditating, I would have an enormous vested interest in discovering a mystical sensibility. Imagine two people drinking the same bottle of wine. One has paid £500 for it. The other has no idea that it is meant to be anything special. The buyer will discover notes of flavour in it that are quite lost on the friend he is treating.
For these reasons, not only is your experience of God not a good reason for me to believe in God, it is not a good reason for you to either. You should apply a sterner test of sceptical distrust to evidence for a proposition you know you want to believe than for one you find objectionable, in order to counteract your natural bias.
The retreat from the intellectual and public sphere to that of private feeling is supposed to put someone beyond the reach of argument: in a "well" of their own which is permanently inaccessible to others, and therefore beyond all criticism. How can anyone else tell you what you feel? But that is to glide from one meaning of "feel", "experience" to another - from a sensation to a contact with something outside the self that stands behind that sensation: real pins and needles as opposed to figurative ones. Given the infinite, unsolicited power of the imagination in dreams, why should we suppose there are any feelings we cannot create if we put our mind to it?