[nonFiction] Argument against Rationality of Believing in God's Existence based on Religious Exp.
Is It Rational To Believe in God's Existence on the Basis of Religious Experience?
Religious experience can be cautiously defined as experience(s) an individual lives through and believes to be belonging to objective reality, with some form of relation to a religion, whereby a religion may be loosely described as an organized system of beliefs. The notion of religious experience, while not limited to, is most commonly associated with Christianity and the Christian God. William James, speaking of religious experiences felt by Christians of the Christian God(hereafter referred to as God) once called them “absolutely authoritative”, while French philosopher François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, mocks the idea of religious experience in Section II of the “Religion” chapter in his Dictionnaire Philosophique.
Rationality, on the other hand, can be more clearly outlined as the process whereby one is justified in the formation of a belief. One must keep in mind that rationality has nothing to do with truth; it matters not if the belief is false, but as long as the way an individual arrives at that belief is sound, the belief can be considered rational. Case in point: it was rational for people to believe in the sun revolving around the earth a thousand years ago, although said belief has been proven false in this modern era.
On the surface, rationality and religious experience appear to be mutually inclusive. The essence of most pro-religion experience arguments appears to be thus: It is rational to believe in whatever that my senses perceive, God has appeared to me and I have perceived him; therefore it isrational (and true, but this is a point that will be placed aside in this debate) to believe that God exists. Examples of said perception can be visions, stigmata and so on.
However, if one were to utilize the line of reasoning adopted by evidentialists, the lack of evidence surrounding religious experience itself declares it to be an irrational basis for belief in God. Religious experience is at its roots extremely subjective, and one can claim it irrational to believe in God’s existence simply because of the innate subjectivity of it that disallows any form of empirical collection of evidence, such as objective testing. In sum, there is no rationality without evidence.
That aside, the fact of the matter is that claims of experiencing such perception are rare, and certainly not professed by all Christians. This says that most who believe in the idea of religious experience based it on the belief that a fellow Christian, someone else - noteworthy is the point that the ‘someone’ in question is typically human and not a divine entity of some form- was subjected to such an encounter with God, and hence it is argued that belief in God’s existence is rational. To remove “God” from the equation will render the argument entirely ridiculous, as such:
“I saw Bigfoot in the woods the other day! You should believe that Bigfoot exists because I saw it.”
(Principle of Credulity)
There is no doubt that the statement above will be deemed as irrational no matter the situation where it is uttered, but remove the noun “Bigfoot” and insert “God” in its place and it is a different matter all together for most believing in religious experience. “I saw God in the woods the other day” or some similar variation of it is indeed the usual claim put forward by those who underwent religious experiences, while subsequently urging others to believe in God’s existence based on their pronouncements.
Referring back to the example of people believing that the sun revolved around the earth, the belief in question can be rational because anyone with viable sight could see the sun seemingly moving across the sky every morning, and hence are justified in their belief even though it is erroneous in nature, due to the fact that they had perceived it for themselves. That is certainly not the case with religious experience acting as the foundation for the belief in God’s existence. Rather, many who believe in it base their beliefs on the words of a select few, and not on their own perceptions. Hence, with reasoning grounded in evidentialism, we can argue that it is irrational to believe God’s existence on the basis of religious experience.