THIS IS A RESPONSE TO BRIAN DAVIES' "EXPERIENCE AND GOD" CHAPTER IN HIS BOOK, INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
At the outset, let me concede to the idea that indeed, the concept of ‘God experience’ vis-à-vis ‘God’s existence’ is problematic. Yet, problematic as it may be, the argument for experience as a valid notion for the existence of God still stands. Let me unravel this truth in the following arguments.
Skeptics deny the existence of God based on experience for which they claim that it is in itself ‘frequently deceptive’. However, saying that experience is frequently deceptive can be a misleading argument. The question of frequency here needs to be qualified. Also, they did not clarify the issue as to how can somebody know which experiences are deceptive and which are not. Davies, stating his case said that experience is a source of knowledge. I would concur to his idea that it is indeed generally a foundation for our knowledge no matter what kind it might be. To say that experience is frequently deceptive is to blatantly lambast this truth and that those who say it are deceiving themselves.
That statement is unfounded and was not well thought of. If experience is a game of deception, then majority of what we know now is a deception in itself. When skeptics say that experience is frequently deceptive, in the case, their statement could be a product of their ‘deceptive experiences’ and could not be trusted as a fact in the rule of thumb.
When oppositionists say that some people are taking mere illusion and hallucination as a ‘God experience’, we ought to be careful with these. Yes, it could be a fact that it is possible for hallucination and illusion to be taken as an experience of God. Yet, we cannot categorically say that ‘all’ people who are talking about their ‘God experience’ are hallucinating and are disillusioned. As Davies said, not all claims need be mistaken as such. For if there are a hundred illusions as against maybe ten truthful ‘God experiences’, the latter could not be discounted and the argument will remain an argument for the existence of God.
Suppose that the experience was just an illusion, it is safe to say that the person had a wrong interpretation of his experience. But so goes the other way. People might think as well that what they termed as an illusion of a ‘God experience’ could possibly be a factual experience of God.
Psychological and social pressures leading people to believe that their experience is a ‘God experience’ could not be a solid argument to trash out experience as a source of God’s existence as well. When we say that people are ‘only swayed’ by the pressures mentioned above, we are downrightly saying that these people could not decide with their own senses and need the help of others to decide whether their experience is right or wrong, an illusion or a truth as how it appears to them. Being ‘pressured’ is not a basis for ‘everybody’ to give up their own credibility in assessing the veracity of thing as it appears to them.
The best argument I guess for the unbelieving is the test of verification. They believe that any claim of a ‘God experience’ must be rejected since there are no agreed tests on the experience of God. There is no standardized test as to assessing the validity of the experience. So in the case, anybody can just claim yet we can’t just believe all of them. So standards are supposed to be set up. But the problem in this argument lies in the issue of who decides the standard. We have to be reminded that experience may come in different forms and could all be true no matter what the form may be.
Davies said that in order to deal with the issue at hand, we need to recognize that it is indeed God that was there in the experience. However, the problem still stands, what is the standard, if there is any, in recognizing that it is indeed God? Davis said that in the Bible there are somehow contrasting statements as to the experience of God. In the Exodus account, we are faced with the statements ‘The Lord spoke to Moses face to face’ and God telling Moses that he cannot see Him for if he does he will surely die. So, are we to trash experience as a valid notion for the existence of God because of contrasting testimonies and statements?
The quick response to this is simply, ‘No!’ It is still possible that experience is valid despite of all these. As Davies said, ‘context’ is very important here and this is what is going to break the whole issue even. Skeptics will say again that if some people experience God, still there are also others who say the nonexistence of God in their experience. However, this still does not call for judging the ‘God experience’ of the optimists as invalid. Those who cannot accept the idea will continue by saying that the mystics themselves are quoted as saying that the experience of God is a faith issue and this answers it all. But faith is in itself is an experience of the divine.
Philosophers believe that since God is an ‘ineffable being’, that is indefinable or beyond words, and that there is no standard of experience of the person that we do not exactly know who, then we might as well scrap the argument and forget the ‘God experience’ since we do not know what we really are talking about. It is a nice try to say those eloquent yet sincerely wrong prejudices. However, we have to keep in mind that even the ‘God experience’ cannot define who God is because who he is, is His wonder and mystery. God cannot be contained in the words of man. Describing him in an experience is possible but defining him by that same experience is unfeasible.
Experience could be deceptive in some cases, but some does not mean all and could never be a basis to brush it aside as a ground for believing in the existence of God. Recognizing God and explaining the experience that people have had with him could somehow be painstaking for those who had it when questioned by the skeptics, but their belief should not waver in the hands of the unbelieving for they are only subject not to man but to the Object of their experience.
To sum it up, no matter how complicated the issue might be, it doesn’t mean that there are no possibilities of the existence of God based on experience. For I believe that, even if there is a single truth claim of a ‘God experience’ as against a million, that one claim will suffice to affirm the existence of a Supreme Being indefinable and incomprehensible as he is.
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