I promised in the introduction of Religion Refuted that we would examine all three paths to religious belief: natural theology, personal experience, and faith. Our examination of natural theology, which occupies three-fourths of the book, is completed. Congratulations. We’re now ready to examine the argument from personal experience, which we will accomplish in a single chapter.
Personal or private experience of God is common. A Gallup poll found that 23 percent of Americans have heard a voice or seen a vision in response to prayer.[1] Stanford University anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, after studying evangelicals who reported hearing the literal, audible voice of God, observed as follows:
I eventually discovered that these experiences were associated with intense prayer practice. They felt spontaneous, but people who liked to get absorbed in their imaginations were more likely to experience them. Those were the people who were more likely to love to pray, and the “prayer warriors” who prayed for long periods were likely to report even more of them.[2]
Imagine a scenario in which a believer prays for God to guide her through an important life decision, after which she hears the audible voice of God delivering personalized advice. In this scenario, God speaks in her native language, scrupulously avoiding words beyond her vocabulary. Rather than simulcasting advice to everyone who could potentially benefit from it, God beams the words directly into this individual believer’s noggin in a way that is inconspicuous to outside observers.
Sometimes God chooses to be even more subtle. Rather than downloading his commentary directly into the believer’s cranium, God communicates in the form of a significant word from a stranger.
Suppose a stranger inadvertently steps on a lady’s shoe and says, “Whoops! So sorry! I should pay more attention to where I am.” The lady, it so happens, was worrying about her company’s upcoming job layoffs, and she interprets this encounter with the stranger as a message from God to stop worrying so much about the future and focus more on the present moment. The stranger unwittingly made a statement that the believer interpreted as having a profound secondary meaning understood only by God and by her. The stranger unknowingly acted as an instrument of a stealth communication. God acted as a remote ventriloquist.
If God tires of ventriloquism, he might provide a sign in the form of a meteorological event, perhaps a tornado that destroys a nearby elementary school. Ordinary citizenry watching the news on local television gasp in horror at the live video of the tornado ripping through the school, while the insightful believer nods her head in recognition that Jesus is sending her an encrypted message to cease spawning so many children by different baby daddies.
Suppose a believer is awakened by a light beaming through her bedroom window, illuminating family photos on her dresser. Her attention is drawn to the glimmering silver-framed photo of her dad, who is ill. She glances out her window to see headlights of a car turning around in her driveway, an all-too-common annoyance at this end of the street. The next morning, she gets a phone call from her mother, who conveys the sad news that her father passed away during the night. The believer, instantly enlightened by a beam of insight, imperiously decrees that the illuminated photo was a sign from God that he was repossessing her father.
Believers aren’t passive receivers of God’s veiled signs. They are ostensibly engaged in an ongoing two-way communication. For example, televangelist Joyce Meyer wrote:
I once asked the Lord why so many people are confused and He said to me, “Tell them to stop trying to figure everything out, and they will stop being confused.” I have found it to be absolutely true. Reasoning and confusion go together.[3]+
Given how frequently Meyer quotes God verbatim for her book-buying audience, she and God must chin-flutter as relentlessly as two fifteen-year-old girls who got new cell phones for Christmas. I wonder if Meyer’s book editor ever corrects God’s grammar.
Some Christians confess that their personal experience of God is the sole basis for their belief. They steadfastly abjure any claims to objective evidence that might justify their belief to a critical third party. They are too well-informed—and members of their social circle are too well-informed—to permit them to declare with a straight face that there is real-world evidence adequate to justify belief. By appealing solely to personal experience, believers liberate themselves from the intellectual rigors of grappling with natural theology. To further sweeten the deal, taking refuge in private experience stymies skeptical critics; one cannot scrutinize the inscrutable.
Reliance solely on private evidence is, however, a double-edged sword. While “going private” insulates the purported evidence from external audits, it also deprives Christians of the means to convince a rational critic that God exists. We cannot impress upon others the rectitude of our beliefs when the evidence supporting those beliefs is exclusively private. Moreover, relying solely on private experience implies that, for those without private experience, nonbelief is the only rational state of mind.
It might be argued that if I trust the testimony of my religious neighbor, my own lack of personal experience should not be an obstacle to belief. After all, I take my neighbor’s word on other matters beyond my ability to verify. If a sizable percentage of my neighbors and relatives are in general agreement about their private communications with God, surely it is reasonable to accept this consensus as probable evidence of God’s existence.
No, I think not. I might readily accept my neighbor’s claim that he spoke with a mutual acquaintance. I might even accept his claim that he spoke with an A-list Hollywood celebrity or the president of the United States. But I assuredly would not accept a claim that he spoke with Cleopatra, which would require some extraordinary science-fiction scenario. Given that I would justifiably reject my neighbor’s claim that he chatted up Cleopatra, an actual historical person, why would I accept his claim to have ongoing telepathic tête-à-têtes with an unevidenced magical being whose attributes, such as omnipotence, entail logical contradictions?
People who profess to have ongoing conversations with God diminish their credibility when they continue to drink to excess, gossip, buy expensive trinkets, and otherwise pursue mundane lives. If the alleged God-talkers believed, deep in their hearts, that their experiences were genuine, their belief would dominate their lives.
Granted, people with cirrhosis of the liver sometimes continue to drink, and people with lung cancer sometimes continue to smoke. Sick people often live in denial, or else they lament that they have a terminal condition and thus nothing to be gained by reforming their habits. With God, however, all things are possible, so denial and resignation are inappropriate—unless believers doubt they are really communicating with God.
God-talkers are rarely more animated than when tearing apart a fellow congregant’s theological ruminations. People are different, and that displeases them. In that respect they are alike.
As we widen our view, the smorgasbord of tenets certified by private evidence becomes increasingly heterogeneous, encompassing monotheism, polytheism, henotheism, pantheism, panentheism, and the worship of entities too nebulous to even classify. We are told on Monday that God champions laissez-faire capitalism and repeal of the estate tax. On Tuesday, God prefers democratic socialism and the National Football League. On Wednesday, he applauds lifelong celibacy and manifest destiny. On Thursday, he endorses environmentalism and the pledge of allegiance. On Friday, he canoodles peaceniks and mandates wearing of the hijab. On Saturday, he ignites the warmongers and gives the wink to polyamory. On Sunday, he just sits around the house all day in his underwear.
God has firm opinions, say his Earthly emissaries. Theological diversity is therefore shrugged off as human-induced noise. Apologists urge us to distill the true meaning, what businessmen call the takeaway message. Fine. Let’s do that. Private experiences of God do seem to share some core similarities, namely that (1) they regularly impart elaborate sectarian doctrines with no trace of intermediate logic, (2) they never impart stunning insights, such as how to build a Star Trek-style teleportation chamber, and (3) they bear every appearance of having emerged from the relationship of the believer with his or her social circle rather than from a relationship with any invisible agents.
Appeals to personal experience wax as confidence in natural theology wanes. Theologians, of course, adamantly deny any decline of natural theology as they prop up its listless frame and jiggle its floppy mandible. Yet three out of four modern philosophers view natural theology as moribund, an intellectual museum piece.[4]
Once upon a time, the apostle Paul boasted that nature proves God so plainly that “people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20, NIV). By the mid-twentieth century, C. S. Lewis tacitly conceded that wasn’t so; natural theology has been a lifelong invalid: “The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion; it must have always been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.”[5]
If Lewis was right and the source of belief is not natural theology or external evidence, then the source must be internal. Having a source of conviction that’s safely tucked deep within is wonderfully convenient for those who never cared to expose their cherished convictions to fact-checking. Stalwarts of personal experience, when probed by a thoughtful questioner, deflect the assault by screeching, “Nobody can disprove a belief rooted in private evidence!”
That claim is largely false. Admittedly, current brain-scanning technology does not enable us to identify whether the private evidence was accurately reported or pharmacologically induced. In that sense, reports of private experience are beyond testing. But if private evidence culminates in a statement about the real world, we can test the accuracy of that statement, barring practical obstacles. A private religious experience that does not culminate in any statement with real-world consequences must forever remain beyond the reach of real-world tests, but who cares about a statement that has no real-world consequences?
Taking religious experiences en masse, their mutual incompatibilities make them all dubious. We can’t formally deduce that every purported private experience is bogus; that would be the genetic fallacy. But the “personal experience channel” seems to be all noise and no signal. Sensible listeners will switch to a different channel.
[1] Billy Hallowell, “Has God Ever Spoken to You Directly? The Blaze Wants to Know about Your Most Intensely-Religious Experiences,” The Blaze, January 16, 2013, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20130118030924/https://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/01/16/has-god-ever-spoken-to-you-directly-theblaze-wants-to-know-about-your-most-intensely-religious-experiences/.
[2] T. M. Luhrmann, “Is That God Talking?” New York Times, May 1, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/opinion/is-that-god-talking.html?_r=0.
[3] This quotation is from Meyer’s book The Battlefield for the Minds of Teens: Winning the Battle in Your Mind. Meyer’s book is riddled with similar comments. A few paragraphs later, Meyer writes, “I don’t know about you, but I want God to reveal things to me in such a way that I know in my spirit that what has been revealed to my mind is correct. I don’t want to reason, to figure, and to be logical, rotating my mind around and around an issue until I am worn out and confused. I want to experience the peace of mind and heart that comes from trusting in God, not in my own human insight and understanding.”
Meyer is sober and modest compared to televangelists like Kat Kerr, whom God often grants literal tours of heaven and empowers to direct the paths of hurricanes.
Joyce Meyer, The Battlefield for the Minds of Teens: Winning the Battle in Your Mind (Hachette Book Group, New York, 2006).
[4] Bourget and Chalmers, “The 2009 PhilPapers Survey.”
See also:
“Why Are So Many Scientists and Philosophers Atheists?” Atheism and the City, June 15, 2015, http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2015/06/why-are-so-many-scientists-and.html.
[5] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 1940), 2–3.
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