Notes for 11/4/2025

 

11/04/2025

[Philosophy Club every Tuesday at 5:00pm in CAS 436 ("The Cave")]

[Challenge for today: Try to think of (and possibly ask) at least one question.]

Have you ever had what you would consider a religious experience?

 

Arguments from religious experience can be reduced to the following general formula:

 

Pr(Claim/Experience) > Pr(Claim)

 

That is, religious experiences, or at least certain types of them, provide evidence in support of certain religious claims.

 

Depending on specifics, in some cases the experiences are allegedly sufficient to make it more rational to believe the claim than to reject or suspend judgment about it.

 

If religious experiences (REs) are to be considered evidence, an account is owed regarding how this can be so.

 

Richard Swinburne says that an experience is a “conscious mental event.”

(We should at least ask whether “conscious” is always necessary. Dreams, feelings, intuitions, unconscious or subconscious perceptions, etc.?)

 

 

A first plausible condition of REs being evidence is that the experience must somehow be an “experience of.”

That is, REs deliver information about certain kinds of things.

 

 

Swinburne suggests there are two ways this could work: direct and indirect. It is not always clear how these are to be distinguished.

 

Swinburne identifies 5 types of RE:

 

(1)     Experience centering on ordinary public objects. (e.g., stars in the night sky, baby’s smile)

(2)     Experience centering on extraordinary public objects. (e.g., pillar of fire, levitation)

 

Both of these are (presumably) indirect.

But how, exactly, can these provide information about things not themselves perceived in the experiences? Presumably by inference (more on this later).

 

(3)     Private sensations that resemble public sensory experiences. (e.g., private seeings and hearings)

(4)     Private sensations that don’t resemble public sensory experiences. (e.g., unique “awarenesses”, some “ESP-type” awarenesses)

(5)     Private “direct” non-sensory experiences of objects, properties of objects, or revelatory truths.

 

Experiences classified as “mystical” generally fit categories 4 or 5.

 

 

Swinburne’s position is that any of these experiences can be used to support a claim of the type “It seems to me that this is an experience of x” where x is at the center of a religious claim.

 

The “principle of credulity” is an “innocent until proven guilty” view of evidence.

If it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic).

 

 

Swinburne rejects a negative version this principle:

If it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is NOT present (or lacks some characteristic), then probably x is not present (or lacks that characteristic).

 

This a variation of the principle that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

The exception would be a case where it could reasonably be expected for x to seem present to S given S’s use of evidentiary resources.

 

Swinburne also has an “innocent until guilty” view of testimony. His view is that S2’s claiming to have experienced x should count as evidence for S1 that x exists (or has the properties S2 claims to have experienced x as having) unless S1 has good reasons to doubt S2’s testimony.

 

 

It is important to recognize that both the Principles of Credulity and Testimony are defeasible.

This just means that an inferential judgment can be undermined/weakened (defeated) by additional information.

 

For example, Benny’s experience of seeming to be surrounded by bats can be undermined by the information that he has taken LSD.

 

A celebrity’s claim regarding the quality of a product is weakened by the information that the celebrity was paid to endorse it.

 

Given all this, do you think that religious experiences generally provide good enough evidence for the claims based on them?

[discuss]

 

Some critical responses to Swinburne:

 

For any given assertion that Pr(C/E) > Pr(C), some plausible account needs to be given why this should be accepted.

 

This is especially problematic regarding how “seems (epistemically) to S” should be understood.

 

As with Plantinga’s discussion of proper basicality, Swinburne accepts that some seemings would be epistemically improper (beliefs shouldn’t be formed or justified that way).

 

For example,

“This seems to be a steam locomotive.”

 

Or:

 

“It seems to me that this is a portal to another universe.”

 

 

Or:

 

“It seems to me that this is a giant elephant that was petrified.”

 

 

But on what grounds should Swinburne reject these as improper seemings but accept the seemings at the heart of RE claims?

 

It has to be more than just that some experience makes one think of something. This is especially important given the phenomenon of priming where people can be induced to interpret an experience in particular ways.

Some of these can reflect cultural or societal biases.

(For example, people tend to rate faces of their own ethnicity as more trustworthy than faces of different ethnicities.)

 

Priming is highly relevant to the interpretation of religious experiences.

People tend to have religious experiences that fit their existing religious information.

 

 

It is unclear whether these considerations undermine the Principle of Credulity, itself, or whether they count as potential defeaters/weakeners.

 

 

What DO count as weakeners for claims based on REs are claims based on other REs that conflict with them.