Yes, But Can You Experience God?
The challenge here, I think, is to hold in mind that whether you are an atheist who rests her understanding of the world in science and empirical data or the religious believer who finds meaning through scripture and God, that both means of understanding are properly understood to be a process of inquiry.
In terms of resting one’s belief about the nature of the world in the revelations of science, there is often a corresponding failure to understand that doing so is, in itself, a choice to explore the world from a particular vantage point. The popular view of science is that is has to do only with the material, that whatever we can touch and feel, dissect and study with our senses is what is really real. Insofar as God and the process of understanding through religion don’t deal with the material, atheists thus assume that they are invalid and merely the hair-brained superstitions of the unenlightened.
But empiricism and materialism are not, in fact, the same thing. Empiricism is a study of reality through the avenue of experience and the assumption that only the material can be experienced is itself an unspoken premise that limits what we stand to discover. The explanatory power of the natural sciences not withstanding, operating under the assumption that only the material constitutes reality and is therefore deserving of consideration is as much a matter of faith as a belief in God.
I take the idea of whether one can have an experience of God to be an open question so long as experience isn’t necessarily relegated into the domain of the material. Despite not being a religious individual I have had what I would call an experience of God that was entirely subjective and has infused my own life with a deeply held spirituality. That the experience can’t be easily translated into material terms doesn’t, at least in my mind, invalidate it as an experience. Nor does it cause the influence of that experience on my life to be null and void.
It is this, in my mind, that gives religion the power that Freddie rightly notes it has: the infusion of one’s life with a deeper current of purposefulness through openness to an experience of something greater than one’s self. Again, rightly understood, I think such an experience isn’t so much determinative as it is dispositive.
Besides, I feel like the whole argument over the existence of God is misplaced. It’s not a belief in God that keeps me from adhering to any particular religious tradition, but my concerns around the way that most religious traditions operate, the stasis of belief that tends to become the norm in such communities, and the levels of discrimination and xenophobia that such stasis can tend to produce. Most of the criticisms that I’ve ever heard about religion are grounded in those same kinds of concerns, but those concerns have literally nothing to do with the belief in the existence of God, there are cultural not metaphysical. So a good faith argument about the problematic elements of religion ought to focus on those cultural elements, and would be a good deal more effective as a result I would wager.
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7 comments
“I take the idea of whether one can have an experience of God to be an open question so long as experience isn’t necessarily relegated into the domain of the material.”
I’m suspicious of this. Experience is measured by our brains, and our brains are made up of dots, which are made of gunk, which is a type of material. Even your experience of God was registered by you as the shifting and reforming of gunk-dots.
I do agree it’s possible that rationality and spirituality don’t necessarily have to be in tension with each other, but it’s important to build a good fence. That means establishing clearly that all faith is irrational, by definition. There is nothing empirical about your arbitrary decision to use the descriptor “experience of God.” You wanted to interpret your experience that way, so you made a choice. And, you know, may it bring you serenity. But it wasn’t some other type-two kind of science. It was a deeply irrational decision that you made.
And you know, we sort have these security measures built in to society where we ridicule irrational behavior. (At least, those types of it which we are evolved enough to detect.) Asking people not to ridicule the faith of others is often like arranging the meeting so that we meet unarmed, on your turf. If we assent to it, it is a sign of deep respect and trust. It means that we believe that your irrationality does not render you a danger to yourselves or to us.
The way it should be understood is this. The appropriate response to completely irrational behavior is full-throated ridicule. Thus, if Bill Maher offers only a 6 out of 10 on the ridicule scale, or PZ Meyers a 9, then that is four and one points of ridicule being given back to you as a sign of respect.
“…the assumption that only the material can be experienced is itself an unspoken premise that limits what we stand to discover.” It’s not correct to call this an assumption. The history of science is full of investigations into non-material forms of experience (from Cartesian intuitions to the fin-de-siecle obsession with spiritualism). It’s just that none of them have panned out. In these discussions, much more important than any nonexistence “assumption” of materialism, are such ideas as testability and intersubjectivity.
Nah…
Even the upper tail of the bellcurve can have that numinous experience.
I did.
Capacity for belief is is a distrubution, like all hardwired behaviors.
It depends on the size of your god-shaped hole.
Really, it’s all about teh substrate.
The explanatory power of the natural sciences not withstanding, operating under the assumption that only the material constitutes reality and is therefore deserving of consideration is as much a matter of faith as a belief in God.
Empiricism can discover non-material things. Empiricism proceeds by looking at the world and finding the best explanations for what we find. Mathematical truth and even laws of physics aren’t really physical objects made of molecules–but they explain such a pervasive series of observations that it’s easier to believe that they exist than it is to believe in the long list of coincidences or conspiracy that would make it appear as though the explanatory law in question exists.
This leaves open the possibility that there are many more immaterial things waiting to be used by the empiricist as explanations for observations. New mathematical intuitions might be discovered by meta-mathematicians. Or we might be able to explain some element of physical world by hypothesizing the existence of an objective beauty–as David Deutsch did when he tried to explain why human beings find flowers to be appealing.
So, in that sense, I’m agnostic rather than atheist–I think it might be possible to prove God’s existence by non-subjective argument–or, to put it another way, we might one day publicly observe some property of the world for which the best explanation is God’s existence.
OTOH, I expect any theist with sufficient honesty and reason to admit that this argument remains undiscovered–that any experience indicating God’s existence remains subjective. Moreover, it’s only reasonable to expect other people to doubt your subjective experiences–to seek explanations within the known, physical world that account for them. Should those seekers be more respectful in tone? Sure. But if a valid non-subjective argument for God’s existence is ever discovered, it will only be because non-believers worked so hard to refute the invalid arguments along the way.
I wish I had mentioned this is the post you cite, but please, disagreement is not always derision. If I debate you, it is not de facto mockery. Only religion gets this vaunted don’t-question-me status, and that is exactly what the new atheism is meant to challenge, and a good thing, too.