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The Argument from Religious Experience The premises: 1) Many people across time and cultures have had experiences which they have interpreted as touching the divine. 2) So many cannot have been wrong in their interpretation of the nature of their experiences. 3) Therefore there is some real divinity that has touched these human beings. The critical premise is that so many could not have been wrong in interpreting their religious experiences. We cannot beg the question by assuming that their shared experiences are real simply because they have one trait in common: the interpretation that they touch the divine. If they are real, they must also clearly stem from the same divine source. To illustrate the reasoning, take a hypothetical example: Let's say we have two dozen witnesses to a murder who claim to have heard the suspected murderer say something to the victim at the same point in time. On the surface, that would seem to indicate clearly that the suspected murderer said something to the victim. On the other hand, we would also want to know what the murderer supposedly said. Suppose the list of things the witnesses claim to have heard included the following: "I love you." "I will kill you." "You are dead." "I want you to go to the store and buy me a pack of cigarettes." "Hello." Not only would that list give us no confidence about what the murderer said, but it would even call into question the belief that the murderer said anything at all, since nothing the murderer could conceivably have said in reality would have sounded so different to so many people. This is the way it is when we evaluate the collective record of human religious experiences. They have pointed in thousands of different directions, called upon human beings to believe in hundreds, if not thousands, of different divinities of varying natures, in dozens upon dozens of different stories of creation, millions of different tales, most of them mutually exclusive. Least compatible with most of them is Christianity, which requires that almost all of the experiences of polytheistic societies be regarded as completely false or seriously misinterpreted or intentionally deceptive on the part of Yahweh, the Christian and Jewish God. These are enough to take away from Christianity the support of this argument. If the religious experiences of polytheistic societies, requiring belief in multiple different and often competing divinities, are to be regarded as false, then most of the interpretations of religious experiences throughout history are false, and therefore the second premise of the argument is refuted: many human experiences have been misinterpreted. Likewise, if these experiences are regarded as having stemmed from Yahweh but were misinterpreted, then again misinterpretation of these experiences is the rule rather than the exception, and there is no confidence in the interpretations of the many. Finally, if the experiences are regarded as coming from Yahweh but were intended to deceive humans into believing in false religions, then the experiences are deceptive and human interpretations of them cannot be trusted. Once again, there is no reason to believe that the interpretation of these events is accurate. Once we have established that the interpretations of these events can be inaccurate, and we remind ourselves that the interpretations are usually mutually exclusive (Baal and Yahweh cannot both exist if the doctrine of Christianity is true) there is no reason to assume (as this argument requires) that any of them is accurate. Those who already believe in some religion or another will automatically view those which comport with his belief as being accurate, those which do not as being inaccurate, invented, or false. And others who believe in other religions will believe the same of the experiences interpreted by the believers in the first religion. Going back to our analogy, those witnesses who say the alleged murderer said "I love you" to the victim will doggedly maintain his innocence and claim that the witnesses who say he said "I will kill you" are insane, mistaken, or lying. Those who say he said "I will kill you" will maintain his guilt and, in turn, accuse those who say he said "I love you" of incompetence or dishonesty. And we, the jury, will have to assume that he said nothing at all, and decide his innocence or guilt entirely on other evidence, because the conflicting testimony offers nothing we can use as evidence one way or the other. There is no evidence against Yahweh or Zeus or Ahura Mazda or the Great Spirit in the inconsistent interpretations of billions of religious experiences over 100,000 years or longer of the collective human religious experience. There just isn't any evidence for them. |
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