Experience, Beauty and Reason

Psalm 34 is an acrostic, its verses beginning in turn with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (with one letter missing), written as though a teacher had put his testimony into a form children could learn: Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD (34:11). Its heading places it after David's escape from Gath, when he saved his life by pretending to be mad before a Philistine king. That is not the setting of a calm philosopher. It is the setting of a frightened man who called out and was heard. And the psalm's central invitation is not an argument. It is taste and see.

The word matters. Ta'am is the ordinary Hebrew word for tasting food, and its noun can mean good sense or discernment, which is the word used in the heading for the sense David pretended to have lost. Tasting is knowledge by contact rather than by report. No description of mango or honey will tell you what it is like until it is in your mouth. The psalmist believes there is a knowledge of God of that kind, available to those who take refuge in him, and that it is genuine knowledge, not just a feeling. That is the biblical root of every argument from religious experience: some people claim to have known God, not as a conclusion but as a presence.

The rest of scripture both honours and tests this claim. Jacob wakes from his dream and says, Surely the LORD is in this place. Isaiah sees the Lord enthroned in the temple and cries out that he is ruined. Paul is met on the Damascus road. Romans 8:16 says the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. But scripture also says the heart is deceitful, that Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and that a dreamer whose sign comes true must still be rejected if he leads people to other gods (Deuteronomy 13:1-3). John's instruction is to test the spirits, and the test he gives is about content: does it confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:2)? A Christian account of experience has to keep both sides.

This lesson takes up four further kinds of reason for belief in God that do not start from the existence or order of the universe: experience, the trustworthiness of reason itself, desire and beauty, and the very idea of God. Each is weaker as a public proof than the arguments of the last three lessons, and some are stronger as a personal reason. The last section asks what happens when you put them all together.

William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 and published them as The Varieties of Religious Experience. He collected first-hand reports of conversion, mystical union, sudden peace and overwhelming presence from many traditions and took them seriously as data. He described mystical states as hard to put into words and yet carrying a sense of knowledge, of having learned something true. James did not conclude that they proved Christianity. He concluded that they were real features of human life that a purely materialist psychology could not dismiss, and that they had authority for those who had them.

Richard Swinburne, in The Existence of God (1979, revised 2004), turned this into a careful argument. He proposed a principle of credulity: if it seems to you that something is present, then probably it is, unless you have special reason to doubt it. That is how we treat all our experience; if we did not, we could not know anything about the world. And he added a principle of testimony: in the absence of reason for doubt, we should believe that others' experiences are as they report. So if millions of people, across centuries and cultures, report that it seemed to them God was present, that is evidence that he was, unless there is good reason to think otherwise. William Alston, in Perceiving God (1991), argued that Christian experience of God works like sense perception: it is a socially established practice of forming beliefs, with its own tests and checks, and it is as rational to rely on it as on our senses, which we also cannot prove reliable without relying on them.

The objections are serious. First, religious experiences conflict. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and followers of traditional religion all report experiences that seem to support their faiths, and they cannot all be right about what they experienced. Alston himself regarded this as the hardest problem for his view. Second, there may be natural explanations. Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), argued that God is the projection of human ideals onto the sky. Sigmund Freud, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), argued that belief in God is a wish for a protecting father. Neuroscientists have found patterns of brain activity associated with prayer and meditation. Third, experiences of God cannot be checked the way ordinary perceptions can: I can ask you whether you also see the tree, but not whether you also feel God's presence in the same way.

Each objection has replies, and each reply has limits. To conflicting experiences: experiences of a sacred reality across religions may be partly true and partly misinterpreted, as several witnesses to a road accident can disagree on details and still all have seen a crash; and the Christian may judge some experiences mistaken without judging all experience worthless. To natural explanations: finding that an experience has a brain correlate does not show that it has no object, since seeing a tree also has a brain correlate. Freud himself granted that an illusion, in his sense, need not be false; used as a proof that belief in God is false, his account would commit what logicians call the genetic fallacy, judging a belief false because of its origin. The psychologist Paul Vitz pointed out in Faith of the Fatherless (1999) that the same reasoning can be turned against atheism, which might be the wish to be rid of a father. Michael Persinger's widely reported attempt to produce religious experience by stimulating the brain with weak magnetic fields, the so-called God helmet, failed to replicate when a Swedish team led by Pehr Granqvist tested it under double-blind conditions in 2005, though Persinger disputed their method. To the checking problem: some experiences are checked by their fruits, their consistency with what God has revealed, and the community's discernment, which is what 1 John and Deuteronomy require.

In much of the world, experience is not the weak point but the starting point. Christian workers in many Muslim-majority countries report that Muslims who come to Christ often speak of dreams in which a figure of light, whom they understand to be Jesus, appeared to them. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, many people come to faith through healing or deliverance, or through prayer answered when every other help had failed. These experiences deserve to be heard with respect and taken seriously as evidence. They also need exactly the tests scripture gives, because the same regions are full of powerful experiences that lead away from Christ, and because a faith that rests only on a dream can be shaken by the next dream. The best use of experience in apologetics is the one Psalm 34 models: here is what happened to me, and here is the God it led me to, whom you can test for yourself.

C. S. Lewis put the next argument at the heart of his book Miracles (1947). If naturalism is true, he argued, every event in the universe, including every thought in my head, is fully explained by prior physical causes. But if my belief that naturalism is true is fully explained by the movement of atoms in my brain, which happened as it did for reasons that have nothing to do with whether naturalism is true, then I have no reason to trust that belief. Naturalism, if it is true, seems to cut away the ground on which anyone could know it is true. Reasoning only works if there is a real connection between thinking and truth, and that connection is what naturalism seems unable to supply.

In February 1948 the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe read a paper criticising Lewis's argument at the Oxford Socratic Club, which Lewis chaired. She pointed out that he had confused two senses of because: the causes of a belief, and the reasons for it, and that a belief could have physical causes and still be held for good reasons. Lewis took the criticism seriously and rewrote the chapter for the 1960 edition of Miracles, distinguishing cause and effect from ground and consequent, and arguing that the problem is not that our thoughts have causes but that, on naturalism, the causes seem to leave no room for the reasons to do any work. The argument has been developed since by Victor Reppert, in C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (2003), and others.

Alvin Plantinga gave the argument a different form, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, first in Warrant and Proper Function (1993) and later in Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011). Natural selection, he says, rewards behaviour that helps survival, not belief that is true. If our cognitive faculties were produced by unguided evolution, then whether our beliefs are true or false is, as far as natural selection is concerned, beside the point, so long as the behaviour they cause is adaptive. So, if both naturalism and evolution are true, the probability that our faculties are reliable is low or impossible to estimate. And anyone who sees this has a reason to doubt all his beliefs, including his belief in naturalism. Plantinga cites Charles Darwin, who wrote in a letter of 1881 to William Graham of a horrid doubt about whether the convictions of a mind developed from the minds of lower animals could be trusted. Darwin was in fact doubting his own inward conviction that the universe was not the result of chance, so his doubt fell on a conviction that pointed toward God; Plantinga uses the letter to show that Darwin saw the general problem. Plantinga's conclusion is not that evolution is false, but that evolution and naturalism together defeat themselves, while evolution guided by God does not.

The critics answer that true beliefs generally do help survival: an animal that believes there is no lion when there is one will not live long, so natural selection will tend to favour reliable faculties at least for the beliefs that matter for survival. Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober published a detailed criticism of Plantinga's probabilities in 1998, and many philosophers think the argument proves too much or too little. Plantinga replies that the critics show only that adaptive behaviour is likely, not that true belief is, and that the link between them is exactly what naturalism has trouble explaining. The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, in Mind and Cosmos (2012), was not persuaded by theism but agreed that materialism has a deep problem accounting for reason. Like the moral argument, the argument from reason is about the foundations of something everyone relies on. It does not say that atheists cannot reason; it asks why reason can be trusted if naturalism is true.

Augustine began his Confessions with a sentence that has been quoted ever since: fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te, which in plain English is, you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Ecclesiastes says God has set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work God has done (3:11). C. S. Lewis made this into an argument, most fully in his sermon The Weight of Glory (1941), in Mere Christianity, and in the story of his own conversion, Surprised by Joy (1955). He described a longing, which he called Joy and which the German word Sehnsucht names, that nothing in this world satisfies: a stab of longing at a piece of music, a distant hill, a line of poetry, that points beyond whatever triggered it. Lewis argued that natural desires correspond to real objects, hunger to food and thirst to water, and that a desire no earthly thing can satisfy suggests that we were made for something beyond the earth.

The objections are obvious, and Lewis knew them. Wanting something does not make it exist: people want to fly, or to live for ever, or to meet a lost friend again. Lewis replied that he was speaking of natural desires that belong to us as the kind of creature we are, not of particular wishes, and that a hungry man does not prove he will get bread but does prove that bread exists. Critics answer that the longing may be a by-product of other evolved desires, or simply part of being a finite creature who can imagine more than he has. The argument from desire is better understood as a pointer than as a proof. It gives a reason to take seriously the Christian claim that we were made for God, and it gives the apologist a way to speak to people who are not interested in arguments but are restless and know it.

Beauty raises a related question. Why is the universe not only orderly but beautiful, and why do we respond to that beauty as though it means something? The physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay in 1960 on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences: abstract structures worked out by mathematicians for their own beauty turn out, again and again, to describe the physical world with extraordinary precision. Many physicists have found mathematical beauty a reliable guide to true theories. For the Christian, this is what one would expect if the world was made by a mind and our minds were made in its image; Psalm 27:4 speaks of the desire to gaze on the beauty of the LORD. The critic replies that our sense of beauty may be an evolved response to features of the environment that helped survival, and that the effectiveness of mathematics may reflect only that we notice the cases where it works. This is an argument many people feel more strongly than they can state, and it is fair to say so.

The strangest argument for God is also one of the oldest. Anselm, abbot of Bec and later Archbishop of Canterbury, set it out in his Proslogion, written around 1077 and 1078, as a prayer. God, he says, is that than which nothing greater can be thought. The fool of Psalm 14:1 says in his heart that there is no God, but even the fool understands what the word God means, so God exists at least in the fool's understanding. But a being that exists in reality as well as in the understanding is greater than one that exists only in the understanding. So if God existed only in the understanding, we could think of something greater, which contradicts the definition. Therefore God exists in reality.

Most people, on first hearing it, feel they are being tricked, and they are in good company. A monk named Gaunilo replied at once, On Behalf of the Fool, that the same reasoning would prove the existence of a perfect island. Anselm answered that the argument works only for a being whose greatness includes necessary existence, not for islands, which are by nature limited. Thomas Aquinas rejected the argument because we do not know God's essence well enough to reason from it. René Descartes revived it in his Meditations (1641). Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), objected that existence is not a property that adds to the greatness of a thing; to say a thing exists is not to describe it but to say the description is fulfilled.

In the twentieth century Alvin Plantinga, in The Nature of Necessity (1974), restated the argument using the logic of possibility and necessity. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, one that has every perfection in every possible world, then such a being exists in every possible world, including ours. The logic is valid. Everything turns on the first premise: is a maximally great being possible? The critic replies that it seems equally possible that no maximally great being exists, and by the same logic that would prove there is none. Plantinga himself did not claim the argument proves God to someone who does not already accept the key premise; he claimed it shows that belief in God is rational, since the premise is one a reasonable person may accept. The ontological argument is rarely the right argument to use in a conversation. It is worth knowing because it shows what Christians mean by God: not a very great being among others, but the greatest conceivable, whose existence is not borrowed from anything.

No single argument in this module proves the Christian faith. Several, if successful, prove a good deal. The question is what happens when they are put together. Basil Mitchell, in The Justification of Religious Belief (1973), argued that belief in God is justified the way a historian's or a detective's conclusion is: not by a single proof, but by showing that one explanation makes better sense of many facts than its rivals. The existence of a contingent universe, its fine-tuning for life, the reality of moral obligation, the reliability of reason, the experience of millions, the longing that nothing satisfies, and, as Module 3 will argue, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus: the cumulative case says that theism explains all of these together better than naturalism does. Richard Swinburne makes the same case using the mathematics of probability.

Antony Flew, for most of his life one of the best-known atheist philosophers in Britain, objected in God and Philosophy (1966) that if one leaky bucket will not hold water, there is no reason to think that ten will. If each argument fails, putting failed arguments together does not make them succeed. That objection is correct about unsound arguments. An argument that is actually invalid or has a false premise adds nothing. But it is incorrect about evidence that is real but limited. In a court, one witness's uncertain identification, a partial fingerprint and a motive are each insufficient, but together they can establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The cumulative case does not stack failed proofs; it gathers pieces of evidence, each of which raises the probability of God somewhat, and asks where they point together. Honesty also requires the reverse: the problem of evil and the hiddenness of God, which Module 4 takes up, belong on the other side of the scale, and a cumulative case that leaves them out is not cumulative at all.

Now add the fourth paragraph to your page headed My defence of the faith, and this one is different. Look back at the three arguments you have already written and the four in this lesson. Choose the two you think would be most helpful to the people you actually know, and write one sentence on why. Then write out, in no more than a paragraph, your own reason for believing that you wrote in the inquiry, and under it the way a sceptical friend might explain it without God, and then your honest reply. If your reply is that you cannot prove it to them but you can invite them to taste and see, that is a good answer, and it is the psalm's answer.

Then do what the psalmist did. This week, tell one person, in under three minutes, what God has done for you, and invite them to test it for themselves. Do not overstate. Say what happened, say what it led you to believe, and say what would help them find out whether it is true: reading one of the Gospels, praying an honest prayer, coming to church with you. Afterwards write down what they asked or said. You will need their questions more than you need your answers.