Phydeaux said:
I suppose your right
. But I would say that the claim of believers, that they have had experiences with God gives a little edge to the idea of a God, true or not.
Yes, Phydeaux, I agree that the existence of religious experience is the best argument there is for a God. If you have experienced something - or appeared to experience something - it is very hard not to believe in it, as your own posts suggest.
The problem is that this is a consideration that has psychological force rather than argumentative force. That is, if I have had what I believe to be an experience of God, then that is very powerful from my point of view but not from anyone else's. It's hard for me to say to someone else, "I've experienced God, so he exists" - because they can easily say that what I took to be an experience of God was in fact something else.
But I personally think that if there is a potentially persuasive route to take in arguing for God, this is the best possibility on offer. What the theist has to do is show that it is reasonable to take religious experience as evidence for God. There are a couple of ways one could do this:
(1) Argue that God is the most probable cause of these experiences.
(2) Argue that, as a rule, we take experiences to be veridical - that is, we believe that what we see is real - unless there is a particular reason to think otherwise (e.g. we are colour blind, drunk, etc.). Then you'd have to argue that this applies to religious experiences too.
I think that (2) is probably the better route to go down. Then you'd have to counter a few objections, too, such as -
(1) The reason we take our experiences to be veridical unless there is good reason to suppose otherwise is that our experiences can be tested. For example, if you think you see a tree, you can go and touch it, bang your head against it, etc. Or you can ask the person standing next to you if they see it too. But if you think you have experienced God, it is very hard to verify this by another method.
(2) Different people have different religious experiences. For example, a Christian mystic may experience the love of the Holy Trinity, whilst a Hindu mystic may experience the patronage of Lord Ganesha. In other words, religious experiences do not testify to a single, mutually supporting body of evidence, but contradict each other. If you are using religious experience as evidence for God, you will have to show (a) *which* religious experiences are evidence, and which are not, and (b) *why* some of those experiences are good evidence and others are not. That's not going to be easy.
