What are we to make of mystical experiences? For some, a mystical experience is an immediate and powerful reason to believe in things like gods and angels. Others, however, argue that they should be taken with a huge grain of salt and don’t necessarily warrant uncritical acceptance.

David Efird writes at Prosblogion about Williams James’ ideas regarding mystical experiences and what sort of “authority” they should have with us:

[A]n analogy from aesthetics will be helpful. It is rather common in aesthetics to maintain that warrant for an aesthetic belief (the Mona Lisa is beautiful) is available only to one who has experienced, or engaged with, or seen, the Mona Lisa. That is, someone who has lived all his life in the Congo and never seen the Mona Lisa, or any representation of it, cannot warrantedly believe that the Mona Lisa is beautiful simply by my telling him that it is: he must experience it himself to have warrant for that belief. I think that view in aesthetics is rather plausible.

And I think something similar maybe true in the epistemology of mystical experience: in order to have warrant for a mystical belief, one must have engaged with the object of that belief. Now that engagement can take many forms -- it need not be a sort of Hollywood angels all around experience. It can be a Wesleyan "my heart was strangely warmed" sort of experience. But some sort of engagement is needed.

Efird argues (in part) from this analogy that a mystical experience may provide the individual with powerful reasons for belief, but that assent to those beliefs cannot be expected from others. Just because I experience the beauty of the Mona Lisa doesn’t mean that I can expect a person who has never seen the painting to agree that it is beautiful.

Is it, however, fair to say that a mystical experience even offers good reasons for belief to the person who had the experience? This only seems reasonable if the claims based upon mystical experiences are similar to those based upon aesthetic experiences, i.e. they are not empirical claims as to what is or is not true about the world. Is the statement “God is Love,” derived from a mystical experience, more like “the Mono Lisa is beautiful” or more like “my computer is a Macintosh”?

I think that, at least in a significant percentage of the cases, mystical claims are intended to be more like the latter than the former. If that is true, then I don’t think that mystical experiences necessary provide a good reason to believe the claims normally derived form them.

At this point there are common comparisons to normal sense experience and our immediate beliefs derived from them, but this cannot salvage mystical claims. For one thing, normal sense experiences are at least in theory things which can be shared, verified, and even perhaps defeated in the right conditions. Mystical claims not only aren’t like that, but mystics sometimes insist on just how important this difference is.

For another, there is quite a bit scientific research on how mystical experiences can be induced at will and may be the product of purely physical changes in the electromagnetic fields around the brain. If similar evidence existed and pointed to such a source for, say, people’s belief that they saw chairs in rooms when others saw nothing, then the believers would have good reason to wonder if there really were chairs there after all. The same should hold true here as well.

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