From: "Truth Liberty"
Subject: Re: Atheism

I never believed in a god, but after experiencing God for the first time after a near death experience. I could never and can never deny the experience I had with God and the fulfilment since then.

Near Death Experiences are often used as justifications for believing in things like souls, gods, spirits, an afterlife, etc. Are they, however, a very good justification for such beliefs? No.

The first serious problem is the fact that so many people confuse the truth of an interpretation of an experience with things like: the intensity of the experience, the apparent sincerity of the person reporting the experience, the sorts of changes that an experience brings to a person, etc. A person can have an intense experience, report it as honestly as they can, and change their life based upon it even while completely misinterpreting and misunderstanding it. There is no logical contradiction in such a situation.

As a matter of fact, people who have intense experiences should be especially careful about how they interpret them as well as what they claim about them. It's a known fact that people have a very poor track record when it comes to accurately reporting traumatic events that carry a lot of emotional intensity, like accidents or injuries. Why should we believe that a "near death experience" would be any different?

A second problem here is one that is also true of mystical experiences and the attempts by some to use them as justification for religious beliefs: how can a person claim to recognize God? What arguments or evidence, without resorting to question begging, can a person use to claim that whatever they experienced is necessarily that of the god they believe in? TL here, for example, claims to have never believed in god — so what basis for evaluation did he use to conclude that his experience was of God and not something else?

Michael Martin offers the example of someone claiming to have spoken on the phone with a person who seemed to be the strongest man of County Cork. How could such an identification possibly be made merely on the basis of a voice? Perhaps if the person was an expert on Irish accents at least a small part of the claim could be justified — but only a very small part.

These same problems occur with the claims made that someone has spoken with God or even just “experienced” God. This claim cannot be taken at face value: we need to know what part of this experience justifies the conclusion that it involved “God” — with all of the qualities and attributes alleged for this god, like omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. — and not an experience of something else, even if it is another supernatural being.

A traditional question based upon this dilemma is, “Are you so sure that you can’t be fooled and it wasn’t Satan who spoke to you?” You don’t have to be a believer in God or Satan to recognize the importance of such a question. The point is, no one has offered a sound basis for differentiating between an experience of “god” and of something else entirely. TL certainly didn't bother trying.

 

People can try and disprove my beliefs through science, evolution or any other means, but no-one can ever take away the life changing experience, no one can take away the complete change of heart and mind that came with. My family and friends still cannot believe how quickly I changed, for the good.

TL here doesn't seem to understand an important distinction: the truth of the existence of an experience is not the same as the truth of the interpretation of that experience. One can grant that TL had a very important, very profound, very intense experience that changed his life in a multitude of (good) ways. This does not, however, require agreeing that TL had an experience of "God," either in the orthodox Christian sense or in some personally defined sense. TL could be completely wrong in his interpretation of what he experienced without that affecting the truth of having had an experience.

I'm not quite sure why so many people feel to realize and appreciate this crucial distinction. It's one that they are able to make in other situations, but when it comes to "religious" or "mystical" experience, all common sense and skepticism go right out the window.

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