A common argument for the existence of God is one based upon personal, often mystical, experiences. A person claims they have had direct and immediate experiences of God and, therefore, belief in God is not only reasonable but even necessary. It is difficult to argue against personal religious experiences — how easy is it to criticize what a person claims about what they have seen, felt, or heard? At the same time, though, how can we be confident that they are correct in their conclusions?
So God Walks Into a Bar...
Even if we assume for the sake of argument that "God" does exist or perhaps might exist, on what basis can anyone claim to reasonably know that they had encountered "God"?
Even if God were to make an immediate appearance, I would still need rational theology as a presupposition. For how am I to be certain that it is God himself who has appeared to me, or only another powerful creature?
- Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology.
In the above quotation, Immanuel Kant provides one approach which cuts to the heart of alleged experiences of God: how do you know that you experienced God and not someone or something else? How can a person claim to recognize God? If God walked into a bar and sat down next to you, how should you know? Upon what rational basis could you claim to have recognized God, knew it was God, and thereafter claim to have met God?
What arguments or evidence, without resorting to question begging, can a person use to claim that whatever they experienced is necessarily that of any alleged god at all, never mind the god they already happen to believe in? Shouldn't we be suspicious that out of all the possible gods which people have believed in, a person just happens to have encountered exactly the god they believed in or exactly the sort of god which is popular in their culture and thus was proven right?
Perception & Skepticism
Perceptual recognition is something which can merit skepticism even in mundane matters we encounter in everyday life. Consider how easy it can be to make an error in recognition when it comes to the voices or faces or writing styles of people we know very well. Reliable recognition of people we don’t know is even worse — there are very good reasons why eyewitness testimony is considered the most unreliable sort of evidence in a criminal trial. At least we are familiar with human beings generally, though. We can’t say the same about deities. How would we "know" the voice or face or speaking style of "god"?
To illustrate how we can better understand this issue, Michael Martin has offered 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 on earth could such an identification 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 and so it would be rational to believe that the person on the phone was from County Cork — but only that very small part and that is in the best case scenario.
Typically, we would have to reject the overall claim as being valid, we would have no reason whatsoever to believe it, and we would have to seriously wonder about any person who establishes beliefs upon this experience. These same problems are not only present but are in fact much worse when someone makes the claim that they have spoken with God or even just "experienced" God. After all, we can at least presume that there is such a being as "the strongly man of County Cork."
Addressing Mystical Claims
The claim "I have spoken with God" cannot be taken at face value. We need to know what part of this experience justifies the conclusion that it involved "God" — not "God" generally and in some vague sense, but "God" specifically with all of the qualities and attributes alleged for this god, like omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. We need some rational bias for not thinking that it was an experience of something else, even if it was some other sort supernatural being.
Following Kant, anyone who wants to claim to be a half-way rational and reasonable believer needs some sort of “rational theology” first before they can evaluate the assertions of those claiming to have had mystical, divine experiences. They need some means of distinguishing between God and all of the other not-God candidates before it's possible to deduce that it's even possible that the experience was of "God," never mind that it's reasonable to believe it really was.
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 or that Satan isn’t the only possible not-God candidate that has to be considered. The point is, it is very difficult to offer a sound basis for differentiating between an experience of "god" and of something else entirely. Most religious believers never realize or think about this.
Instead, religious believers just seem to accept as legitimate the claims of mystics which happen to be consistent with one's religion and with what one already wants to believe is true. That's not using a "rational theology" to differentiate between valid and invalid claims; all it really amounts to is the selective use of "evidence" to validate a pre-existing ideology or avoid uncomfortable conflicts. When an experience — whether personal or someone else's — fits with one's preconceptions and what they want, they seem to just accept it as valid and never give it a second thought.
