One curious issue with the claim that mystics’ experiences of God provide good reasons to believe that God really exists is the question of just how a person can 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?
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 — but how would we “know” the voice or face or speaking style of “god”?
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 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 — 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.
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