Experience of God and the rationality of theistic belief (original) (raw)

1997, Choice Reviews Online

We are now in a position to present our argument for the strong ratio¬ nality of the belief that God is really and truly experienced and hence exists, based on alleged experiences of God. There are certain principles about how to connect experience with real¬ ity which we all implicitly recognize as authoritative. We all regularly ap¬ peal to these rules when attempting to rationally determine the connection between experience and reality in contexts other than the experience of God. In our argument here, these principles will simply be assumed to govern correctly the relevant, rational deliberations. Thus, the argument starts with these principles. The principles to which we here are going to appeal do not only give conditions under which a certain kind of belief that p is weakly rational, under which conditions, that is, not only is the belief that p rational, but also the belief that not-p is rational. These principles yield strong rationality, showing that a belief that p is rational while a belief that not-p is not. At the same time, though, at least because of the clause "everything else being equal" which these principles contain, not every reasonable, proper appli¬ cation of them, even when considering the same evidence, need yield the same results. Reasonable, informed human beings could conceivably reach different conclusions from these same principles even though they all agreed on the principles and on the relevant evidence to which the princi¬ ples were to be applied. They could reasonably differ over whether every¬ thing else was equal. Hence, we do not claim that all reasonable, proper applications of these principles would show, with regard to a belief that p, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief 46 ] that it was rational and that the belief that not-p was not. So our principles do not serve to show that a belief possesses "universal" strong rationality.