One might think that this research goes against arguments for the existence of God that appeal to religious experience. In other words, one could argue as follows:
- Religious experience counts as strong evidence for the existence of God only if the sensed-presence experience cannot be produced on demand.
- The sensed-presence experience can be produced on demand.
- Therefore, religious experience is not strong evidence for the existence of God.
Update: Further discussion at Steinblog.
Update: What about the following argument?
- Religious experience is a good reason to believe in the existence of God only if the sensed-presence experience cannot be reproduced under experimental conditions.
- The sensed-presence experience can be reproduced under experimental conditions.
- Therefore, religious experience is not a good reason to believe in the existence of God.
Now that we can produce it on demand, it would seem to diminish the strength of the argument, as there are now additional ways to produce the sensed-presence experience. But I am not sure that it was initially strong, and now it is not strong. One way of construing it, is that it is now simply less strong than it was before as it is now easier to imagine alternate ways the experience was come by. Before such experience was had in n ways, now it is had in n+1 ways. I would think too that n was probably always thought of as greater than 1. "Crazy people" were always said to feel all sorts of presences.
ReplyDeleteIn comments at Steinblog, the following example is presented as a counterexample to premise (1):
ReplyDelete“My seeing the keyboard in front of me is strong evidence for its existence only if my seeing it in front of me cannot be produced on demand (perhaps by ingesting some hallucinatory substance).”
I am not sure that this example is a counterexample to premise (1).
I take it that the counterexample is supposed to work as follows:
(a) My seeing the keyboard in front of me is strong evidence for its existence only if my seeing it in front of me cannot be produced on demand. [Assumption for reductio.]
(b) My seeing the keyboard in front of me can be produced on demand (perhaps by ingesting some hallucinatory substance).
(c) But my seeing the keyboard in front of me is strong evidence for its existence.
(d) Therefore, (a) is false.
(e) (a) and (1) are instantiations of the same principle, which says that an experience of kind-K counts as strong evidence for the existence of X only if that experience cannot be produced on demand.
(f) Therefore, (1) is false.
It seems to me that (c) is doing the heavy lifting in this reductio. However, it seems to me that (c) is a ceteris paribus claim. That is to say, the intuition that (c) is true is grounded in the fact that we take it to be a ceteris paribus claim that excludes the possibility that we are in a skeptical scenario. However, once we take into consideration the possibility that we are in a skeptical scenario (e.g., that we are brains in vats), then (c) is no longer true.
Now, in the post’s argument about sensed-presence, we are talking about an experience that is supposed to be produced by a supernatural cause. Therefore, premise (1) is not supposed to be a ceteris paribus claim, i.e., it is not supposed to exclude far-fetched possible causes. Moreover, the God Helmet experiment is a sort of skeptical scenario by design, since it is supposed to recreate an experience that supposedly occurs “in the wild” under experimental conditions. So I take that to be the difference between premise (1) and premise (a) in the reductio, which means that they are not instantiations of the same principle, which, in turn, means that (e) is false.