Religious Experience, Testimony, and Skepticism, Part 1 (A Very Rough Draft)

My project here is not to show that God exists, or even to demonstrate that there exists anything beyond the realm of the natural world. It is my plan, however, to examine in what cases the unbeliever (by unbeliever, I understand one who disbelieves, lacks a belief regarding, or is agnostic about either, specifically, the existence of a personal, benevolent, omnipotent God such as that posited by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, or else one who regards the supernatural, generally, as impossible or improbable) is epistemically justified in her unbelieving. Further, I am directly concerned with the question of the justification of disbelief as it relates to the testimony of fellow human beings regarding their own religious experience.

A preliminary consideration: when I speak of perception and experience, I will be favoring in this paper the so-called Theory of Appearing. William Alston in Perceiving God explains what it means for a person to perceive an object: “For S to perceive X is simply for X to appear to S as so-and so. That is all there is to it.”[1] For Alston, then, sight of an object occurs if to one that object looks a certain way; hearing an object happens if an object sounds a certain way. Moreover says Alston, “the notion of X’s appearing to S as so-and-so is fundamental and unanalyzable,” and thus the Theory of Appearing remains remarkably simple.[2]'

I. Testimony About Non-Religious Experience

1. Testimony as a source of basic belief

Sources of both belief and justification are many; perception, memory, introspection, reason, and the like produce within us beliefs about the way the world is. One of the most often overlooked but certainly one of the most important sources of belief is what we call testimony. In his Epistemic Justification, Richard Swinburne defines the testimony of others as “what other people tell us orally or in writing about what they have perceived, experienced, or done… or what they claim to know on good authority to be so.”[3] Moreover, Swinburne distinguishes between two types of human testimony: direct and indirect. As I understand it, direct testimony occurs when person S2 reports an event or perception to person S1, where the event reported is not mediated by a third person’s testimony while indirect testimony is said to occur when person S2 reports to S1 a testimony received from another person, S3.[4] I am concerned almost exclusively with direct testimony, the kind of attestation that involves only two persons, S1 and S2. Furthermore, I will be dealing with cases of testimony about the testifier’s own experience or perception of an event or appearance.

The importance of other persons’ testimonies for our epistemic lives is clear; as social creatures we know much of what we do by way of the attestation of others. I only know about geopolitical events around the world through reading news reports, articles, and books researched, compiled, and written by other human persons. My knowledge of history, physics, biology, and chemistry is based almost entirely on the testimony of experts written in textbooks and spoken in lectures. Further, my beliefs about the activities of my friends and family when I am not present are based almost solely on their say-so. Thomas Reid, in his An Inquiry into the Human Mind: on the Principles of Common Sense, in Section XXIV, entitled Of the Analogy between Perception, and the Credit we give to Human Testimony, has a fundamental recognition of the basicality of human testimony in the acquiring and justifying of beliefs and the strong analogy between knowledge gotten by way of perception and knowledge attained as mediated by other persons: "The objects of human knowledge are innumerable, but the channels by which it is conveyed to the mind are few.” Reid continues, “Among these, the perception of external things by our senses, and the informations which we receive upon human testimony, are not the least considerable." [5] Alvin Plantinga, in his Warrant and Proper Function agrees with Reid’s assessment, arguing that we generally hold beliefs occasioned by testimony in a basic way: “Reid is surely right in thinking that the beliefs we form by way of credulity or testimony are typically held in the basic way, not by way of inductive or abductive evidence from other things I believe.”[6]

The argument that we hold testimonial evidence as basic is a persuasive one; consider a case of direct testimony about perception, wherein S2 tells S1 a testimony, T, about its seeming to S2 that x is presenting itself to him or her as [phi]. Upon hearing S2’s words, S1 adopts the belief that T is true; S1’s belief that T is true is not based on another proposition or another kind of evidence. S1 does not induce or abduce the conclusion. When S1 receives testimony from S2, S1 does not perform a quick deduction (something like, I ought to believe people who tell the truth, S1 is telling the truth, therefore I ought to believe S1). The informational content of the testimony, T, is believed solely on the fact that it was delivered by S2 as testimony. However, one may ask, is S1 justified in holding his belief in such a way? To answer this question, let us formulate a general principle of testimony, modeled after Thomas Reid’s so-called principle of credulity:

(A1) For some person S1, a basic belief in the veracity of the perceptual testimony, T, of another person, S2, is justified by virtue of its being occasioned by T.

Something very much like (A1) seems to me correct. It is similar to Reid’s common-sense credulity, which he defines as, “a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us.”[7] The mechanism of credulity, as it stands, is only descriptive; Reid simply notes that humans tend to believe what they are told. (A1) incorporates a normative element; my statement is that not only do humans tend to accept the veracity of testimony, but also that they are justified in doing so. I have, however, purposefully narrowed (A1) to cases of testimony about perception or experience of an object; (A1) is not concerned with testimony given about, say, the deliverances of a person’s reason, intuition, introspection, or non-perceptual memory. Note, also, that (A1) is careful to say that belief in the veracity of T is justified just in case that belief is occasioned by T. Suppose that instead of being occasioned by T, S1’s belief is occasioned instead by, for instance, a sound blow to the head by a baseball bat that causes neurological damage. In such a case, we would not generally say that S1 is justified in his belief, even if by some sheer coincidence it turns out to be a true belief. For more on externalist constraints, proper function, and epistemic practices, see below.

(A1) is grounded upon another principle, one that states that a man is justified in believing in the veracity of the deliverances of his own senses and faculties. Swinburne, in The Existence of God, explains: “…it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations), if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic)…”[8] This seems to be one of the most basic truths of epistemology. Suppose I am appeared to in a rose-like way. Perhaps I smell a flowery scent and I encounter a red, rose-shaped visual sensation. Few would doubt that the rational thing to do in such a situation, barring any defeaters (see below), would be for me to adopt the belief that there is a flower-scented, rose-shaped object causing my sensations. William Alston, in Perceiving God, formulates a similar axiom: “If S’s belief that X is [phi] is based on an experience in which, so it seems to S, X is appearing to S as [phi], the that belief is prima facie justified.”[9] Alston and Swinburne have a fundamental agreement here; when I seem to be appeared to in such-and-such a way by an object, that counts as evidence for my believing that the object appearing to me exists and predicates such-and-such a property so as to appear to me in such-and-such a way.

Swinburne’s “principle of rationality” must, however, be coupled with another principle, a rule Thomas Reid called the principle of veracity in order for (A1) to be fully supported. “The first of these principles is, a propensity to speak truth, and to use the signs of language, so as to convey our real sentiments.”[10] Now, the principle of veracity may not at first seem obvious. Don’t humans often deceive one another? Yes, however, Reid’s point is not so much a statement of universality as it is a generalization; people often equivocate and engage in deception. For the most part, however, it is obvious that humans tell the truth to one another; people who constantly deceive we call pathological liars and are unable to function normally in a working society. This is a point Reid makes cogently; if people tended to lie to one another more often than they told the truth, basic societal relations would become nearly impossible. Constant deception and thus mutual distrust would eat away at the foundations of human cooperative civilization.

The principle of veracity, in conjunction with the Alstonian-Swinburnian rationality axiom, seems to me powerful enough to make (A1) look like a fairly modest proposal. Insofar as Swinburne’s principle of rationality and Reid’s principle of veracity relate to (A1), we ought to note that if it is true that a person’s apparent perceptions of such-and-such a thing with such-and-such properties count toward justifying his belief that something actually stands in such a causal relation so as to be perceived as such-and-such and if it is true that human persons tend not to lie about their experiences, perceivings, and beliefs, then (A1) seems to follow quite readily.

2. Two beliefs justified by testimony

(A1) states that whenever a person receives testimony from another person (in the absence of defeaters), he or she is justified in believing that the testimony is valid. What, exactly, does the term validity entail? Well, if (as on Swinburne’s principle) S2 is justified in his believing that an object x is causing him to have such and such a sensation on the basis of its seeming to S2 that x is present and if (as on Reid’s description of credulity) people normally tell the truth to one another about their experiences, it seems that S1 is justified in believing two propositions. First, S1 is justified in believing that S2 is not deceiving him. Second, S1 is justified in believing that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present. A clarification to (A1):

(A2) For some person S1, two beliefs, B1 and B2, about the veracity of the testimony, T, of another person, S2, are justified by virtue of their being occasioned by T, where B1 is the belief that S2 is not deceiving S1, and B2 is the belief that that something, x, is, indeed, causing it to S2 to seem that x is present.

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[1] Perceiving God, p.55.

[2] For a brief treatment of Alston’s Theory of Appearing and competing theories of perception, see Perceiving God, p.54-59

[3] Epistemic Justification, p. 123.

[4] See Swinburne’s Epistemic Justification, pages 123-128.

[5] Reid, p. 228

[6] Warrant and Proper Function, p. 79

[7] Reid, p. 232

[8] The Existence of God, p. 303

[9] Perceiving God, p. 100

[10] Reid, 231