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

Thomas Reid on Testimony

As part of a project I am doing on religious experience, skepticism, and testimony, I have been reading Thomas Reid's 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, Thomas Reid's fundamental recognition is 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. Among these, the perception of external things by our senses, and the informations which we receive upon human testimony, are not the least considerable" (Reid, 228.)


Although the notion that much of our knowledge relies upon trusting the veracity of other peoples' word tends to upset our Enlightenment constitution, Reid's point is an important one; one that I hope to utilize in a somewhat modified argument from religious experience for the existence of God (but more of that in another post).
Thomas Reid begins by making a distinction between original and acquired perception, and natural and artificial language. There is, he says, a great analogy between acquired perception and artificial language, but there is a stronger connection between original perception and natural language. Man's original perception is said to understand a sign; this sign is representative of reality. It is the interpretation of how the sign connects to what it symbolizes that yields a belief within a given man. What makes this faculty original, argue Reid, is that our ability to interpret the sign is itself implanted by nature; we have within us a natural understanding of the relationship between, say, the cooing sound of our mother's voice and her actual face and body. Similarly, Reid posits a relationship between the signs of the body (gestures, tone, etc...) and the thoughts and dispensations of the mind that are perceived in our ability of natural language. As is the case with original perception, our capability to understand this relationship is implanted in us from birth; it is something 'natural' in the sense that we need not cultivate or develop it in order for it to function.
On the other end of the spectrum we have what Thomas Reid calls acquired perception and artificial language; both of these faculties understand a connection that exists between signs and reality as is the case with the original perception and natural language. Acquired perception discovers the relationship between novel signs (sensations) and a novel reality (say, a skyscraper or the ocean) by experience; this understanding is not innate as it is in original perception and thus must be honed. Analogously, our capacity for Reid's artificial language is said to discover the connection between particular articulated sounds (novel words or phrases, new semantics, or grammatical arrangements) and a man's thoughts and intentions; thus beliefs about the relation between the two are grounded in experience. Suppose I encounter a new word that has been circulating around my University lately, Word X. If I have never heard Word X before, apart from asking someone outright for a definition, I would likely come to understand its meaning only if I paid close attention to the way it was being used in sentences, its similarity to other words I already knew, and the like. My understanding of the connection between these syntactical, grammatical, and semantic clues and the actual meaning of the word would be what Reid would call my artificial language. Eventually, says Reid, I would come to form principles (something akin to concepts) and would be able to form generally accurate predictions about the meaning of new words through my artificial language and perceive the reality of novel objects through my acquired perception. I would come to understand that when such-and-such a sensation is present within me, an object with such-and-such properties is probably the cause of my sensation.


"There is, therefore, in the human mind an early anticipation, neither derived from experience, nor from reason, nor from any compact of promise, that our fellow creatures will use the same signs in language when they have the same sentiments.... The wise and beneficent Author of nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with eachother" (Reid 231.)


These principles, says Thomas Reid, are first the propensity to speak the truth, to use the signs of language so as to convey our real sentiments, and second the "disposition to confide in the veracity of others." This second principle Reid dubs the principle of credulity. Richard Swinburne, in both his The Existence of God (p. 305) and his Epistemic Justification (pp. 141-50) devises a similar axiom by the same name. Alvin Plantinga, too, mentions Thomas Reid's principle in Warrant and Proper Function (p. 77). If humans are not implanted with a tendancy to accept prima facie what others have told us, Reid reasons, no proposition would go unexamined; we would be inclined to filter each and every report through reason and experience, weighing each testimony about the world against the evidence. This, says Reid, is obviously not the case. Even the most skeptical of us do not carefully and logically asses each and every claim we receive from others. This, to me, seems to be right. When I hear on the 7 o'clock news that there was a nasty accident on the highway, my first reaction is not skepticism, but epistemic assent. I tend to believe that I am told. Moreover, even witnesses that are perceived as less reliable than news organizations I generally meet with little to no skepticism. If my neighbor Fred comes over and tells me that his house was broken into last night, I take his claim at face value and adopt the belief, Fred's house was broken into last night into my epistemic web. Reid's principle of credulity is a kind of "innocent until proven guilty" with respect to the veracity of human testimony.
In addition to his argument from our apparent casual usage of the principle of credulity, Reid mounts a pragmatic argument in its favor: "...distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society, and place us in a worse condition than that of savages." Here, he makes the obvious point that without the normatization of the principle of credulity, human knowledge would diminish to a destructively low level; society itself would decline, and distrust and incredulity would slowly degrade our modern society. Thus, Reid argues, one ought to believe others about their testimony, at least prima facie.
Insofar as the principle of credulity relates to Thomas Reid's previous arguments about language and perception, we should here note that if, as a general rule, we should believe others, then it follows that we should believe others about specifics, such as the deliverances of their own acquired perception and artificial language. If, for instance, I observe my colleagues using Word X in a certain way, and I decide to take a stab at using Word X, I ought to follow their example and use it in the sense that they do. Similarly, if I am told that a number of people have just in the last few moments been appeared to in a rose-like way, I ought to first believe that this is probably not a lie (unless I know them to have good reason for deceiving me) and thus second that there probably was something rose-like that appeared to them in such a way so as to cause them to have a rose-like experience (since the best explanation for multiple experiences of a rose-like qualia is usually not hallucination or deception, but actual perception).
What exactly Thomas Reid's common-sense approach to testimony and credulity means for religion and religious experience is a topic I intend to explore soon.