Issues Relating to Religious Experience - Validity

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Using Testimony to Validate Religious Experience

Swinburne formulated a second principle called the principle of testimony to answer the question of whether we should rely on testimony of religious experience.

Basic principle of rationality

Swinburne claims that a basic principle of rationality is that those who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe others when they say that they do (again, barring evidence which would make us disbelieve them - eg. they are a known habitual liar).
Again, if we didn’t follow this principle of rationality, Swinburne says, we would have almost non-existent knowledge of geography, history or science.

Principle of testimony

The principle of testimony is like applying the principle of credulity to the experiences of other people.
So a summary of the principle of testimony is that, all other things being equal, other peoples’ experiences are likely to be as they report them to be.
Swinburne, like William Alston, argues that religious experience has a prima facie evidential force. This means that the existence of seeming perceptions of the divine is sufficient to establish them as veridical (true) unless actually disproved.

Caroline Franks Davis

This actually answers one of the objections to this principle, which is that the lack of testimony of religious experiences by some people undermines the testimonies of others who have had them.
But Caroline Franks Davis writes in The Evidential Force of Religious Experience: “Where the very existence of an entity is at issue, a failure to perceive it is not by itself prima facie evidence for its non-existence, whereas an experience of its presence is itself prima facie evidence for the entity’s existence.”

Experiences of 'higher power'

Research by the Religious Experience Research Centre (based at the University of Wales) found that up to 40% of people report having experiences of some kind of ‘higher power’ - which further increase the likelihood of the argument.

Testimony/Witness Not Validating Religious Experience

On the other hand, personal testimony or witness alone is unlikely to support the validity of religious experience.

Needs other authority for validity

Personal testimony or witness would have to be part of a network of other sources of authority - such as rational argument, officially sanctioned teachings (eg. The Magisterium of the Catholic Church), revelation in sacred scripture and elsewhere, and personal experience - to support the validity of religious experience.

Loch Ness monster analogy

This becomes clearer if you examine the case of someone who says they saw the Loch Ness Monster.
- Why would it not be justified to believe them merely on the basis of their testimony alone? Because the background evidence is so slight for the existence of the creature.
- Richard Dawkins spends a large part of The God Delusion arguing along these lines. God is like the Tooth Fairy: you can dismiss anyone off-hand who tells you they’ve experienced them because there is no evidence for such a creature.

'Cumulative case' argument

But Swinburne argues that in the case of religious experience, we have a whole set of other reasons to believe in God which are part of what he calls his ‘cumulative case’ argument.
- These are things like the cosmological, teleological and moral arguments for God.

Raising probability of a God

Although Swinburne doesn’t claim that any of these are sufficient on their own to establish belief in God as reasonable, Swinburne argues that, together, they do raise the background probability of there being a God to the level of likely.
A religious believer can then add the other sources of authority mentioned above and have confidence in the validity of the testimony, as long as it coheres with religious teaching.