The Argument for God from Experience: A Doxastic Practice Approach

The Experiential Argument for God's Existence

As a brief review, here is my argument to date:

Premise 1: Human beings have experiences that evoke a profound sense of dependence, awe, and transcendence (what Schleiermacher calls the feeling of absolute dependence).

Premise 2: These experiences are epistemically significant. Importantly, they constitute non-propositional knowledge.

Premise 3: The depth and universality of these feelings point toward a reality that is non-contingent.

Conclusion: Therefore, the experiences of dependence, awe, and transcendence are not merely psychological but ontological. They invite interpretation of the self as in-relation-to an Ultimate (what theology names God).

So far, I have been focusing on Premises 1 and 2. In my previous blog, I explored William Alston's epistemology. Today, I would like to expand on one specific aspect of Alston's approach: doxastic practice as epistemological justification for belief in God from religious experience.

What is a Doxastic Practice?

A doxastic practice refers to a socially embedded or habitual way of forming and evaluating beliefs. The term "doxastic" comes from the Greek doxa, meaning belief or opinion. A doxastic practice, therefore, is essentially a patterned method or tradition through which beliefs are acquired, justified, and sustained.

When it comes to religious experience, examples of doxastic practices can include things like prayer, scripture reading, worship, and religious intuition.

But importantly, doxastic practice is not limited to the spiritual realm. We use doxastic practices every day, when we trust sight and smell to tell us a stove is hot, or our hearing to let us know it would be dangerous to cross an otherwise quiet, country road without looking both ways.

Doxastic practices are even used in scientific inquiry. Empirical observation, experimentation, and peer review are all embedded and habitual ways the science community encases the discovery process.

The Reliability of Sense Perception

Alston devotes a large portion of his book to comparing and contrasting religious experience (what he calls mystical perception) to that of sense perception. He notes humans commonly rely on sense perception to acquire knowledge about reality and rarely question the validity of data gained via the same.

He analyzes several philosophical arguments in an attempt to affirm sense perception being placed in such a high epistemic status. Interestingly, he finds no such support. For Alston, even the strongest epistemic arguments for the reliability of sense perception (SP) rely on circular reasoning.

For example, Alston looks at what Kant's transcendental approach. (1) In this argument, sense perception's reliability (its application towards all objects of experience) is deemed a necessary condition of the unity of consciousness. But as is the same for all explications of SP's reliability, Alston asserts any wholesale defense of SP ultimately relies on the assumption that SP is in fact reliable.

Is that Really an Onion on that Table? ...Is that Even a Table?

Let's use a hypothetical example. Let's say I walk into a room and spot what I believe to be a red onion sitting on a table. It sure looks like a red onion. So that's what it is. Case closed, right?

Well, let's say I am skeptical that I can believe what my eyes appear to be showing me. What else can I do to confirm what I see? Maybe I experience a sharp, pungent odor of what smells to me to be an onion. Maybe I feel the object's texture and find it to be thin and papery. Perhaps I pick up the object and find it to be about the weight of a baseball. The case is officially closed. We have an onion!

The problem is every step I have taken to confirm the correctness of my visual sense perception has also relied on SP.

There is no possible, independent authentication of SP that doesn't involve SP!

Alston's Doxastic Practice Approach

So, we have a problem on our hands. If I can't use SP to confirm the validity of my visual perception, how can I feel comfortable in my determination that what I see is an onion?

Certainly, I can feel justified in believing an onion lies before me. No one would blame me for making such a claim, right? Correct, but why is this?

1. I have learned from past experience that my eyesight is fairly reliable.

   
   

2. My senses of smell and touch have rarely steered me wrong in the past.

   
   

3. I have internalized, through language and social learning, categories such as "onion," "baseball," "papery, " and "pungent, sharp odor."

   
   

Put differently, it is the embedded and habitual use of my senses within context that ultimately helps me justify my beliefs. SP doesn't justify the utility of SP, doxastic practice does!

The Reliability of Mystical Perception

"All at once I... felt the presence of God - I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it - as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether...I thanked God...I felt his reply...Then slowly, the ecstasy left my heart...the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present, though invisible; he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him." (2)

Above is a case example of the religious experiences philosopher William James records in his famous work, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Though the category of mystical perception (MP) is wide-ranging, the anecdote serves as an adequate example for our purposes.

Like SP, Alston admits that there can be no non-circular arguments for the reliability of MP. But (also like SP) Alston advocates for belief in the validity of such experiences to be justifiable based off a doxastic practice model.

Why is this? It is because the criteria for analyzing the validity of belief doesn't change whether we are talking about SP or MP. Many who have MPs would communicate such occurrences comport with their experience, their life habits and practices, and are affirmed by the communities in which they partake. As such, Alston states they are justified in holding their belief.

Specifically, Alston asserts, "There are no principled objections to supposing that many cases in which a person takes herself to be directly aware of God constitute a genuine experiential cognition of God that has the same basic structure as sense perception of the physical environment." (3)

In other words, the claim that the person in James' example has experienced God should bear no more burden of proof than the claim the object I saw in the aforementioned room is an onion.

In a doxastic approach model, the experience God justifies belief in God.

In Sum

Over my last three blog posts, I have attempted to justify Premise 2 for my Argument for God from Experience. I used Polanyi to show the "experiences that evoke a profound sense of dependence, awe, and transcendence" to be non-contingent and Alston to argue they are epistemically significant.

In my next post, I will turn to Premise 3 of my argument: The depth and universality of these feelings point toward a reality that is non-contingent.

(1) William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 110-111.

(2) William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. (New York: The Modern Library, 1902), 67-68.

(3) Perceiving God, 68.