MONOTHEISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 217experience is reliable, involves being aware of something or someone that
is not dependent for its existence on being experienced. In that respect,
such experiences resemble experiences of shrubs and worms (these being
typically reliable, and shrubs and worms existing independent of one’s
experiencing them) or of ghosts (if experiences of ghosts were reliable,
then ghosts would have experience-independent existence). They have the
sort of content described above in the first part of our series of descriptions
of religious experiences. They are also experiences in which the at least
apparent object is not oneself, one’s body, or one’s mental states; they are
(if reliable) experiences of something other than oneself or one’s body or
one’s states – a being that exists distinct from and independent of oneself.
Question 2: can any experience be evidence for just any old
claim?
Distinguish between direct evidence and indirect evidence. An experience is
direct evidence for a claim that something exists only if it is true that the
experience in question, if reliable, just is an experience of that thing. We
take it that we have exactly that sort of experience of cats and computers.
An experience is indirect evidence for the existence of something only if it
is, if reliable, experience of something else, where if the something else
exists, then the thing in question exists. Suppose that Ralph and Mabel are
hosting Mabel’s sloppy brother Jim, whom they know to be the only person
in the world who eats peanut butter and mustard sandwiches. Arriving
home, Ralph is hopeful that his brother-in-law may have ended his visit,
but is chagrined to find on the kitchen table two peanut butter and mustard
sandwiches waiting to be devoured; he infers that Jim is still around, and
will soon be having a snack. Seeing the sandwiches provides direct evidence
of their existence, and indirect evidence of Jim’s continued presence. Our
concern in this chapter will be with direct evidence only, and our concern
with it focuses on the conditions under which experience provides direct
evidence for the existence of something.
Not every experience can be direct evidence for the existence of just
anything. Its at least seeming to Mary that there is tea in her cup, bread on her
table, and music coming over the radio will not provide her with direct
evidence that the Alps are still around, there are trolls, or that God exists.
Mountains, trolls, and God are not among the things she even seems to
experience. An experience is direct evidence only for what exists provided that
experience is reliable – provided things are as that experience represents them
as being. How an experience represents things as being is a function of its
phenomenological content. Our concern here is with, and only with,