MONOTHEISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 227question Tara’s having one, nor does it raise doubts about the religious
experience that Tara has. This difference sometimes is put by saying that
sensory experience is public in a way that religious experience is not.
Further, if one wants to see the window, simple procedures will allow this,
whereas experiences of God are not producible by following a procedure.
Sensory experiences typically are controllable where religious experiences
are not. Further still, if one sees the window, one can predict that if one
reaches out, one will touch it; if one raps it gently, one will hear a sound; if
one tastes it, one will get a cold, smooth sensation; were one to strike it
sharply with a hammer, it would break, and so on. Sensory experiences
typically ground predictions and are testable by comparison with
experiences from other sensory modalities. Typically, religious experiences
do not ground predictions nor do there seem to be multiple religious
modalities.^7
These differences are crucial only if they underlie this difference: it is
possible to cross-check sensory experiences but it is not possible to
crosscheck religious experiences. Since this is not so, these differences are
not crucial relative to the question of whether religious experience
provides evidence that God exists.
Question 11: how can one check religious experiences?
In exactly the ways one might expect. First, any experience that satisfies
(P*) is evidence by virtue of that fact. There isn’t any point in checking,
say, one sensory experience against another unless each such experience
has some presumptive evidential force. If it looks like my computer screen
has turned solid gold, there is no point in checking unless my looking again
has some evidential punch all on its own; but then the first look has
evidential punch too. If there isn’t any conflict among one’s sensory
experiences, as there very often is not, then comparison will have no
negative results regarding their reliability. The same typically holds for at
least apparent experiences of God. Second, one appeals to other things one
knows or reasonably believes in sorting out what experiential conflicts one
finds in sensory experience. If an experience is reliable only if something is
false that we have good reason to believe, its reliability is properly
questioned. The same holds for religious experiences. Third, if religious
experiences occur, as they do, in various cultures, at various times, to
people in various sorts of social, economic, political, and psychological
situations, that is all to the good – it broadens the base of possible
comparison of experience with experience, removes concern that religious
experience is somehow tied to one culture or another, and the like.