MONOTHEISM AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 233there being a world with the physical characteristics of our world is
logically inconsistent with God existing. There seem to be no good reasons
to think either of these things.
Condition 5 will raise a problem for Mary’s experience being reliable
only if it is logically or empirically impossible that there be experiential
evidence against the claim that God exists. Suppose, then, as is logically
possible and consistent with what we know about initial conditions and
laws of nature, that these two sorts of experience were to occur.
Sort 1: everyone, upon dying, were to go to a place where
everyone was exquisitely happy, civilized, and glad to be
alive, or to a place where everyone was devastatingly
unhappy, crude and violent, and devoutly wishing for their
annihilation; those in the happy habitat are without
exception those who have opposed the idea of God, been
atheists or at least agnostics, been hostile to monotheism
of any kind, and enjoyed nothing so much as committing
blasphemy; those in the miserable habitat are without
exception those who have, as they thought, worshipped
and served God, been sincere monotheists, prayed, sung
hymns, and tried to live lives in accord with monotheistic
morality; societies for psychical research communicate
with both habitats and receive convincing evidence that
this is indeed how things are in the after-life; scientists
working in the happy habitat discover that there are
fundamental laws of nature that will keep those in the
happy habitat there, and those in the miserable habitat
there, for ever.
Sort 2: most apparent experiences of a non-human intelligence
were of a powerful being who enjoys wickedness,
encourages rape and murder and torture. Excruciating
suffering accompanies all such experiences and those who
have them become exceedingly violent and dangerous, and
the only remaining religious experiences are those in
which the subjects are first given experiences with
phenomenologies like those of monotheistic experiences
and then followed by phenomenologies in which it is
explained that monotheistic experiences were given to
religious fools to deceive them.
Were experiences of Sort 1 to occur, we would have experiential evidence
against the existence of God, perhaps of the same kind as are Mary’s own
experience and possibly not. (Given the looseness of the notion of a kind of