46 J.J.C. Smart
that these explanations are indeed the correct ones: it is that someone who
has naturalistic preconceptions will always in fact find some naturalistic
explanation more plausible than a supernatural one. The words ‘in fact’ in
the previous sentence are important. I am talking about the world as I believe
it is. Suppose that I woke up in the night and saw the stars arranged in shapes
that spelt out the Apostles’ Creed. I would know that astronomically it is
impossible that stars should have so changed their positions. I don’t know
what I would think. Perhaps I would think that I was dreaming or that I had
gone mad. What if everyone else seemed to me to be telling me that the
same thing had happened? Then I might not only think that I had gone
mad – I would probably go mad. Well established astronomical knowledge
is not so easily abandoned. Of course I am here trespassing over the border
between the discussion of religious experience and that of miracles. The
topics clearly overlap and I shall return to the discussion of miracles in a later
section.
Sometimes religious experience can consist of a sudden feeling of certitude,
peace, joy, fear, the presence of God. A good example can be seen in Blaise
Pascal’s report of his own conversion experience.^82 Such a report can be very
impressive, though there is no valid inference from the fact that the thoughts
are had to the proposition that God in fact exists. To feelcertain need not be
tobecertain. The converted person believes that the thoughts have a super-
natural cause, but the naturalist will prefer some naturalistic explanation in
terms of the psychological history of the person in question.
The word ‘experience’ can have a less ‘inner’ or ‘subjective’ connotation, as
when a person is said to have had ‘experience of life’, ‘military experience’,
even, as we read in job advertisements, ‘experience in marketing’. In this sense
a monk (for example) certainly has religious experience, but he need not have
any specifically religious experiences. In this connection we should consider
the question of whether a person’s religiously motivated life, say as a Chris-
tian, is evidential value for others. The person’s religious beliefs may be a
source of many excellent traits of character and of motivation to beneficial
and effective action. This may be so, but it does not bear on the truth of the
beliefs. There are also good and admirable persons who profess mutually
incompatible religions and (more importantly) no religion at all. Scepticism
helped David Hume to be le bon David. More to the point, there have been
self-sacrificing atheist saints. Waiving this point, I must insist that it is
important to distinguish between the question of whether a belief is true and
the question of whether it is useful to have it.
It could be that the religious experience of a person, in the sense of
‘experience’ appropriate to the above mentioned example of the monk or
that of ‘military experience’, might be undertaken precisely in order to induce
religious belief. This is the course advocated by Pascal, in his notion of a