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PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
• The person should be regarded as someone who is mentally and psychologically well-balanced.
Key
e do
Are there conclusive grounds for rejecting religious experiences?
Wainwright (Philosophy of Religion, 1988) comments that the only conclusive grounds for rejecting religious experiences would be: • Proofs of the non-existence of God and other supernatural entities. • Good reasons for thinking that the perceptual claims immediately based on these experiences are inconsistent. • Evidence that the experiences are produced by natural mechanisms known to systematically cause false beliefs and delusive experiences. Wainwright's personal conclusion is that, so far, critics have not provided these grounds. For a very different conclusion read chapter 10 in Mackie's book The Miracle of Theism (1982).
e) The principle of credulity and the principle of testimony Richard Swinburne has given much importance to the argument from religious experience (The Existence of God, 1979), as does Caroline Franks Davis' book The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (1989). In particular, Swinburne puts forward two principles.
The principle of credulity Key people Richard Swinburne (b 1934) is an Oxford professor who has devoted himself to promoting arguments for theism.
Key question Is it up to the disbeliever to show that it is unreasonable to believe, or up to the believer to show that it is reasonable to believe?
Swinburne's argument is focused on the onus of proof and put in the context of ordinary sense experiences. He argued that we are justified in accepting an event occurs unless there are strong reasons to the contrary, for example, grounds for supposing the viewer was hallucinating! It is up to the disbeliever to show that it is unreasonable to believe the account, rather than for the believer to show that it is reasonable to believe. In other words, it is a case of religious experiences being viewed as true until proven otherwise. To express this principle formally: 'In the absence of any special considerations, if it seems that X is present to a person, then probably X is present.'What one seems to perceive is probably the case. Swinburne points out that unless we do this we cannot know anything. We would have to be sceptical about all our sense experiences. If my experience of seeing a cat in a tree does not justify my belief that there is a cat in the tree — then it seems that I could never be justified in believing that there is a cat in the tree. Nor indeed anything else for that matter. He then lists four considerations that, if present, would cast doubt on the reliability of the account: • if subject 'S' was unreliable • if similar perceptions are shown to be false