Mystical experience as evidence

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 19-46

  Fales, Evan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

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EID: 53349128541     PISSN: 00207047     EISSN: 15728684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF00141751     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Roughly similar, but simpler, arguments can be found in C.D. Broad, 'Arguments for the Existence of God, II,' The Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1939): 157-167;
2. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 13;
3. John Hick, 'Mystical experiences as cognition,' in Harold Coward and Terence Penelhum (eds.), Mystics and Scholars: The Calgary Conference on Mysticism, 1976 (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1977);
4. Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1982);
5. and William Wainwright, Mysticism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
6. The similarities of Alston's strategies to those of Wainwright are especially strong, and much of what I shall have to say applies to his arguments as well. In 'The evidential value of religious experience', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 189-202,
7. Ralph W. Clark allows that religious experiences provide no prima facie justification for perceptual religious beliefs based on them, but maintains that they do provide such justification so long as no naturalistic explanation of their occurrence can compete with a religious one. Here I shall be supporting Clark's first claim; in Evan Fales, 'Scientific explanations of mystical experience, Parts I and II', Religious Studies (forthcoming in Sept. and Dec. 1996), I will show that Clark, Alston, and others are mistaken with respect to the second claim.
8. What these are will be made explicit in due course. See Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (hereafter abbreviated as PG) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 223-4.
9. There are other troubles as well, but I shall discuss them elsewhere: see Fales, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience 1991), pp. Ibid.
10. Alston, PG, p. 20.
11. Alston calls the first class of defeaters rebutters, and the second class underminers.
12. See Alston, PG, p. 209.
13. It would be circular, as Alston recognizes, to consider this conclusion a demonstration of that reliability.
14. Alston further distinguishes indirect perception from indirect perceptual recognition (where one recognizes the presence of something by recognizing some effect of it), as when I recognize that a plane is flying overhead by seeing only its contrail.
15. This rules out those mystical experiences which, if correctly so described, are said to involve a mystical union with God (or with everything) so intimate that all distinctions whatever are obliterated.
16. Possibly he does not make this point because, although he speaks of the qualities in question as phenomenal characteristics and even refers to them as qualia, he evidently means them to be the qualities the presented object is presented as having, without prejudice to whether this makes those qualities purely subjective qualities of purely subjective objects, i.e. of sense data, or objective qualities of extramental objects.
17. Alston overstates the point. In some Christian communities, and in many non-Christian ones, theophanies are induced in highly regularized, predictable, and communally shared ways, and there is a high degree of consensus as to content. But I shall follow Alston's lead for the moment.
18. That isn't quite how Alston sizes up the situation. His strategy is first to deploy the weapons of skepticism to argue that our ordinary sense-perceptual practices (SP) can't be non-circularly justified (in a purely epistemic sense); to then construct a quasi-pragmatic justification for SP, and finally to argue that, using the same standards which vindicate SP, we can put MP on a roughly equal footing. Thus, Alston claims to have rebutted the charge that SP, unlike MP, can noncircularly be given a clean epistemic bill of health. I do not think that Alston's quasi-pragmatic approach to vindicating SP and MP can possibly succeed, but that's not my topic here; see Norman Kretzmann, 'St. Teresa, William Alston, and the Broadminded Atheist', Journal of Philosophical Research 20 (1995): 45-66 for a penetrating discussion of how Alston fails, and
19. Alston, 'Reply to Critics', Journal of Philosophical Research 20 (1995): 67-81 for a reply. Like Kretzmann, I do not think that Alston's level-distinction between knowing and knowing that one knows cuts the ice required of it. I am not pursuing that theme here; for present purposes, what matters is simply this: however SP is ultimately to be vindicated, the issue for Alston effectively becomes one of granting that SP is on a secure footing, and then undertaking to establish a rough parity, in the same general terms, for MP.
20. My own view is that these strategies are best understood within a Bayesian framework.
21. In effect, this is the problem of radical underdetermination of theory by data.
22. Coherence is (at least) a matter of logical consistency and probabilistic coherence - that is, of each of the propositions of the revised belief system having a sufficiently high probability relative to the conjunction of the remaining propositions.
23. I do not regard (3) to be analytically true. The modality here is that of either causal or metaphysical necessity.
24. Even an understanding which is rudimentary and implicit can play a significant role here. In the case of ordinary perceptual judgments, our knowledge of suitable conditions for observation, and of how to compensate for non-optimal conditions, is acquired through the myriad daily opportunities to compare our judgments with those of others, to compare the verdicts of different sensory modalities, and to compare judgments under varying circumstances. In this way we gain mastery over at least a larger number of patterns of covariation which signal causal dependencies. The same applies to more sophisticated measurements. When Galileo, whose understanding of optics was rudimentary, wanted to check the reliability of his telescopes, he trained them upon terrestrial objects which could also be observed near at hand. But then he was vulnerable to the charge - which was made - that the observation of celestinal bodies was a very different matter from observation of terrestrial ones, so that reliability in the one domain could not be taken to underwrite reliability in the other. The complexity and precision of the overrider system for SP is nicely displayed in Ian Hacking, 'Do we see through a microscope?', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 305-322
25. and Jean Perrin, Brownian Movement and Molecular Reality (London: Taylor and Francis, trans. F. Soddy, 1910).
26. It is by no means easy to bring order to all this variety; since there are divergences of belief and practice even within sects, and significant transformations over time, it would in many cases be highly misleading to pretend that there is a stable MP that can be associated even with a single sect over significant stretches of time.
27. See Alston PG, pp. 192-4.
28. Alston PG, p. 184; also Chapter 4.
29. Initially in PG, Alston makes it appear to be a matter of indifference whether contradictions within MP are of an interpractice or intrapratice sort - hence not crucial how we split MP into more specific practices. It turns out, however, that where the boundaries between practices are drawn matters a great deal after all (see pp. 271-2). Interpractise conflicts are claimed to cut less ice because distinct practices do not share an overrider system. By segregating CMP from other MP's, Alston hopes to isolate it, to some extent, from conflicts with other rivals. Without this isolation from rival MP's, Alston's argument for the rationality of engaging in CMP would founder. For a criticism of this strategy, see J. L. Schellenberg, 'Religious experience and religious diversity: A reply to Alston', Religious Studies 30 (1994): 151-159. Alston thinks that the failure of two doxastic practices to share the same overrider system (because they do not share the same system of background beliefs) somehow relieves their participants of the responsibility to resolve contradictions, without making continued acceptance of a practice irrational. But why can't conflicts between background beliefs also be put on the table for evaluation? Alston seems here to be flirting with epistemic relativism. Once it is recognized that the central issue is the tracing of causal chains, the weakness of Alston's argument becomes apparent. The background beliefs of different doxastic practices may incorporate radically different views as to what causes what; but so long as they share some general conception of what it is for one event to cause another, there is no reason here to suppose that differing systems are incommensurable or incomparable.
30. Thomas Burton gives an excellent introduction to the practices of the Pentecostal-Holiness churches in his Serpent-Handling Believers (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1993).
31. For a vivid and sometimes poignant evocation of the lives of the snake-handlers, see Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (New York: Addison Wesley, 1995).
32. My source is The Book of Her Life and The Interior Castle, both in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976).
33. Alston PG, p. 203.
34. Poulain, writing with the Papal imprimatur, clearly displays the traditional ambivalence of the Catholic Church towards its mystics. See Anton Poulain, The Graces of Interior Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, trans. Leonora Yorke Smith and Jean Vincent Bainvel, 1950 [1910]). Poulain recognizes (Chapter XX) that failed prophecy presents a theological problem: the mystics in question are, after all, canonized. On the other hand, Poulain is eager to demonstrate that ecstasy is not an infallible source of information. Yet, he does take the levitations to be genuine. Teresa herself exhibits an awareness that the question of prophetic infallibility must be carefully negotiated (IC VI: 3 §9).
35. Poulain The Graces of Interior Prayer (Ibid., p. 340 does report that some unspecified prophecies of Magdalen of the Cross were fulfilled. But these were Satan-inspired and designed to convince others of her sanctity. Magdalen's alleged levitations are also claimed to have been the work of Satan. (Poulain 'knows' this because Magdalen, at the near approach of death, confessed it. But she recovered and regretted having done so.
36. Fuller accounts can be found in Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain (New York: MacMillan, 1992 [1907]), volume iv, pp. 82-3;
37. Lea, Chapters from the Religious History of Spain (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967 [1890]), pp. 330-36,
38. and Stephen Clissold, Saint Teresa of Avila (London: Sheldon Press, 1979), pp. 46-7 and 130.
39. According to Lea, Magdalen fell seriously ill, and, upon being told by her physician that death was immanent, she confessed and requested exorcism. She was subsequently handed over to the Inquisition, which treated her leniently by confining her to a prison call for the rest of her life. I am not equipped to form any independent judgment of the accuracy of these accounts of the circumstances of Magdalen's confession; in view of her immense popularity and the willingness of the Inquisition to resort to deception and torture (for which see Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, iii), it might reasonably be wondered whether Magdalen confessed before or after falling into the hands of the Inquisition. Prior to her downfall, Magdalen was a very influential woman, both in secular and in ecclesiastical circles; moreover, Teresa adopted the Rule of the Poor Clares for her own foundation of St. Joseph's in Avila. Teresa, who was 28 years younger than Magdalen and began her career as a mystic some eight years after the latter's condemnation, was constantly reminded of Magdalen's fate and occasionally explicitly compared to her.)
40. As God evidently furthers His by sometimes permitting evil. Jesus is said to offer the same strange argument against the accusation that he is performing the work of the devil - see Mt. 12: 22-32; parallels at Mk. 3: 22-30, Lk. 11: 14-23. See also endnote 25.
41. That is so even on the there-is-no-best-possible-world solution to the problem of evil; for on that solution, what right have we to assign a high probability to God's creating a world in which all and only genuine theophanies produce these fruits? Alston seems to share this agnosticism elsewhere: see PG, p. 219.
42. I shall show this in some detail in Fales, PG, p. Ibid.
43. This is a formal consequence of Bayes' Theorem.
44. This claim has no better credentials than the one about the likely effects of genuine theophany.
45. We can compare the performance of an airplane designed by a good mathematician/ physicist with one designed by a hospital orderly.
46. Suppose you had no such external ways of checking the reputed abilities of mathematicians or winetasters; suppose each group insisted upon being accountable only to criteria internal to their practice and accessible only to the 'experts'. By what means then could you judge the plausibility of their knowledge claims? Simply relying upon their testimony would not distinguish knowledge from delusion. But it is a fantasy to suppose that our cognitive practices are ever to that extent isolated from one another. Still, it might be objected that we don't demand such external checks on SP. But there is a reason for this. SP is not a narrow practice, but the broadest empirical practice we have. To make the demand here is to raise the specter of skepticism; but obviously, if there were independent standards against which we could check SP, we'd be foolish not to do so. The present point has to do, however, with relatively narrow practices founded upon (alleged) special perceptual skills or faculties. It would, e.g., be simply mad to take at her word the self-proclaimed clairvoyant who purported to be able to 'see' events in the distant past for which there was no independent historical evidence, save the testimony of other clairvoyants who were in communication with the first.
47. See C. B. Martin, Religious Beliefs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959);
48. William L. Rowe, "Religious experience and the principle of credulity'; International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 13 (1982): 85-92;
49. Anthony O'Hear, Experience, Explanation, and Faith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984),
50. and Richard Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
51. O'Hear On the Nature and Existence of God (Ibid. also frames the issue this way - see pp. 32-33.
52. In his most recent discussion of Alston's book, Gale himself reverts to this issue, this time generalizing by allowing the theist to individuate God along any "dimensions' the theist might care to specify. (See Richard Gale, 'Why Alston's mystical doxastic practice is subjective', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 869-875.) Alston, changing the issue to identification, replies that there's no reason to think that one can't, with the help of background beliefs, perceptually identify God. (Alston, on the other hand, has done nothing to show how one can produce such a perceptual identification.) Furthermore, Gale has supposedly not shown why the general tests he takes to be essential to any perceptual cognition (the cross-checking repertoire) are required of the mystic. In all this, I am arguing that the fundamental issue is whether there is a suitable causal connection between God and putative theophanies, and whether anyone can provide evidence of that fact. Without such a connection, the theophany is not a verdical one.
53. In his recent paper, 'Truth-warranted manifestation beliefs', Faith and Philosophy 11 (1995): 436-2451, John Zeis has taken a different tack, reopening the issue whether some mystical experiences are self-authenticating, for the mystic at least. Relying upon the claims of John of the Cross and Teresa that a certain type of intellectual vision can't be produced by the devil, Zeis argues they couldn't be, in that case, delusions of any sort. Supposedly, the mystic can recognize the fact that these experiences can only be produced by God, and not by the devil, in something like the way Descartes is able to recognize that an evil demon can't deceive him about his own existence. But this strategy - besides being unduly naive about the nature of our information about such visions (Zeis claims, e.g., to have knowledge of the mental states of Abraham) - is hopeless. In order to tighten the analogy to the Cartesian cogito, Zeis speculates that because the Holy Ghost 'dwells within' the mystic, the object of the mystic's vision is not external to the mystic: yet he admits that the vision must be caused by God. Further, he admits that subjectively indistinguishable visions may be either veridical or not; they are warranted only when true. That sounds like externalism - a far cry from the Cartesian project. Warrant in that sense is not evidence, as I am using the term.
54. Gale calls Alston's claim to the contrary 'Alston's fallacy'.
55. A similar myth invests miracles with uniqueness, irreproducibility, and unpredictability. In fact, in many cultures, certain miracles are the regular - and predictable - stock in trade of particular religious ceremonies. In Phoenicia, just a few miles north of Cana during the first century, water was regularly changed into wine by the priests presiding over the annual Bacchus mysteries.
56. See Williams Sargant, The Mind Possessed: A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism, and Faith Healing (New York: J. B. Lipincott, 1974), pp. 183-4.
57. Possibly Alston would disqualify these supposed Holy Spirit possessions on just those grounds. But then why shouldn't Teresa's theophanies (or a Quaker's) be disqualified on the grounds that she used techniques of contemplation and prayer? In neither instance is theophany guaranteed; but in both cases, the probability of occurrence is significantly enhanced. It must be added that Teresa is actually quite skeptical about the efficacy of meditative techniques in this connection, and tends to emphasize the unexpected - even unwanted - 'breaking in' of the divine. But others - e.g. Osuna and St. John of the Cross - are clearly more technique-minded.
58. I am not committing myself here to a causal theory of perception, understood as an analysis of what it means to say that S perceives X. I am committing myself to the view that a causal connection is a necessary component of any state of affairs in which S perceives an extra-mental object X, a commitment backed by the strong intuitive appeal of certain counterfactuals. Alston, it appears, would agree - see PG, e.g. p. 230.
59. Jean Perrin, PG, Ibid.
60. Thus, Perrin employs two methods to measure the density of the gamboge spheres he used to observe Brownian motion, and three methods of determining precisely their diameters.
61. The force of this does not, once again, rely on the disanalogy between CMP and SR Examples from SP merely illustrate, in an area where we know well how to operate, the richness and the interwoven texture of the resources built into a genuine underminer system.
62. Gale thinks that spatial localizability is a requirement on events that can be identified as members of a causal sequence. I am not entirely convinced of that. Alston, on the other hand, thinks the problem of independently identifying causes can't be solved in this case: 'Since we are in no position to say what kind of causal contribution is required for objecthood until we have some genuine cases of object perception to work from, one can't even embark on the project of specifying the necessary causal contribution until one recognizes that there are authentic cases of object perception. And by then game is lost.' (PG, p. 33) .
63. Alston is concerned here with the more complex question of what kind of causal connection is required for something to be a perceptual object; but I take it the point applies equally to the problem of establishing simply what kinds of causal connections there are. If so, Alston is mistaken here. Of course, it can be argued that the triangulation methods I'm proposing ultimately involve circular reasoning (as they would in SP also); but that is the completely general skeptical objection we've agreed to bracket. That Alston is committed to the view that genuine theophany requires divine causation is quite clear (PG, pp. 228-33). A strict externalist could insist that, so long as theophanies generate reliably true beliefs, they yield knowledge, even if we know nothing about the mechanisms involved. But Christians do not take theophanies to be reliable in general, or even within CMP; hence the need for an overrider system. One way around the central difficulty would be to hold that perception of the divine does not require God to play any (or any special) causal role in the production of the perceptual experience. That's not Alston's view; and anyone who holds it owes us an account of perception which makes this alternative intelligible.
64. The experience of Pentecostals and many others apparently to the contrary.
65. Alston might reply that establishing the existence of the "right" causal antecedents to a theophany - i.e., establishing the legitimacy and successful operation of CMP's overrider system - is a second-order enterprise. It's here that circularity threatens, here that a quasi-pragmatic defense must be mounted. For Alston, it would amount to a level-confusion to suppose that theophany-based theistic beliefs for which no doubts arise, or which the overrider system, such as it is, vindicates, are on that account not rationally held. But this reply would be ineffective. Unless the overrider system can be shown to be suited to the job required of it, the second-order defense of a doxastic practice can't succeed, even if it is only of Alston's quasi-pragmatic sort. What I've shown is that CMP doesn't have a serious overrider system. If CMP 'works' in the Christian community, the most plausible explanation is that its success doesn't depend on whether or not the beliefs on which it is based are true. Alternatively, Alston might read me as demanding that CMP supply an external justification for claims that particular theophanies are divinely caused. And then he will reply - see PG, pp. 226-7 - that this demand isn't one that SP can (non-circularly) meet either. Since I have agreed to set aside the question of radical skepticism with respect to SP, fairness demands according CMP the same courtesy. But this would be to misread the objection. The demand for a testable account of the divine causal role in theophanies is not an external demand, but one being made - quite properly - as an internal requirement for adequacy. Just as - once skeptical problems about inductive reasoning are set aside - such accounts can be given and checked within SP, we are asking whether - again granting CMP all the inference patterns we grant SP - there is a basis for cross-checking, prediction and the like. The trouble is that, by and large, CMP just hasn't got causal explanations for abductive reasoning to reason to, or (by Alston's lights) sufficient regularities upon which to base predictions.
66. As it stands, this argument is not formulated quite so as to satisfy the criteria for formal validity; I have tried rather to capture the essential steps of the argument.
67. Jesus' yoke is easy - Mt. 11: 28-38 - but also very hard; see Mt. 5: 27-28, 6: 25-34, 7: 13-14, 19: 16-23, and cognate passages in Mk. and Lk. for some examples. I suspect that Mt. 11: 30 is a slap at the policies of Reheboam (see 1 Ki. 12) which destroyed the unified monarchy; but this merely reinforces the problem of deciding what the terms are of the promise made to Christians.
68. Particularly difficult for Christians, I should think, are the divine promises given at Is. 62: 8-9 and Mt. 16: 27-28. These do not concern mystical experience, but they do have profound significance for the total Christian story.
69. The question arises whether we could, through ordinary sense perception, see an embodied God (cf. Jn. 14: 7-9). This would require, I think, an account of the embodiment relation which could explain how, through empirical investigation, it would be possible to determine the presence or absence of this relation between God and a given individual. It would further require an account of what would make an action of the embodying individual an action of the embodied God. I do not believe that Christians have adequate answers to these questions either.
70. See Fales, Ibid. I thank Alston for valuable comments on a draft of the present paper.