Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

44 J.J.C. Smart
beliefs, even though this reason is not interpersonally persuasive. The believer
may think that these experiences enable him or her to cope better with the
problems of life, and perhaps become a better person. The idea that this may
constitute an intellectually respectable reason for belief is connected with James’s
pragmatism, which assimilates the notion of truth to that of the useful or
what works. I do not think that it is necessary nowadays to take up space in
refuting this confused notion of truth. This is not, however, to say that we
can totally ignore pragmatic considerations, as in the well-known matter of
Pascal’s Wager, which I shall consider shortly.
When people talk of religious ‘experience’, the word ‘experience’ tends to
be somewhat protean in meaning. In the first place, they may be claiming
that they have something like perception. However, there are clearly no special
religious sensations as there are visual, auditory and tactual sensations.
Nor do they correlate with interpersonally perceptible situations, as visual,
auditory and tactual sensations do. Furthermore, in the last century or two
there has come to be increasing physical and neurophysiological knowledge
of how perception works. There is nothing like this in the case of religious
experience, at least if this is thought of as a sort of spiritual perception. Do
spiritual photons come from God to some neurophysiological organ? Perhaps
this is an unfair question. God might be everywhere, even in the synapses of
the brain, and in the previous section I have played with a notion of how an
external (atemporal) being might be said to act on the world. Still, there does
remain some difficulty in seeing sense perception as a fit model for the notion
of religious experience.
Experience of God has sometimes been described as the feeling that there
is a ‘presence’. This feeling is not connected with a special perceptual sensation.
Thus two explorers in the wilderness may say to one another that they
feel that there is someone nearby whom they cannot see. In fact they know
that no other explorer or native of the region is nearby. Nevertheless,
I suppose, the feeling can be strong and shared interpersonally. A psychologist
would put it down to an illusion brought on by loneliness and privation.
Similarly a vague feeling of a Presence, such as some mystics have reported,
need not be taken as veridical. If a person of mystical bent does take it
as veridical, a sceptic need not accept the mystic’s claim. The principle of
theoretical economy favours the sceptic’s explanation in terms of some sort
of illusion. Not that the sceptic will convince the mystic. At the beginning of
this essay I put forward scientific plausibility as a guide in metaphysics and
the mystic will refuse to go all the way with this guide. There is thus likely to
be deadlock here. At any rate I think that the sceptic can say this, that
religious experience provides no objective warrant for religious belief unless
the possibility of a naturalistic explanation of the experience can be ruled out
as implausible, and it is hard to see how this requirement could be met.