RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE,

JUSTIFICATION, AND

HISTORY

MATTHEW C. BAGGER

published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridgeThe Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

cambridge university pressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, cb2 2ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk

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# Matthew C. Bagger 1999

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without the written permission of Cambridge University Press

First published 1999

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in Baskerville 11/12.5 pt [c e ]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Bagger, Matthew C.Religious experience, justi®cation, and history / Matthew C. Bagger.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0 521 62255 7 (hardback)1. Experience (Religion) 2. Religion ± Philosophy. i. Title.

bl53.b24 1999291.4'2 ± dc21 98±33302 cip

isbn 0 521 62255 7 hardback

Contents

Acknowledgments page viiiList of abbreviations ix

1 Introduction: spectral evidences 12 The explanation in experience and the explanation

of experience 213 Justi®cation by reasons alone 584 Perennialism revisited 905 The miracle of minimal foundationalism 1096 Loves noble Historie: Teresa of Avila's mystical

theology 1357 Modernity and its discontents 197

Bibliography 229Index 237

vii

chapter 1

Introduction: spectral evidences

The whole business is become hereupon so snarled, and thedetermination of the Question one way or another, sodismal, that our Honourable Judges have a Room forJehoshaphat's Exclamation, We know not what to do! Theyhave used, as Judges heretofore have done, the SpectralEvidences, to introduce their further Enquiries into the Livesof the persons accused; and they have thereupon, by thewonderful Providence of God, been so strengthened withother evidences, that some of the Witch Gang have been fairlyExecuted.

Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692)1

Ever since Schleiermacher exalted feeling when addressingreligion's ``cultured despisers,'' apologists have periodicallyexploited religious experience. With all the more traditionalavenues of theism's defense generally in disrepute, moderntheologians and religious philosophers have repeatedly soughtto justify religious belief rationally by reference to the indivi-dual's experience. Charles Darwin in 1876 remarked on theprevalence of this strategy. ` At the present day the most usualargument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn fromthe deep inward conviction and feelings which are experiencedby most persons.''2 This argument left Darwin rightfully un-persuaded. Experience has recently once again, however,become the focus of those aiming to vindicate the rationality ofreligious belief. This time the apologists hail from the ranks of

1 Cotton Mather on Witchcraft (New York: Dorset Press, 1991), p. 70.2 The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Nora Barlow, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,

1969), p. 90.

1

analytic philosophy.3 Increasingly, we ®nd philosophers de-fending the justi®cation of theistic beliefs based on extra-ordinary experiences (so-called ``perceptions of God''). In thisstudy I concentrate on this latter-day revival and ultimatelydeny that religious experiences rationally justify religiousbeliefs.

Both of the central concepts in this discussion, experienceand justi®cation, reward careful scrutiny. The philosopherssympathetic to an experiential justi®cation of theism subscribeto congenial analyses of experience and justi®cation. They stakeout a position on each which, when taken together, licensebeliefs based on extraordinary religious experience. My inqui-ries into a proper understanding of experience and justi®cationbring to the fore two features suppressed or ignored in thisprevailing philosophical approach to religious experience: ex-planation and historical context.

First, I emphasize the ubiquity of explanation in both experi-ence and justi®cation. Experience is, and justi®cation shouldbe, informed by commitments about what constitutes the bestexplanation of the phenomena in question. Experience exhibitsexplanatory logic; we experience what we (usually unre¯ec-tively) suppose the best explanation of the experiential situation.Similarly, in justifying our beliefs about some domain, weshould refer to our best overall explanatory account relevant tothat domain. In a philosophical account of justi®cation, toisolate it from explanation arti®cially segregates our epistemicresources. The apologetic character of much previous philo-sophical literature on religious experience accounts for itstendency to marginalize explanation; properly attending to theexplanatory element in these issues opens the door to unsympa-thetic explanations.

3 To name a few: William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991);Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), ch.13; Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1989); Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame:University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), ch. 5; Keith Yandell, The Epistemology ofReligious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and JeromeGellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1997).

2 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

Second (in part, because of the contextually conditionednature of ``good'' explanations), I stress the paramount import-ance of historical and cultural context for philosophical inquiryabout religious experience. The analytic style of the previousliterature helps account for its tendency to pay little attention tohistorical, linguistic, and cultural context. Analytic philosophygenerally neglects context. Indeed, it calls to mind Nietzsche'sironical observation, ` As is the hallowed custom with philoso-phers, the thinking of all of them is by nature unhistorical.''4

When applied to religious experience, an analytic approachusually includes a few excerpts from different cultures orhistorical periods which serve merely to exemplify a ``type'' ofexperience. Such passages spin their wheels; rarely do thephilosophers engage the texts in any deep way. A disciplinaryparochialism within the humanities results whereby philoso-phers regularly laud philosophical works about religious experi-ence which scholars of religion dismiss as inaccurate andanachronistic. Sampling the reviews of Nelson Pike's recentMystic Union, ironically a book intended to surmount theseweaknesses, reveals a case in point.5 McGinn, the historian ofChristian spirituality, objects that ``Pike's account of Christianmysticism is at least as seriously limited and erroneous as thosehe criticizes'' and claims that ``it would be dif®cult to ®nd amore recent expression of so outdated and narrow a view.''6 Bycontrast, Wainwright, a philosopher, declares Mystic Union ``thebest book of its kind to have appeared since . . . the early part ofthe century. It is superior . . . in its analytic acumen andphilosophical sophistication.''7 The same disciplinary insularitywhich results in potted history and shallow textual interpret-ation on the philosophers' part conversely leads many scholarsof religion to discount the questions addressed by the philoso-phers. To remedy this situation (for, as the epigraph evinces, Ibelieve the philosophical questions potentially have tremendous

4 On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trs. (New York:Vintage Books, 1969), p. 25. Italics original.

5 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. I discuss the shortcomings of Pike's herme-neutic in chapter 6.

6 Bernard McGinn, The Journal of Religion, 74 (1994), p. 99.7 William Wainwright, Faith and Philosophy, 11 (1994), p. 495.

Introduction: spectral evidences 3

practical importance), I bring to the philosophical discussion ofreligious experience the full weight of an historicism and acareful study of one prominent Christian mystic: Saint Teresaof Avila. In Emerson's words, ``Man is explicable by nothingless than all his history.''

Few terms have as many incompatible uses as ``historicism.''I employ it to call attention to an unexceptional relativismwhich allows for communication and rational commensurationbetween historical contexts but fully recognizes the extent of thedifference and discontinuity between them. ``Historicism'' as Ide®ne it reminds us that serious attention to history is integral totextual or philosophical understanding. This dark saying requiressome explication. First, I do not mean to say that seriousattention to history is necessary for any textual or philosophicalinquiry. The relative importance of history will depend on ourinterests. I rest with the minimal claim that historical studyprovides insight not necessarily available otherwise. Second, myhistoricism does not necessarily hold that history is integral tosolving philosophical problems. One familiar stance today main-tains that serious attention to history sometimes enables us todissolve or dismiss philosophical problems. In my chapter onjusti®cation, I rely on historical understanding in this way toevade a whole range of standard issues in the analysis ofjusti®cation that I link to a long-obsolete obsession with skepti-cism. The overall argument of this book, however, uses histor-ical understanding to answer straightforwardly, rather thanevade, the philosophical question about the experiential justi-®cation of religious beliefs. Third, the history referred to in``historicism'' can be either philosophical history or culturaland social history. I rely on both in my arguments. Fourth, bythe admittedly uninstructive phrase ``serious attention tohistory'' I mean that historicism should try (as much as possible)to view the historical data in light of the concerns of the subjectsof history, rather than viewing the data in light of contemporarypreoccupations. The understanding of a text or philosophicalproblem which historical research can offer derives from thisinsight into the relatively alien.

In chapters 2 and 3 I present my case for the centrality of

4 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

explanation and historicism to experience and justi®cationrespectively. Chapter 2, ``The explanation in experience andthe explanation of experience,'' compares the fuller account ofexperience William James offers in his Principles of Psychologywith remarks he makes in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Inarguing that the Varieties does not present as accurate nor assubtle a picture as the Principles, I adopt a view of experiencewherein expectation and cognition play a crucial role. Ex-panding on some passages in James, I describe experience asincluding implicit explanatory commitments, commitmentsabout the best explanation of the experience's cause. Weexperience what we suppose the best explanation of an event orseries of events impinging on us. Obviously, the best availableexplanation will largely depend on context.

I must qualify my description of experience as including aninference to the best explanation. I do not mean that allexperience includes conscious consideration of evidenceleading to an adopted conclusion. Nor do I mean that experi-ence relies on deductive argument. Rather, I do mean thatexperience includes tacit commitments as to how best tointerpret a stimulus. These commitments rarely reach the lightof day. The logic of experience comes most completely to lightwhen we realize we have erred in a perception and can thenview our mistaken presumptions. Historical allies of mine haveoccasionally referred to the explanatory character of experienceas ``unconscious inference.'' James astutely notes that thisphrase sounds so preposterous because the process usuallyfunctions through habit. We must remember, moreover, todisambiguate phenomenological immediacy from epistemic im-mediacy. Much of our experience, unlike memory or cogitation,exhibits phenomenological immediacy or givenness. We usuallydo not feel ourselves bringing our background beliefs andcommitments to bear on our experience. This fact does notmean, however, that experience is immediate in any sense thatexcludes the considerable in¯uence of our epistemic back-ground on it. The hypothesis of epistemic immediacy does not,in fact, comprise the best explanation of the cognitive mech-anism of experience.

Introduction: spectral evidences 5

Explanation I construe as description relevant to a set ofcircumstances. I have in mind no conception of explanation assatisfying formal criteria. I understand explanation as a prag-matic notion, subordinating its structure to the uses mandatedby the thinker's interests, and allowing the standards for anacceptable explanation to vary with a community of inquirers'interests. Roughly, an explanation answers a ``why-question.''For something to count as an explanation, the why-questionneed not be explicit, consciously recognized nor especiallyprofound. In this sense, every experience answers a tacit why-question about sensory stimuli.

In chapter 3, ``Justi®cation by reasons alone,'' I explore theintuitions motivating the philosophical use of the term ``justi-®cation,'' the seeming focal point for those debating the ration-ality of religious belief. A copious literature has grown aroundthe explication of the concept. Naturally, a philosopher's intui-tion about justi®cation depends on the epistemology of which itforms a part. I argue here that the early modern worry aboutskepticism continues to guide the discussion. Abjuring thoseconcerns allows the philosophical use of ``justi®cation'' toresemble more closely its non-philosophical uses. A justi®edbelief is one for which someone has offered explanatoryreasons, reasons that contribute to the best overall explanatoryaccount of the relevant phenomena. Evidential goodness, onthis view, presupposes explanatory goodness. I characterize ajusti®ed belief as one for which the reasons offered exemplifythe good in the way of belief. Clearly, this conception ofjusti®cation involves judgment. We must judge the goodness ofreasons. Furthermore, judgments of goodness presupposevalues. This conception of justi®cation presupposes social stan-dards for acceptability, re¯ecting shared epistemic values. Iview our epistemic values as one species, alongside others likeethical values, constituting our conception of human ¯our-ishing. If one claims an experience justi®es a belief, I argue, onemust make its implicit explanation explicit and submit it todebate based on shared values.

In the next two chapters, which do not directly contribute tomy positive argument, I undertake limited engagements against

6 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

two recent philosophical works in the philosophy of religiousexperience. In chapter 4, ``Perennialism revisited,'' I contendwith Robert Forman's defense of a type of experience entirelyunaffected by the subject's prior background beliefs. Formanchallenges Steven Katz and promotes the possibility of atrans-cultural experience of pure consciousness, a waking,non-intentional consciousness.8 He maintains that mystics inmany traditions have perfected techniques for achieving exper-ience unclouded by cognitive activity. Naturally, these differentmystics enjoy the qualitatively identical experience becausetheir differing background beliefs and expectations do notoperate in this pure consciousness.

Forman's work ostensibly has little to do with religion per sebecause contentless consciousness cannot have an intrinsicreligious importance; religious importance could only enterwith a religious interpretation of this pure consciousness. Thegreat interest his work generates stems in part, I think, from thecentral role the possibility of unmediated experience plays inthe justi®cation of religious beliefs. Forman himself notes thatfor some scholars ``a transcultural perennial philosophy . . .supported an argument for the existence of a (variously de®ned)divinity on the basis of experience.''9 Unmediated experienceoccupies such a place of prominence in discussions of religiousexperience because if other background beliefs or cognitionsenter into the experience, then the justi®cation conferred on theexperiential beliefs depends at least in part on the backgroundbeliefs. When exploring the rationality of religious beliefs gen-erally, the apologist cannot then, without vicious circularity, usethe experiential evidence to justify the beliefs. Unmediatedexperience amounts to a protective strategy, whereby thescholar can ``bracket'' signi®cant considerations to render thereligious claims more convincing.10

In chapter 5, ``The miracle of minimal foundationalism,'' I

8 Robert K. C. Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990).

9 Ibid., p. 4.10 In this book I frequently use the term ``protective strategy'' borrowed from Wayne

Proudfoot's book Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Imean to employ it in a manner analogous to the speci®c sense outlined in his work.

Introduction: spectral evidences 7

address the work of William Alston (among others) who hasprovided the most nuanced and thoughtful version of anepistemological argument justifying religious beliefs based ondirect perceptions of God. Alston's position works as a foil notonly for my theory of justi®cation, but also for my project as awhole. On his theory, the human epistemic makeup relies on amultitude of socially established doxastic practices, or belief-forming mechanisms. We cannot justify our doxastic practices,he sensibly maintains, in a non-circular manner. We cannot, forexample, support our beliefs formed on the basis of senseperception without further recourse to sense perception. Thesedoxastic practices nevertheless constitute the basic sources ofprima facie justi®ed beliefs (subject to defeat). Because none ofour generally reliable belief-forming mechanisms has a moresecure justi®cation than any other, we cannot use the standardsof one practice to indict another. Alston portrays the non-sensory perception of God as one of our basic, but unjusti®able,doxastic practices. To employ the criteria appropriate tosensory perception in order to judge religious perception un-satisfactory amounts to an unfair privileging of the character-istics of one practice over another. Doxastic practices therebycounter a whole range of standard objections to the argumentfrom religious experience.

If, for example, we seek to debunk religious perceptionbecause it doesn't evince the sort of universal distributionenjoyed by sensory perception, we illicitly use the traits of onepractice to judge another. Alston here parries those like Darwinwho, farther into the passage I quoted above, rejects an analogybetween religious experience and sense perception.

It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of rednessmakes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence.This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had thesame inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know thatthis is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such

He describes those who reject the explanatory reduction of religion as attempting``to preclude critical inquiry from outside the religious life'' (p. xvi).

8 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of whatreally exists.11

Darwin argues that the parochial character of religious experi-ence vitiates any analogy with sense perception. Alston's dox-astic practice approach attempts to preserve the analogy whiledisarming the signi®cant disanalogies. As a result he licenses theisolation of our different sources of belief from one another.Obviously, he employs his epistemology as a protective strategy.

Although seemingly discrete issues, the possibility, raised byForman, of pure consciousness shares both content and strategywith the attempt by Alston and others to justify religious beliefsby recourse to religious experience. They both arbitrarilynarrow the scope of the experiences they consider in order torender their contentions more plausible. Forman distinguisheshallucinations, visions, and auditions from what Roland Fischercalls ``trophotropic'' states marked by low levels of cognitiveand physiological activity. He limits his discussion to only thesenon-sensory, introvertive experiences. Alston, for his part, limitshis aim to justifying beliefs based on non-sensory perceptions orawarenesses of God acting in some relation to the mystic. Heexcludes the types of experiences that Forman considers andalso excludes the sensory sorts of experiences which Formanlikewise shuns. By focusing on such speci®c agendas, they givethe impression of greater unanimity between the mystical tradi-tions than a broader sampling would suggest.

Additionally, Forman and Alston, despite the epistemologicalniceties of their theories, ®nally resort to intuition as a court oflast appeal. They grant the fact that someone undergoes anextraordinary experience far too much weight in assessing theexperience. This failing results from neglecting adequately todistinguish the event which causes an experience from the ®rst-person experience of the event. Forman, for instance, inlabeling contentless consciousness a ``Pure ConsciousnessEvent '' (italics added), rather than a ``Pure Consciousness Experi-ence,'' lends the experience of putative pure consciousnessgreater authority. The insistence on unmediated experience

11 Darwin, Autobiography, p. 91.

Introduction: spectral evidences 9

forms another case in point. Both Forman and Alston arguefrom the phenomenological immediacy of an experience, that itfeels unmediated, to its actual epistemic immediacy, that itprovides a source of evidential grounds at least relativelyindependent of background beliefs. In speaking of similar con-fusions, William James coined the phrase ``the psychologist'sfallacy.'' It occurs when psychologists impute their knowledge ofa phenomenon to the mental state of the subjects. Theyintroduce their explanations into the others' descriptions. Thesemethods, shared by Forman and Alston, contribute to thecarapace which privileges the claims of the mystics and fendsoff explanation from outside the religious life.

The protective intentions prevalent in the philosophy ofmysticism ®nally shine most clearly in the repeated injunctionto treat the mystics' claims as ``innocent until proven guilty.''This maxim follows from the epistemologies many contempo-rary philosophers promote, but plays to apologetic aims as well.The judicial conceit, gaining plausibility, no doubt, from itsresonance with Plato's canonical Apology, enjoys a durable andprominent history in the philosophy of religion, ®rst appearingno later than Thomas Sherlock's 1729 The Tryal of the Witnesses ofthe Resurrection of Jesus. By setting his dialogue as a courtproceeding, Sherlock effectively shifts the onus of proof onto thereligious skeptic. With religious believers literally on trial, itseems natural for the skeptic to bear the burden of proof; thebeliever need only provide a defense. The counsel for thedefense argues, ` And this I take to be the known Method ofproceeding in such Cases; no Man is obliged to produce hisTitle to his Possession; it is suf®cient if he maintains it when it iscalled in question.''12 Beliefs remain innocent until provenguilty. Sherlock cleverly extends juridical conventions beyondtheir accepted range of application and imports them into thephilosophy of religion. This apologetic tactic has proved suc-cessful and is increasingly common. In the coming chapters Iwill subject to scrutiny the epistemological credentials for this

12 London, p. 7.

10 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

incursion and (to speak in terms of the metaphor) restore theburden of proof to the theist.

In contrast to Forman and Alston, I would like to portrayexperience as something that includes inference (of a sort) fromprevious beliefs and commitments, something which we neednot take at face value and which we can critique in light of ourwider cultural values. Justi®cation includes judgment informedby values and debate in light of values. I contest accounts ofjusti®cation which obviate the giving of reasons. We would not,then, want to grant controversial beliefs based on religiousexperience prima facie justi®cation as does Alston. Nor would wenecessarily want to accept either the mystic's claims to content-less consciousness or the philosopher's claims to unmediatedexperience because such a claim itself represents an explanationwhich we might not accept as the best explanation of the event.I contend we can best pro®t from an account of religiousexperience and its evidential potential that attends to, ratherthan obscures, the values informing it. One important con-sequence of this view suggests that different cultures andhistorical epochs can take different stances regarding the justi-®cation of certain beliefs. Jeffrey Stout argues in defense of thisposition that ``the rationality of a given person's beliefs oractions is relative to the reasons or reasoning available to thatperson. And the availability of reasons and reasoning varieswith historical and social context.''13 A belief justi®ed in anearlier age may no longer be justi®ed today because of the verydifferent epistemic commitments we hold in light of our evolv-ing values.

As I made clear, I view explanation as the paramount factorin both the production of experience and the justi®cation ofbeliefs. In addition, however, I also view explanation as funda-mental to the epistemic character of an era. The sorts ofexplanations and the assessments of explanations uncontrover-sially accepted in an era reveal much about the epistemic valuesof the culture. In the last chapter, ``Modernity and its discon-tents,'' I attempt to elucidate the epistemic values of two

13 Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1981), p. 168.

Introduction: spectral evidences 11

different eras, the late medieval and the contemporary, byreference to the explanatory commitments they evince. Iattempt to defend the conclusion that although religious experi-ences might well have justi®ed religious beliefs at other points inWestern history (had anyone conceived of employing them thatway), in our contemporary context with our ultimate values andexplanatory commitments, they can no longer do so. I must ofnecessity preserve a certain degree of vagueness in describingcultural values and commitments because we cannot boil a rich,embodied culture down to hard, skeletal criteria of rationality. Imust also insist that I do not deny that both the medieval andthe modern mystical perceiver belong to communities thatvalidate for them their beliefs and provide them with interpreta-tions of their experience. Both sets of experiences exhibit agrammar and make sense within a context and community. Icontend that, given the present condition of Western culture,the explanations of experience licensed and encouraged insome sub-communities within the modern West nonetheless failto exemplify the culture's larger commitments and values. Theimplicit religious explanation of religious experience no longerrepresents the best explanation of the event experienced reli-giously.

A religious perception of the sort singled out by Alstonincludes a commitment to a supernatural cause as the bestexplanation. The ®rst section of the last chapter illustrates howeven Alston's theory surreptitiously trades in supernatural ex-planations. The next section summarizes the results of theprevious chapter where I carefully map out the mystical path asTeresa of Avila describes it. (In chapter 6, I depict her socialsetting and try to recount her thought and experiences compre-hensively without distorting them through selective attention.)To read Teresa as justifying her beliefs through her experiencesanachronistically misinterprets her testimony (if anything shejusti®ed her experiences through her beliefs). The point here,however, is to highlight the supernatural explanations sheemploys and to indicate that supernatural explanations wereacceptable and informative for her and her contemporaries.

The ®nal section argues that supernatural explanations no

12 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

longer represent good explanations. Claiming that self-assertionrepresents the de®ning feature of the modern world-view, I tryhere to demonstrate why supernatural explanations are bothempty and unacceptable to us. Self-assertion denotes the ten-dency to judge our thought in accord with our own plans andby standards we ourselves set rather than by trying to satisfyGod's plan. I argue that in a culture with this commitment toself-assertion, and the understanding of the supernatural/natural bifurcation implicit in natural laws, we can never assertthat, in principle, an event resists naturalistic explanation. Aperfectly substantiated, anomalous event, rather than providingevidence for the supernatural, merely calls into question ourunderstanding of particular natural laws. In the modern era,this position fairly accurately represents the educated responseto novelty. Rather than invoke the supernatural, we can alwaysadjust our knowledge of the natural in extreme cases. In themodern age in actual inquiry, we never reach the point wherewe throw up our hands and appeal to divine intervention toexplain a localized event like an extraordinary experience.

This claim represents something more than a simple socio-logical observation; it carries normative weight. The advent ofthis form of self-assertion, furthermore, appears irreversible.While supernatural explanations might conceivably becomeculturally prevalent once more, there could be no foreseeablewarrant for invoking them. We could have no good reason forasserting that an event, in principle, resists naturalistic explana-tion. The changes in our beliefs and values necessary to rendersupernatural explanations rationally acceptable again are soradical as to make such a circumstance unimaginable. Toborrow Charles Taylor's idiom, self-assertion has become,through a ``ratchet effect,'' a permanent feature of developedhuman potential.14 Accordingly, I believe that although Teresamay have been justi®ed in the beliefs she gained through herreligious experiences, in our historical context, the implicitsupernatural explanation of an experience can never be judgedjusti®ed in the social sense I explicate as the best explanation.

14 ``Comparison, History, Truth,'' in Myth and Philosophy, Frank E. Reynolds and DavidTrac, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), p. 52.

Introduction: spectral evidences 13

My approach to experience and justi®cation centers onexplanation and ultimately my position on mystical perceptionturns on my rejection of supernatural explanations. Essentially,I believe the whole issue concerning the justi®catory value ofextraordinary religious experience reduces to the equally livedebate about the acceptability of supernatural explanations. Arecent textbook in the philosophy of religion has come to thissame conclusion:

If religious experience is shaped by each person's concepts and beliefs,how can we determine which account ± the natural or the super-natural ± provides the best explanation . . . ? Let us suppose that Jane,as a strict naturalist, does not believe in God. Will not the impositionof Jane's own belief systems or her explanation of Joe's experiencemerely juxtapose belief structures, so that ultimately one cannotdecide which explanation ± naturalistic or supernaturalistic ± iscorrect? This becomes clear when Proudfoot assigns the analyst thetask of trying to ferret out why people who have had religiousexperiences understand them as they do and contends that ``what wewant is a historical or cultural explanation.'' This assignment begs thequestion concerning which belief system provides the appropriateframework for explaining the events, for why should one assume thata historical or cultural explanation is more to the point than asupernatural or theistic one?15

The authors want to know why, if we have competing explana-tions of an event, the naturalistic explanation takes precedence.They ask this question rhetorically. Similarly, Philip Clayton, inExplanation from Physics to Theology, limits the topic of his bookand stops short of answering ``the question of how rational it isto appeal to religious explanations in the modern world.''16 Iintend to answer both these questions.

Edward Schoen in his 1985 book, Religious Explanations, laysdown the gauntlet which I pick up in the last chapter. Hedefends the legitimacy of supernatural explanations of spatio-temporal events, but also allows that modernity somehow raisessuspicions about supernatural explanations. ``The simple possi-bility of formulating such explanations along rigidly scienti®c

15 Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, David Basinger, Reason andReligious Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 22.

16 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 132.

14 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

lines would lose much, if not all, of its interest,'' he concedes,``were it discovered that there is not even the remotest chancethat they could prove acceptable to modern, educatedpeople.''17 Supernatural explanations modeled on scienti®cexplanations carry no weight, he observes, if the whole notionof a supernatural explanation of a spatio-temporal event provesunsatisfactory to the modern. Whereas he formulates thisinsight in terms of ``people,'' I prefer to think in terms ofcultural values because, sadly, ``modern, educated people'' alltoo often cling to patterns of thought and action incompatiblewith their basic values. With that caveat, the central focus of mywork straightforwardly denies the acceptability of supernaturalexplanations.

Despite the occasional references to natural law and scienceboth here and in the ®nal chapter which might suggest other-wise, I intend my use of ``natural'' to entail (1) no commitmentsto a physicalistic ontology; (2) no valorization of the speci®cmethods, vocabularies, presuppositions, or conclusions peculiarto natural science; (3) no view about the reducibility of themental to the physical; (4) no position on the ontological statusof logic or mathematics, and (5) no denial of the possibility ofmoral knowledge. Beliefs, values, and logical truths, forexample, count as natural and folk psychological explanations,therefore, are natural explanations. The concept of the natural,in the sense I use it, has virtually no content except as thede®nitional correlative to the supernatural, taken here as atranscendent order of reality (and causation) distinct from themundane order presupposed alike by the natural scientist andthe rest of us in our quotidian affairs. My ``naturalism'' isperhaps best viewed as a variant of what we might refer to asthe great New York school of naturalism, represented by such®gures as Woodbridge, Dewey, Hook, and Cohen. SydneyHook, in particular, took great pains to distinguish naturalismfrom materialism and positivism on the one hand and super-naturalism on the other. He de®ned naturalism as the view that``the furniture of heaven and earth, the way things are and the

17 Durham: Duke University Press, p. 82.

Introduction: spectral evidences 15

way they behave, are best described by the scienti®c disciplineswhen the latter are conceived as continuous with, althoughsometimes critical of, common-sense experience.''18 Like Hook,I believe that ordinary problem-solving procedures suf®cientlycharacterize naturalism and also serve to undermine the ration-ality of belief in the supernatural.

The conceptual distinction between the natural and thesupernatural has a history, of course, but it is something whichwe in large part share with Teresa (even if perhaps it is some-what sharper for us). The notion dates to pre-Christian Greeceand Rome and the concept that theologians sometimes desig-nate the ``®nite supernatural'' enjoys a rich medieval heritage.19

The ®nite supernatural concerns supernatural beings, qualities,or effects within the ®nite, created, natural universe. I will arguein the ®nal chapter that although we share these conceptualdistinctions with Teresa, our values put us in a position wherewe cannot make any good epistemic use of the ®nite super-natural. The supernatural has become explanatorily otiose, acategory which has no legitimate application as an explanationof particular events within the mundane order. Its recentreappearance indicates (to echo Hook) a renewed failure ofnerve.

I do not, however, consider my position a polemic directedagainst religious belief. In fact I have little to say about religiousbelief per se or its rationality. Rather, I intend to argue speci®c-ally against seeking evidential support for religious beliefthrough the perception of God. In other words, although I havereservations about the supernatural in general, my argumentconcerns only the ®nite supernatural. Despite my conclusionsand reluctance to address the larger issues of rationality andreligious belief, I nonetheless see my work as broadly pertinentfor believers. To remain strong and viable religious beliefs mustnot violate the norms and values we hold concerning epistemicgoodness or ¯ourishing. When our religious beliefs contravene

18 The Quest For Being (New York: Delta, 1963), Introduction.19 Charles Stinson provides a brief but comprehensive history of the term ``super-

natural'' in ``The Finite Supernatural: Theological Perspectives,'' Religious Studies 9(1973), pp. 325±337.

16 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

our ideal of human ¯ourishing, they can only do so malgre eux.To retain a vibrant and healthy belief, the believer shouldself-critically re¯ect on the springs of his belief and subjectthem to scrutiny. Arguments for faith shouldn't ¯y in the faceof our epistemic values, lest the faith become marginalizedand idiosyncratic by way of consequence. Ironically,Schleiermacher, the theological ®gure who lurks in the back-ground of the contemporary interest in religious experience, forthese very reasons strongly opposed supernatural explanationsof events occurring within the causal nexus. He concluded thatwhen assigning causes to discrete phenomena, ``we shouldabandon the idea of the absolutely supernatural . . . ''20 Recog-nizing the logic and impetus of modernity, he sought to establishan ``eternal covenant'' between religion and science whereby``we can . . . allow science the freedom to take into its crucibleall facts of interest to us . . . ''21 Otherwise, he felt religion riskedbecoming isolated from and irrelevant to the animating centerof cultural life.

Essentially, I maintain that we shouldn't seek to protect onesubset of our beliefs and values from others. Clearly, myadvocacy of self-critical scrutiny of the commitments informingour beliefs stems from my values, but self-critical re¯ectionarguably represents one of the central values of modernity, onewe would ®nd ourselves at pains to repudiate. In one of his fewfelicitous phrases, Peirce nicely captures this component of theethics of belief. ``Integrity of belief,'' he declares, is ``morewholesome than any particular belief.''22 This demand forre¯ective self-criticism, furthermore, can also derive from moretraditional, religious scruples about purity and devotion. Acentral theme in Augustinean strands of Christianity, for in-stance, is the obligation to scrutinize re¯ectively the bases androle of one's belief, assessing the honesty, centrality and char-acter of one's religious commitment. Not only do Nietzsche and

20 Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, H. R. Mackintosh and J. S.Stewart, eds. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 183.

21 Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, On the ``Glaubenslehre,'' James Duke and FrancisFiorenza, trs. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 64±65.

22 ``The Fixation of Belief,'' Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, Philip Wiener, ed. (NewYork: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 111.

Introduction: spectral evidences 17

Freud, but Augustine, Teresa and Kierkegaard also maintainthat religious belief can be culpably self-deceptive. The latterthree, therefore, all enjoin self-knowledge as essential to theChristian life. Kierkegaard's elusive term ``transparency'' gainsits content from these concerns about purity. A religious ethicsof belief can arrive at the same conclusion as mine: that oneshouldn't seek to preserve one's faith at the cost of inconsist-encies and protective strategies.23

One common and understandable charge I hear levied at mewhen I profess these views questions my right to judge thebeliefs and experiences of others. I seem to offend ``postmo-dern,'' pluralist sensibilities. How dare I presume to legislatethe character of epistemic goodness for others who embracedifferent beliefs, values, and ideals? I don't completely denythis depiction; I only shun the tone of indignation. AlasdairMacIntyre captured the logic of my stance when in a nowfamous essay he asserted, ``Thus the sceptic is committed tosaying that he understands the Christian's use of concepts in away that the Christian himself does not, and presumably viceversa.''24 As I made quite clear when discussing my intuitionsabout justi®cation, I do wish to ®nd rational ways, invoking ourvalues, to criticize others' beliefs and for others to criticize mybeliefs. Without this social element doesn't justi®cation lose itspoint? If justi®cation obtains solely relative to individuals, thenas a notion it doesn't hold much interest.25

The claim that we cannot condemn values we do not share,while seemingly a popular stance today, needs further attention.

23 David Wisdo conducts a suggestive inquiry into an ethics of religious belief that doesnot rely on evidentialist assumptions in The Life of Irony and the Ethics of Belief (Albany:SUNY Press, 1993).

24 Alasdair MacIntyre, ``Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?,''Rationality, Bryan Wilson, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 76. On MacIntyre'sview the skeptic claims to know how certain religious concepts, deracinated from thecontext to which they integrally belonged, have lost their purchase on us.

25 I make this general point about justi®cation in chapter 3, but the notion thatjusti®cation is relative to individuals has a distinguished lineage in philosophy ofreligion. William James's conclusion about the evidential value of mysticism in themysticism chapter of the Varieties gives such an answer and most everyone who haspondered James's conclusions goes away dissatis®ed. Plantinga's apologetics result insomething like this as well: the religious experience justi®es the mystic's beliefs whileit need not carry any authority for those who did not undergo the experience.

18 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History

In fact, I would argue, under many circumstances we dosummarily reject values with which we disagree, but only whenwe feel something of importance is at stake. Most of us, I trust,would condemn many of the values informing the religiouscommunity once inhabiting Jonestown, Guyana. Our scruplesabout pluralism don't restrain us much when we consider theconsequences of divergent values serious enough. In the case ofreligious beliefs based on religious perception, we toleratediversity because of the generally innocuous character of theissues involved. Nothing truly important to us rides on therespective positions espoused in this question. This fact isentirely contingent, however. Cotton Mather reminds us of acontext in which a socially established practice of belief for-mation based on a sort of religious experience had profoundcivic importance. Moreover, because of the high stakes in-volved, even he, the ideological bulwark for the witch trials,insists that ``spectral evidences'' deliver no presumption in favorof the beliefs based on them.26 Judges should not treat thesebeliefs as innocent until proven guilty (indeed, to presume thebeliefs innocent would be tantamount to presuming the defen-dants guilty). They must seek evidence of a wholly differentnature (i.e. from other practices of belief formation) to corrobo-rate them in the best overall account of the case. The witchtrials present an example wherein urgent consequences attendreligious perception. They suggest that the indulgence towardreligious perception lately recommended remains but a provi-sional luxury.

Let me draw out the analogy with ethical values further.Remember that ethical and epistemic values both constitutespecies of the good. Many in our culture embrace values thatrender the abortion of an unborn human fetus objectionable.Others embrace values that lead them to place greater weighton the well-being of the mother and the quality of the child's lifeonce born. Both groups ®nd social support within communitieswhich share these values. Yet rather than manifesting outragethat one group would legislate about the values of the other

26 Mather, Witchcraft, p. 23.

Introduction: spectral evidences 19

(though we do hear this complaint), at least a portion of the dinraised by the issue represents (quasi-) reasoned argument fromshared principles, beliefs, or values to convince the other groupof the correctness of their values and beliefs. This underlyingand often overlooked agreement serves to make the disagree-ment intelligible. All partisans to the debate ®nd unjusti®edhomicide abhorrent and support coercive laws preventing it.The pro-life faction believes abortion to be unjusti®ed homicideand therefore supports coercive laws preventing it. Members ofthe various pro-choice factions, however, either do not believeabortion to be homicide because the fetus is not a person, orthey believe it to be justi®ed in some cases. They object,therefore, to coercive laws preventing abortion. But at thebottom of it all, there does lie a right answer (both sides believeat least this much, or they wouldn't evince such wholeheartedcommitment). Judging from the values we share, there subsists afact of the matter. We haven't reached the point where we haveany satisfying view of this answer and we can't guarantee thatwe will ever reach agreement about it, but the debate continues.

Likewise, I don't expect my colleagues, invoking a misplacedtoleration, to recoil in dismay or censure me for contesting thebeliefs of some believers. Sti¯ing inquiry in this repressivemanner functions as a powerful and effective protective strategy.Rather, if they disagree, I expect them to argue in defense oftheir values and explanatory commitments. Let the positionsengage from the standpoint of shared values and see whatemerges. In the long run reticence serves no purpose other thaninsulating ourselves against the possibility of cognitive disso-nance, a possibility I believe we should willingly risk in pursuitof human ¯ourishing.

20 Religious Experience, Justi®cation, and History