Premonition of death

February 5, 2009 at 9:56 pm (atheism, experience of God)

In the previous post, I mentioned that many people have had subjective experiences of God — “millions of people living in diverse societies and spanning vast epochs of human history.”

Here’s a very striking example of the sort of thing I mean:

One night Diana had a strange dream. In the dream Jesus appeared to her, dressed in a white robe, standing on a cloud of smoke. He was beckoning her to come to him, telling her not to worry, that he was going to take her with him. Then it seemed to her that the whole world disappeared from beneath her and she awoke. She told her husband about the dream the next morning, but he didn’t want to hear about it—it scared him.

The next few nights, the dream repeated itself. She told her mother, who wondered what it could mean.

A month later on September 11, 2001, Diana was at work at her investment firm in the World Trade Center on one of the top floors. She phoned her husband and mother on her cell phone after the second plane struck the tower below her. She reminded them of the dream, just before the tower crumbled.

In that moment, when events spun out of control, Diana presumably took comfort from her dream experience. Likewise, her husband and mother can cling to the message of that dream — i.e., that Diana would be received in an afterlife by Jesus — knowing that the dream was granted when Diana couldn’t possibly have known what lay in her immediate future.

Most subjective experiences are more ambiguous than that one:  for example, a feeling that God is present, offering his comfort to the individual, at a time that is peculiarly difficult for him or her.

Such experiences do not “prove” God’s existence. It’s merely data that, like all data, must be interpreted. Nor do such experiences answer the arguments against God’s existence:  for example, the well-known problem of evil.

I merely note that this sort of evidence is dismissed out of hand by atheists on the grounds that it is anecdotal. And I don’t think that’s a valid response, particularly when one considers that testimony to such experiences is widespread.

To be sure, I don’t expect anyone else to be convinced of God’s existence on the basis of my subjective experience. But such evidence does exist, and it must be reckoned with in some way that does it justice.

Atheists don’t make enough of an effort.

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The Flying Spaghetti Monster debunked

January 30, 2009 at 6:26 pm (atheism)

Ross Douthat argues that the Flying Spaghetti Monster fails to provide a parallel to Christian faith and tradition.

Both the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bertrand Russell’s teapot in space make a great deal of sense, Douthat says,

if you believe that the idea of God is an absurdity dreamed up by crafty clerics in darkest antiquity and subsequently imposed on the human mind by force and fear, and that it only survives for want of brave souls willing to note how inherently absurd the whole thing is.

As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently:  An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection […] has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship.

The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God […], rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts.

Like Douthat, I tend to think the strongest argument for religious faith is the subjective one:  i.e., an argument rooted in the subjective experience of millions of people living in diverse societies and spanning vast epochs of human history.

Moreover, Douthat is right:  the Flying Spaghetti Monster misses that aspect of the equation entirely. It could only be devised by people who have made no effort to look at things sympathetically:  i.e., from within the perspective of the people with whom they disagree.

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