Is “Self-Validating” Religious Experience Logically Possible?

IS "SELF-VALIDATING" RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE LOGICALLY POSSIBLE? MOST PHILOSOPHERS nurtured on the canons of empiricist methodology have looked with more than a little collective distrust upon the claim that "selfvalidating " encounter-experiences with God constitute the unimpeachable foundation for theological commitment, i. e., that there is a uniquely religious mode of knowing.1 To begin with, and as pointed out by Frederick Ferre, the logic of encounter seems to be guilty of some serious question-begging 2 insofar as the very category of encounter entails an objective referent that is encountered. Nonetheless, proponents have continued to insist that" encounter" is the only term equal to the intensity and authority of such experience. Ferre argues further that the person to person "I-Thou" encounters which function as the analogical base for putative encounter with the divine are fraught with difficulties. For example, since illusion is often present in "encounter," how can we ever know that a putative encounter-experience is ever veridical as opposed to subjectivist? How disillusioning, after a prolonged period of silent " encounter " with a friend, to have the spell broken by hearing a sudden snore issuing from the other "Thou" who, it turns out, has been asleep the whole time! How shattering to discover that someone who has been throughly known, it seems, through " encounter " is really quite a different person from the one formerly imagined! 3 1 Cf. C. B. Martin, "A Religious Way of Knowing," in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Anthony Flew and Alasdair Macintyre (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1955), pp. 76-95, for a very poignant critique of the "unique" logic of religious encounter. • Frederick Ferre, Language, Logic and God (New York: Harper and Row, 1961)' p. 94. • Ibid., p. 103. 256 " SELF-VALIDATING " RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE fl57 One response to Ferre here might be that, since the experience with a snoring friend could not legitimately be considered an encounter-experience, it thereby presents no significant threat to the logic of encounter. Simply because there are fake practicioners of medicine, this does not at all entail that the practice of medicine as such is bogus. Consequently, insofar as there can be encounter-experiences (whether with persons or God) , would they not thereby be veridical? Surely the notion of a necessarily veridical or self-validating experience (if logically intelligible) would serve to clarify what is meant by "encounter -experience " as opposed to the " ordinary " kind of experience so often prone to error and illusion. However, the issue of religious encounter as such can surely be addressed quite independently of the exceedingly problematic notion of self-validating experience. While many have argued vigorously in support of the plausibility of direct experience of God, they have argued just as forcefully against the notion that the mode of verification and corroboration of such experience is disparate from that of experience of other sorts. George Mavrodes, for example, has contended that With respect to corroborating experience of other sorts, by other people, the status of religious experience is fundamentally similar to, not different from, that of other types of experience.4 Hence, insofar as the status of religious experience is not one which is epistemically unique, then while social corroboration might not be forthcoming in a given case of putative religious experience, it would always be (logically) relevant to the consideration of its veridicality. However, such corroboration or lack of it could have no logical relevance whatsoever in that regard for those who have maintained that religious experience is self-validating, i.e., that the experience as such carries with it its own guarantee of infallibility. Hence, according to the logic of self-validation, nothing beyond the experience-as-such could conceivably (in principle) call its veridicality into ques- • George I. Mavrodes, Belief in God (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 77. 258 ROBERT A. OAKES tion. However, for Mavrodes and thinkers like him, this does not mean that I am obligated to abandon my putative religious experience as subjectivist (or nonveridicfl.l) simply because I cannot get others to share it. On the contrary, testing procedures cannot always be employed even with regard to experience other than the putatively religious, but this does not at all...