POJMAN’S THREE CRITICISMS OF THE STRONG-JUSTIFICATION THESIS

1.    Religious experience to too amorphous to allow generalization.


2.    Justification of belief on the basis of religious experience is circular.


3.    The veridicality of religious experiences cannot be checked like ordinary perceptual experiences and cannot be confirmed by predictions based on it.




GENERALIZING FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Observations

(1)    Whether or not we find a commonality among religious experiences depends very strongly on the marks (or criteria) we use to determine whether or not something is to be included as a religious (or mystical, or transcendental, etc.).

Examples:

(1)    A Christian writer might concentrate on the similarities that relate to Christianity: reports concerning Jesus or the Doctrine of the Trinity.  Finding common themes in these, he may conclude that the similarities support one another.

(2)    Pojman includes in his list of “religious” experiences the experiences of gratitude and “nothingness” of atheists.  Finding a wide disparity, he concludes that no important generalizations are possible.  
THE PROBLEM OF BIASED SAMPLES

(1) Such procedures are unlikely to yield conclusions of any value.

(2)  It is not clear that C. D. Broad did actually proceed in the biased way described in our examples (He was not a mystic or a theist of any kind).

(3) The only objective way to proceed
seems to be to “let the similarities speak for themselves” – i.e., if there are clear and common propositions that are asserted by a large number of witnesses with varied backgrounds and initial belief sets, then the common features call for an explanation.

(4)  The descriptions by mystics of
various kinds do not agree on any common features that are clearly relevant to our question “Does God exist?” (as we are construing it). Viewed in this way, Pojman’s complaint is correct.


THE “CIRCULARITY” OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Pojman: Religious experiences (indeed, all experiences) take place within the frame of a worldview (p. 86).  Thus: the premises of the attempt to justify religious belief by religious experience will not rest on premises are self-evident to everyone (p. 86), nor are there neutral criteria of assessment of evidence to which the atheist need agree.

Reply: If there is anything to this objection, it cannot be put in such sweeping terms: almost no significant argument has “self-evident” premises to which everyone will agree.  And the general claim that no one’s beliefs and interpretations are bias-free, so that no neutral or objective standpoint is possible, is self-defeating.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IS NOT “CHECKABLE” AND YIELDS NO OBSERVABLE PREDICTIONS.

Observation:  Everyone’s experience is private to them and so, in a sense, is not “intersubjectively checkable”. You can’t observe my experiences directly, nor I yours.  But from the point of view of the experiencer, it does confirm a belief about the causes thereof if predictions based on that belief are further verified or confirmed.  Such confirmation is not, however, essential to the rationality of all of our beliefs.

The student of religious experience should ask: what hypothesis best explains such experiences, given what he himself knows or believes strongly (and with good reason)?


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