I recently listened to a defense attorney making claims about how personal experience and eye-witness testimony are the best kind of evidence you can possibly have, in defense of Christianity.
I have to agree with him about the personal experience part. Not necessarily for defence, but certainly for believing.
I should have clarified that I meant that in terms of having persuasive power over others.
Personal experience can be personally compelling, but people have pretty well exploited the “I personally experienced X, are you calling me a liar?” thing enough (also, hallucinations, confusion, unreliable memory, etc), that people generally take statements about personal experience of others with a grain of salt.
If I hallucinated a discussion with God, I would probably not be long-term convinced of it, despite the experience.
(Edit: Aside: why did I add anything past the first sentence? There was no reason to.)
If I had a REAL discussion with Actual God, he might just rewire me because I had a bug, and he’s a cool guy.
Alternatively, I might ask God for evidence that he’s God, or at least an awesome alien teenager with big angelic powers, and get some predictions and stuff out of him that I can use to verify that something incredible is in fact happening, because, hey, I’m human, and humans occasionally hallucinate, and I would probably like to make sound arguments that I really did have a discussion with a guy with big angelic powers that I could share with other people.
But if he can’t deliver on that stuff, the fact that I had a memory of talking to God with strong emotions and stuff attached to it, would probably not stand up to the amount of scrutiny that I’m likely to throw at it.
The problem is that people with serious psychotic disorders, the type of people who have this kind of hallucinations while not on drugs, are not just “hearing voices” and “seeing things” as if somebody hacked into their auditory and optical nerves and inserted extraneous signals. These people are really incapable of thinking clearly and rationally evaluating evidence. It is probably like they are living in a dream-like state while they are awake.
Yeah, what I didn’t say is, “If I became psychotic, and had a hallucination of god, I would probably not long-term believe it.” There are other reasons people can arrive at a state where they have hallucinations. If you break my critical faculties, then I’m far less likely to reason well.
I was able to find numbers suggesting that perhaps 1⁄4 people with schizophrenia have religious hallucinations, but I was unable to find out what percentage of people who report religious hallucinations serious suffer psychotic disorders. I do know that religious visions are widely claimed within certain communities, that various drugs, sleep depression, stress, are all things that raise the odds of having hallucinations, and there are perhaps 3% schizotypal folks out there, who are somewhat likely to be hallucinators but may not meet your bar for “serious psychotic disorder”.
I’ve sort of been assuming that while hallucinations are fairly a strong predictor of, say, “schizophrenia”, that other factors than serious-brain-whammy drive the bulk of religious hallucinations.
I have to agree with him about the personal experience part. Not necessarily for defence, but certainly for believing.
I should have clarified that I meant that in terms of having persuasive power over others.
Personal experience can be personally compelling, but people have pretty well exploited the “I personally experienced X, are you calling me a liar?” thing enough (also, hallucinations, confusion, unreliable memory, etc), that people generally take statements about personal experience of others with a grain of salt.
If I hallucinated a discussion with God, I would probably not be long-term convinced of it, despite the experience.
(Edit: Aside: why did I add anything past the first sentence? There was no reason to.)
Heh. Here be circles :-)
If I hallucinated a discussion with God, I would probably not be long-term convinced of it.
If I had a real discussion with God, I would probably be long-term convinced of it.
That’s how conversations go...
How do you distinguish the two?
If I had a REAL discussion with Actual God, he might just rewire me because I had a bug, and he’s a cool guy.
Alternatively, I might ask God for evidence that he’s God, or at least an awesome alien teenager with big angelic powers, and get some predictions and stuff out of him that I can use to verify that something incredible is in fact happening, because, hey, I’m human, and humans occasionally hallucinate, and I would probably like to make sound arguments that I really did have a discussion with a guy with big angelic powers that I could share with other people.
But if he can’t deliver on that stuff, the fact that I had a memory of talking to God with strong emotions and stuff attached to it, would probably not stand up to the amount of scrutiny that I’m likely to throw at it.
The problem is that people with serious psychotic disorders, the type of people who have this kind of hallucinations while not on drugs, are not just “hearing voices” and “seeing things” as if somebody hacked into their auditory and optical nerves and inserted extraneous signals. These people are really incapable of thinking clearly and rationally evaluating evidence.
It is probably like they are living in a dream-like state while they are awake.
Yeah, what I didn’t say is, “If I became psychotic, and had a hallucination of god, I would probably not long-term believe it.” There are other reasons people can arrive at a state where they have hallucinations. If you break my critical faculties, then I’m far less likely to reason well.
I was able to find numbers suggesting that perhaps 1⁄4 people with schizophrenia have religious hallucinations, but I was unable to find out what percentage of people who report religious hallucinations serious suffer psychotic disorders. I do know that religious visions are widely claimed within certain communities, that various drugs, sleep depression, stress, are all things that raise the odds of having hallucinations, and there are perhaps 3% schizotypal folks out there, who are somewhat likely to be hallucinators but may not meet your bar for “serious psychotic disorder”.
I’ve sort of been assuming that while hallucinations are fairly a strong predictor of, say, “schizophrenia”, that other factors than serious-brain-whammy drive the bulk of religious hallucinations.