The following is a letter I wrote to a colleague after a conversation we had in which he implied that those who have miraculous/supernatural religious experiences are basically deluded. Although I hesitate to juxtapose such a great mind with my own, I have included after it G.K. Chesterton saying precisely what I was getting at, with much more style and erudition. The passage is taken from Orthodoxy.

_____________________________________

OCD or schizotypalism is, as I understand from you, a psychological condition. You implied that people who suffer from this condition are essentially misaligned with reality, either through paranoia, such as washing excessively (which indicates irrational beliefs about hygiene), or through schizophrenic behaviors such as “hearing voices” (which indicates an instability of the mind). If “misaligned with reality” is not a decently accurate general description of what you were referring to, I suppose I was quite confused and missed what you were trying to say. But assuming I got the general idea, I proceed.

You also said that something akin to this condition tends to produce both lunatics and the founders of religious movements, the difference between the two being less the nature of their condition and more the chance suitability of their behaviors in that particular time and place. To extend the metaphor, if the voices come upon you at the right time or in the right way, you will be lifted onto people’s shoulders as a prophet, but if at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you will be burned at the stake as a witch.

Obviously to have founders of religions who are misaligned with reality would lead us to the conclusion that those religions are misaligned with reality, and this would not be desirable no matter how successful the religion. In fact, the more successful, the more heinous. If Mohammed was hallucinating the Qur’an, then Islam is not a good thing. But I want to talk about an assumption that is evident in your argument.
Imagine for a moment that there once was a farmer who was contacted telepathically by aliens one night. Astounded, he ran into the bar downtown the next day and announced, “I was contacted by aliens last night!” However, at that very moment, the town lunatic, a disturbed drunkard, burst through the doors and said, “I saw ‘em too! I saw aliens last night!” Then, a man turned to the farmer and said, “Get out of here with all that talk of aliens, Sam. We all know that if that lunatic says he saw ‘em, then they ain’t there.”

The man’s reply would be entirely nonsensical if he meant, “Anything the lunatic claims to exist doesn’t exist,” because the lunatic, no doubt, might possibly make claims about having seen real entities, such as “I saw ‘bout fifty o’ ‘em deer up ‘er younder jus’ yesteeday.” – but the deer will not cease to have existed because of his statement. No, it is much more likely that the man’s intention in saying that is, “You are in bed with the lunatics on this one, Sam, because there’s no such thing as aliens.” He says this because he has a presupposition that aliens don’t exist.

You say that religious founders are often misaligned with reality and point to the similarity to people who are out of touch with reality. But something that a person falsely claims to have seen is not necessarily false. The dictionary calls a hallucination “a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind”—but if it does exist outside of the mind, then that person is not hallucinating, he is actually sensing. Therefore, “hearing voices” does not prove that you are misaligned with reality unless you combine it with the presupposition that voices don’t exist. If voices do exist, then, even if 99% of people who have claimed to have heard them are nuts, it is possible that some people have heard them sanely.

I personally believe that some people (actually all of us, but some in particular) have experienced the supernatural God—experiences that are real, while inexplicable to psychology and neurology. (I mean that, while there might be correlations between brain activity and the experiences, that the brain activity or any sum of environmental stimuli do not constitute the causation of the experience.) How to tell these experiences apart from the crazies is another discussion. But if one rules out the existence of the supernatural, like the man in the bar, it’s therefore pointless to go looking for crop circles with the farmer or interview him to determine the plausibility of his experience—he is wrong merely for having made his claim.

So that’s it, I wanted to draw out the fact that the stuff you were talking about last night is built on the presupposition, “There is no God” and ask, would you agree that you hold this presupposition? If so, I would like to kind of “go deeper” with that and engage on that if you want.

_____________________________________

IN G.K. CHESTERTON’S WORDS

My belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.