Assess the view that religious experience provides convincing proof of the existence of God (12 marks)

The inductive nature of the argument from religious experience can at first be a very convincing point for the existence of God. The premise states that if something is experienced, it must exist, and evidence and people’s testimonies would suggest that people have indeed experienced God. Therefore God must exist. To an objectivist, religious experience must be evidence for the existence of God.  However according to subjectivist William James this is not the case. Although religious experiences should not be cast aside, he says that they should not be seen as definite proof for God’s existence. To a large extent this is a sensible view- religious experiences alone are simply not proof enough of the existence of an all-loving and omnipotent god. Furthermore the idea of God appearing to people in dreams depends on the prior probability of God himself already being established. So then is this theory, added to the argument from design, the cosmological argument and the ontological argument, enough to prove the existence of God? To Anthony Flew, the answer is a resounding no. According to the ‘ten leaky buckets’ analogy, ten bad ‘leaky’ arguments do not make one good one. Therefore Flew concludes that religious experiences are not convincing proof of God.  Another key criticism of religious experience proving the existence of God is the psychological challenge, which goes as far as to try to disprove religious experience altogether. Led by Persinger, the psychological argument states that religious experiences do not really happen but are simply a figment of human’s imaginations. Persinger tried to prove this in his famous experiment using ‘Persinger’s helmet’. In the experiment a helmet was used to separate the left and right temporal lobes, which gives the brain the illusion of an otherworldly force- much like the brain activity used in a religious experience. Most people, under the influence of Persinger’s helmet, felt God or had some kind of religious experience. The experiment was then emulated by Derren Brown, a television illusionist, who managed to provoke a religious experience in an atheist woman through a series of psychological tricks. This proves that religious experiences are not proof of the existence of God, but simply ‘a few seconds of electrical activity in the normal human brain’.  In conclusion, although it cannot be doubted that religious experiences exist, it is true that they are largely subjective and self-authenticating. Whilst the experiencer may start to believe in God (such as Paul/Saul being converted on the way to Damascus), to anyone who has not had a religious experience they are hardly proof for God’s existence. Therefore religious experience alone is not enough to convert the atheist- in the words of William James ‘religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief.’