Science is Experiential; Religion is Experiential Too

Science is Experiential; Religion is Experiential Too
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In my previous essay, I promised to come back to my claim that scientific knowledge is not the only kind of experiential knowledge: religious knowledge is experientially verified as well. I know that this point is controversial.

It is common to say that science is unique in being empirical, that is, relying on sense experience. In contrast, the sources of religious knowledge are traditionally taken to be revelation and reason, where revelation is usually described as the knowledge recorded in sacred texts and the teachings of the church. But where did the sacred texts and church teachings come from? The word "revelation" means "revealed knowledge," or knowledge said to have been revealed directly by God to specific individuals (prophets).

By the seventeenth century in Europe, there were two ways of thinking about revelation. On one view, the church had become so corrupted by its alliance with secular power (originating when Christianity became adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire) that God was no longer speaking directly to people. The days of the prophets were in the past. But their teachings were preserved in the Bible and church traditions.

But there were other Christian groups that believed in "continuing revelation," or the view that God continues to speak to people even in the present time. This view was controversial, and some of the religious strife during this time was dispute over this very question. While mainstream Protestantism generally holds the first view of revelation, grounding it in the authority of the Bible, at least one of the surviving dissident churches of the Radical Reformation that believed in continuing revelation survives: the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Instead of emphasizing the Bible or the teachings of the Church, the Quakers generally believe that there is that of God in everyone, and that with careful discernment each person has direct access to divine wisdom. The Quakers even implemented a method of group discernment, recognizing that individuals on their own may fail to distinguish properly between human impulses and divine leadings. This group discernment is analogous to the role of peer review in science (see Geoffrey Cantor's book Quakers, Jews, and Science.)

If we consider seriously the possibility of continuing revelation, what we see is that it is itself a kind of experiential knowledge. If God does exist and can communicate to people, how would people experience this communication? The cartoon answer is that they hear voices and have visions. This answer is conveniently simplistic and easy to dismiss: aren't hearing voices and seeing visions signs of mental illness? This way of understanding religious experience makes it easy to write off not only people now who claim some kind of divine inspiration but also all of the prophets of the past. In other words, this view allows us to describe all of religion as a superstition we should have outgrown by now.

But we all know that God is not literally supposed to be a bearded man in the sky. More sophisticated understandings of God include understanding God as Love, the principle of order or harmony in the universe, and creator: the ultimate source of being, of life, and of consciousness. God is often described as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Believing in God above all is believing that life, consciousness, goodness, and love are not mere epiphenomena accidentally arising out of the dead, mechanical "matter" that is regarded as the ultimate substance (the only real existing thing). Instead, life, consciousness, goodness, and love are what are most real.

The question now is this: given such a concept of God, what would be the nature of our experience of relationship with such a being? This being is not defined materially, and so we should not expect such a being necessarily to manifest itself materially to us (through voices or visions). But sense experience is not the only kind of experience we have. Sense experience is simply how we perceive external physical realities. But there is a lot more that we know and experience. For example, if we consider our knowledge of other people, while it is true that our senses inform this knowledge, sense experience is not the only way that we know other people. Yes, we see people and hear them, but when we engage in conversations with other people, our listening to them involves so much more than just perceiving sound waves. Those sound waves convey words which carry meanings. We try to figure out how others perceive the world, and try to discern their emotions, intentions, goals, personality, character. We engage in relationships, finding some relationships inspiring, others stressful, yet others healing, etc. We are profoundly affected, shaped, and even transformed by our relationships. These relational experiences teach us about human nature, and cannot be reduced to sense experience alone.

The experiences that inform our religious understandings are more like relational experiences than mere sense perception. (There are other kinds of experiences as well that inform our religious understandings, and I will discuss these in a future essay.) Just as we have relationships with people, so too do we have a relationship with ultimate reality, whatever it is and however we think of it. And so if there is in fact a supreme consciousness that pervades the entire universe, by virtue of being conscious beings ourselves, we can be in relationship to that supreme consciousness. If there is a supreme love that pervades the universe, by virtue of our being creatures capable of loving and being loved, we can be in relationship to this supreme love. If there is a supreme goodness that pervades the universe, by virtue of our being creatures capable of both perceiving goodness and being good, we can be in relationship with supreme goodness.

Gandhi subtitled his autobiography, "the story of my experiments with truth." Do we not all live in such a way as to be "experimentally" testing our beliefs about ultimate reality?

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