Theistic Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

Failure of naturalism; extraordinary experiences; arguments for theism

The sorts of pragmatic considerations I adduced in The Pragmatic and the Evidential in support of the rationality of religious belief will leave unmoved someone lacking a religious disposition.  Without such a disposition religious belief cannot be a "live option" in William James' sense.  You have to be antecedently inclined to take seriously the possibility that some form of religion is true.  This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing.  Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists.  Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism.  Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa.  What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett.  If you are 'surface all the way down' religion won't get a grip on you. You will not be able to take it seriously. It will strike you as superstitious nonsense, make-believe, wishful thinking, unconscious anthropomorphic projection . . . .

In my case religious belief is a live option. For most atheists, and for all militant atheists, the truth of some religion is no more a live existential option than numerology or Marxism is for me.  I will now state what, in my own case, are the additional factors, factors beyond the religious disposition, that move me to accept religious belief. I claim that these factors render religious belief reasonable, and not just for me.

1. The Manifold Failures of Naturalism.  There are four lrgitimate questions to which meraphysical naturalism has no satisfactory answer.

The first is why there is anything (or at least anything concrete and contingent) at all.  This is an intelligible question but there is no good naturalist answer to it.   The physicist Lawrence Krauss recently made a fool of himself over this question as I demonstrated in earlier posts.  (Here is one, and here is another.) The second question is how life arose from inanimate matter.  Life has to have arisen before natural selection can go to work upon random mutations.  The third is how consciousness or sentience arose in some living organisms, and the fourth is how self-consciousness, conscience, reason and all related higher-order mental phenomena arose.  There are many, many questions here, but it is widely accepted that naturalism has failed to give adequate answers to them.  Naturalists give answers all right, but they are reasonably rejected. For details, see my Naturalism category.

Now of course nothing I said in those many posts will convince any naturalist, but that's not my purpose.  My purpose is to explain how one can reasonably take religion seriously.  I could not take it seriously if naturalism were true. But I am not merely reporting on a psychological incapacity of mine; I am claiming that no one ought to take (classically theistic) religion seriously if naturalism is true. The refutation or rather neutralization of naturalism therefore removes an obstacle to religious belief.  If, on the other hand, you are convinced that naturalism is true, then you cannot, consistently with that conviction, accept (classical) theism — whether or not you have a religious disposition.

It is also important to realize that if naturalism as we currently know it is false, it doesn't follow that some form of (classical) theism is true.  It doesn't even follow that no form of naturalism is true.  It could be that there is a version of naturalism, over the horizon, which will adequately answer the questions I mentioned.  If I have understood the thrust of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012), that is what he is aiming at.  He is trying to find a way between naturalism in its current configuration and theism.  He wants to be able to see mind as somehow essential to the fabric of nature and not, as it must appear on evolutionary naturalism, as an accidental byproduct of purely physical processes. 

It is also worth noting that not all of the critics of contemporary evolutionary naturalism are theists.  If they were, then one might suspect that their criticisms were ideologically motivated.  Not so.  Nagel is both an atheist and an opponent of contemporary naturalism.  Given that Nagel's 'middle path' is merely a gesture in the direction of a possible destination, as opposed to a concrete alternative, I think it is reasonable to accept (classical) theism given the hopelessness of naturalism.

2. Mystical, Religious, and Paranormal Experiences and Intuitions

Suppose that someone (i) has the religious disposition and (ii) agrees that theism is superior to naturalism.  That still might not do it.  Abstract reasoning, even to intellectual types who flourish in its element, is no substitute for experiences.  In fact, I doubt that anyone could really take religion seriously (in a way that would make a concrete difference in how one lives one's life) who lacked the sensus divinitatis, or the feeling that the deliverances of conscience emanate from a sphere beyond the human, or who never had a mystical glimpse or a religious experience, or who never lived through anything paranormal such as an out-of-body experience or an experience of pre-cognition.

This is not the place to try to explain the differences between mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences, intuitions, intimations, visitations and vouchsafings  that religious types speak of.  But let me give a couple of examples of religious experiences, which I distinguish on the one hand from mystical experiences and on the other from paranormal experiences. 

One day many years ago I was pacing around  in an extremely agitated frame of mind over a matter that I won't go into.  But suffice it to say that my mind and heart were filled with extremely negative thoughts and desires.  Suddenly, without any forethought, I raised my arms to the ceiling and exclaimed, "Release me from this!"  In an instant I was as calm as a Stoic sage, as quiescent as a Quietist.  The roiling burden was lifted.  I was at peace.  I want to stress that that I had had no intention to pray.  The whole episode transpired spontaneously.  Now what happened?  Phenomenologically, my unintended, spontaneous prayer resulted in a state of blissful calm.  Does that unforgettable experience prove that a Higher Power hears and grants some of our heart-felt requests?  No, for the simple reason that no (outer) experience proves anything.  My current visual experiences of this computer do not prove its existence.  But the religious experience, while not probative, is nonetheless evidence of something Transcendent. If you have had such experiences you may be inclined to think that they carry a lot more weight than abstract reasoning from questionable premises.

On another occasion, while deep in meditation, I had an experience of — or an experience  as of, to put the point with pedantic epistemological caution — being the object of Someone's love.  "I am being loved by some unknown person" was my thought during the experience. That's what it felt like. I was alone sitting in the dark on the black mat.     It was an unmistakable experience, but still only an experience.  A brain fart you say?  A random neuronal swerve?  Could be, but then our ordinary mundane experiences could be random brain events too — only more coherent and protracted.

There are those who simply dismiss experiences like these.  That is a strange attitude, at once unempirical and dogmatically rationalistic.  See

The experience cited is a bit of evidence that I add to the other bits of experiential evidence such as a deep sense of the superficiality of ordinary human relations, and of the relative unreality and unimportance of this impermanent world.  Without experiences like these Plato, Augustine, Pascal, Simone Weil and so many others could not have written what they wrote.

3. The Arguments for Theism

And then there are the dozens of arguments for theism which, taken together, make a strong cumulative case for theism's truth especially in tandem with the refutation of the atheistic arguments. This is not the place to rehearse them.

4. Conclusion

Now add it all together: the manifold inadequacies and outright absurdities of the naturalist/materialist/reductionist Weltanschauung, the wide variety of mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences, the deliverances of conscience, the testimony of beauty and order and purposiveness, and the rest of the intuitions, intimations and sensings, including those of demonic agency, the refutations of atheism and the arguments for theism — add this all together, take it as a big cumulative case, and its just might take someone who has the religious disposition over the line into a living belief.

And THEN, and only then, comes the capstone that clinches it for someone like me:  "So how can I lose? Even if God and the soul turn out to be illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."   I am assuming that one lives in a land in which religious liberty is respected. The costs incurred will then not be worth mentioning.