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Is Theistic Experience Phenomenologically Possible?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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William Forgie's negative conclusion concerning the possibility of theistic experience in particular turns on a sophisticated, if idiosyncratic, phenomenology of experience in general. Forgie introduces us to his position by having us imagine two people, Tim and Tom Tibbetts. He then asks us to suppose that Tim and Tom are identical twins who live next door. Imagine that looking over the fence one fine sunny day you have what you take to be a veridical visual experience of someone who looks like one of the Tibbetts. If you were required to rely solely on the content of your experience, says Forgie, and not on any extra-experiential information to which you may be privy (e.g. you know Tom is away at aunt Millie's), there would be no way to identify the object of your experience as Tim, rather than Tom, Tibbetts. An experience of one would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from an experience of the other and there would be, therefore, nothing in the experience itself which guarantees that it's Tim, rather than Tom.
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References
1 Forgie, ‘Theistic Experience’, p. 16.
2 It is interesting to note in this regard that Forgie takes the omniproperties classically attributed to God to be not uniquely instantiable properties some individual, A, may exemplify them in this world but some other individual, B, numerically distinct from A, may instantiate these properties in another possible world. This assumes two things, of course. First, it assumes that God does not possess these properties essentially. Second, it assumes that God is not a necessary being such that God exists at every possible world. If God is a necessary being and, further, if God does possess the properties in question essentially, i.e., God possesses these properties at every possible world at which God exists, which, if God is a necessary being, is every possible world, then it would be impossible for numerically distinct individuals to exemplify these properties in different possible worlds. For example, if one's idea of God is that of an essentially omnipotent and necessarily existing being, and one believes, as seems eminently plausible, that there cannot simultaneously be two omnipotent beings, then being omnipotent is a uniquely instantiable property of God's, if God exists. That God does not possess the omni-properties essentially and does not exist necessarily are suppressed premises in Forgie's argument.
3 Throughout the course of this paper I will mean by the term ‘veridical’ what I understand Forgie and Pike to mean in their use of it, namely, an experience is understood by them to be veridical if that experience is of an actually existing object in the external world and is not a hallucinatory or otherwise illusory experience. Thus, to answer the question ‘Was the experience of the Tiger a veridical experience?’ is not to answer the question ‘Was the experience of a Tiger?’
4 I have run the argument for individuals. One can run the same argument replacing individuals with kinds of things (e.g. a tiger or a coffee maker) or something's possessing property F.
5 Forgie extends his argument to include the case where ‘God’ is construed as an abbreviated definite description. Forgie denies the possibility of an experience being phenomenologically of something exemplifying the kinds of properties classically attributed to God, since the manifestation of these properties involves agency and agency involves causation which, as we learned from Hume, is never an item on an inventory of phenomenological content of any experience. Thus, even if what I say in note 4 is true about omnipotence being a uniquely instantiable property of God's, Forgie would still deny that that propery could ever be part of the phenomenological content of any experience.
6 See Stace's, W. T.Mysticism and Philosophy (J. P. Tarcher, Inc./St. Martin's Press, 1960), pp. 41–133.Google Scholar
7 Smart, Ninian, ‘Interpretation and Mystical Experience’, Religious Studies I (1965), pp. 75–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Pike, p. 139.
9 Pike, p. 140.
10 Pike, p. 140.
11 Pike, p. 143. Pike distinguishes between that which is ‘given’ in a perceptual experience from that which he calls the ‘discernible given’. The given, Pike tells us, ‘is that which is, as we say, directly or immediately presented’. The discernible given is ‘that which would be discerned in an act of reflection as having been ‘given’ in some specific perception’ (p. 142). The difference between that which is perceived in an act of reflection as having been given and the discernible given is that the former is derived inferentially whereas the latter, as Pike has it, is not; it is given coterminous with the perception.
12 Pike, p. 145.
13 Pike, p. 145.
14 See The life of Teresa of Jesus, trans. and ed. Peers, E. Allen (Image Books Doubleday, 1991), p. 249.Google Scholar
15 Teresa, p. 249.
16 Pike, p. 146.
17 Pike, p. 152.
18 Pike, p. 117.
19 Pike, p. 117.
20 Pike, p. 145.
21 Pike, p. 145.
22 Forgie, William, ‘Pike's Mystic Union and The Possibility of Theistic Experience’, Religious Studies, 30 (1994), pp. 231–242CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 Forgie, ‘Pike's Mystic Union’, p. 238 (italics mine).
24 Forgie, ‘Pike's Mystic Union’, p. 237.
25 Forgie, ‘Pike's Mystic Union,’ p. 239.
26 We might also imagine the less bizarre case of someone's being phenomenologically aware of (an) X, but because of inattention or distraction she misidentifies (the) X as (a) Y, where ‘Y’ is nevertheless given coterminously with the experience.
27 Note here that we are concerned with whether the identification corresponds with the phenomenological object and not whether the phenomenological object corresponds to the actual object. These are two distinct issues and I will discuss the latter issue in due course.
28 We should also add the further constraint that the experient be attending to the matter with sufficient care, since if she isn't, it will matter little that her cognitive equipment is functioning properly and her conceptual repetoire is adequate to the perceptual task. I will assume in what follows that this constraint is met where the others are met also.
29 Note that Forgie does not claim to have proved that God is never the (actual) object of one's experience, nor that one has failed to fulfill one's epistemic obligations if one claims to have perceived God. Forgie's claim is that no experience can be phenomenologically of God, just as no experience can be phenomenologically of Tim Tibbetts or a coffee maker.
30 Forgie, ‘Pike's Mystic Union’, p. 239
31 Forgie, ‘Theistic Experience’, p. 17.
32 Such instances are comparatively few, however. See Beardsworth, Timothy, A Sense of Presence (Oxford, 1977), pp. 30–31 and 113–114.Google Scholar
33 See his Perceiving God (Cornell, 1991), p. 19.
34 I wish to acknowledge the help and support of William Rowe, who read earlier drafts of this paper and provided many useful comments. I also wish to thank Melanie Baker and Bruce Dutra, both of whom discussed with me many of the issues considered in this paper. Ancestors of this paper were read to the 1994 Indiana Philosophical Association's Spring meeting at Depauw University and the 1995 regional conference of The Society of Christian Philosphers held at Bethel College. I'd like to thank participants at those meetings for forcing me to clarify just how theistic experience might be construed along perceptual lines.