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Religious Experience, Sense-perception and God's Essential Unobservability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert Oakes
Robert Oakes
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri–Rolla
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Extract

While many philosophical theists have maintained (correctly or not) that there are data accessible to sense-perception – e.g., the ‘orderly processes of nature’, loving and benevolent human actions – which constitute evidence for the existence of God, it seems unproblematic that there could not conceivably occur sense-perceptions of God. Rather, the properties being God and being sense-perceivable are incompatible, i.e., are such that it is inconceivable for there to exist something which coexemplifies them. This being so, it is nothing short of a necessary truth that if God exists, he is unobservable. In what follows, I shall often express this point in the language of necessity de re by noting that being unobservable is a property that God has essentially; for those at home with ‘possible-world’ semantics, this amounts to the claim that being unobservable is a property that God exemplifies at every possible-world at which he exists. One might reasonably account for this, of course, in terms of God's incorporeality; for it seems unproblemetic that being incorporeal is also a property that God has essentially, and that the function ‘X is incorporeal’ entails the function ‘X is unobservable’. Hence, since ‘If God exists, he is incorporeal’ expresses a necessary truth, it should be intuitively clear that the proposition expressed by ‘If God exists, he is unobservable’ is also a necessary truth.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , September 1981 , pp. 357 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

page 357 note 1 This fundamental doctrine surfaces often (albeit metaphorically) in Scripture. In Exod. 33:20, for example, the Lord says ‘You shall not see my face; for man shall not see me and live.’ Moving up a bit to 33:23, we find ‘ …and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York, 1972)Google Scholar contains the following comment on Exodus 33: 23: ‘Although employing bold anthropomorphisms (the Lord's hand and back), the story stresses that God remains hidden even when he manifests his presence’ (p. 112).

page 357 note 2 Philosophical theists within the classical Judeo-Christian tradition tend to give considerable emphasis to this point. As put, for example, by Thomas, St: ‘In no sense is God a body…’ (Summa Theologica Part 1, W. 3, Art. 1, Reply).Google Scholar For what it is worth, I fail to see how there could be incorporeal objects which were incorporeal accidentally (non -essentially).On the contrary, it seems to me that being incorporeal is a property which must be had essentially if had at all. We need not, of course, attempt to resolve that question here.

page 358 note 1 Nielsen, Kai, ‘God and Postulated Entities’, The Southern journal of Philosophy (1974), pp. 225–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 359 note 1 Clearly, this presupposes that ‘God exists’ (simpliciter) expresses a logically possible proposition. If that is mistaken, then (obviously) my thesis fails. So far as I can tell, however, there is no plausible argument in the corpus of literature in philosophical theology for the view that it is logically impossible for theism to be true. That has not, of course, prevented a number of philosophers from holding just such a view.

page 360 note 1 See James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902; renewed 1929), p. 397.Google Scholar

page 360 note 2 Stace, W. T., Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia, 1960), p. 49.Google Scholar

page 360 note 3 Ibid.

page 360 note 4 The Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, translated and edited with an Introduction by Peers, E. Allison (New York, 1960), p. 260.Google Scholar

page 360 note 5 Ascent of Mount Carmel, translated and edited, with a General Introduction by Peers, E. Allison (New York, 1958), p. 245.Google Scholar

page 360 note 6 Tooley, Michael, ‘John Hick and the Concept of Eschatological Verification’, Religious Studies XII (1976), p. 190.Google Scholar

page 361 note 1 Barclay, William, The Mind of St Paul (New York, 1975), p. 36.Google Scholar

page 361 note 2 Someone (N) perceives something (O) ‘epistemically’ at time t if and only if N perceives O at t and knows (at t) that he is perceiving O at that time. Clearly, then, anyone who sees that the object of his perception is the (setting) sun thereby has (since seeing-that is logically sufficient for knowing-that) an epistemic visual perception of the (setting) sun. Epistemic perceiving, then, is always (as opposed to perceiving- simpliciter) ‘intensional’. Chisholm terms perceivings of this sort ‘propositional’ (cf. his Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 10).Google Scholar In what follows, I shall often use ‘perceiving’ (or ‘perception’) as short for ‘epistemic perciving’ (or ‘epistemic perception’).

page 362 note 1 While the visual sense might be the most illuminating to work with in terms of my thesis (and in general), I do not mean to suggest that any sensory detections of God's presence (if there are any) would have to be visual detections. For example, I think that it is perfectly conceivable for there to occur audial detections of God's presence. Indeed, the literature contains interesting examples of putative religious experiences that lend themselves to just such analysis; for instance, see Mavrodes, George I., Belief in God (New York, 1970), pp. 67–69.Google Scholar

page 362 note 2 This example is very similar to the one employed by Fred Dretske in his very fine paper ‘Perception and Other Minds’, Nous (1973), pp. 34–44.Google Scholar In that paper, he attempts to show (with complete success, I believe) that the so-called ‘other minds’ problem is bogus. I am indebted to Dretske insofar as the thesis which I am defending has drawn more than a little of its inspiration from his argument.

page 366 note 1 See Mavrodes, , op. cit. p. 53.Google Scholar

page 367 note 1 In my paper ‘Religious Experience, Self-Authentication, and Modality De Re: A Prolegomenon’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XVI (1979), pp. 217–224.Google Scholar