- The boy: "Daddy… Mommy's home!"
- Dad: "No she's not, she went to the doctor, then to a friend's house."
- The boy: "No daddy, mommy IS home."
- Dad: "Alex I already told you she is not."
- The boy: "No she IS."
- Dad: "Let's go to the garage and look for her car. Is mommy's car there?"
- The boy: "Nooooo."
- Dad: "Did mommy drive her car away?"
- The boy: "Yeeeesss."
- Dad: "So is mommy home?"
- The boy (grinning): "Nooooo."
- Dad: "Want chicken and peas for dinner tonight?"
- The boy: "YEAH!"
I use this dialogue to illustrate a major disconnect between those who believe in God and atheists. My son was a true believer. He had no evidence that mom was home other than perhaps something that he heard or something else that he perceived that he had mistaken for my wife's car or the sound of the car door slamming. I was the skeptic. The evidence that satisfied his understanding of things to suggest that mom was home was not really evidence that pointed in that direction at all – but some other direction. I had to show him that mom was indeed not home because her car was not there. The he was OK with it.
Christians do not understand why atheists ask for evidence so much and this is why. There is simply no shared experience that legitimates an atheist apprehension of the world as being something related to cosmic presence called God. They want Christians to show them that there is indeed a "car in our garage" that offers substantial evidence that the God who was once here is still there or coming back "soon". But Christians cannot provide them with such evidence. The only evidence as such is an empty tomb. The evidence must be a shared experience. Therefore existence precedes experience for the atheist.
Here is the difference. My son still had a hope that mom would come back. Even though I proved to him that mom was not home, he trusted me at that point that mom would be back home. It is his experience with his mother that informed and legitimated that conclusion. Without an experience of God of some kind, it becomes quite difficult to legitimate that there is a God at all. Therefore, for the Christian, experience precedes existence.
Apologetics seeks to found the reasonableness of faith sans experience. Hence apologetics fails. It seeks to do something that it cannot – ground the facticity of a being that has not been experienced by the doubter. Arguing for God's existence is therefore experiential. My son's hope and trust that mom would come back home to be with him – even if he learned by evidence that mom was not there right now – was grounded first in his life with his mother. The experience of the relationship is what grounds her existence. This is a pretheoretical legitimation. As Peter Berger notes in The Sacred Canopy:
If legitimation had to consist of theoretically coherent propositions, it would support the social order only for that minority of intellectuals that have such theoretical interests – obviously not a very practical program. Most legitimation, consequently, is pretheoretical in character (p.30).
This is why theoretical legitimations of God's existence drill down to absurdities and have atheists arguing on theoretical grounds alone licking their chops. And they should be licking their chops. Such arguments from the side of Christianity not only will ultimately fail, they will also miss the facticity of God's existence which is irreducibly grounded in their experience of God in a pretheoretical relationship.
Thus the inquiry:
Can one be a Christian without some experience of God to ground one's belief?
No related posts.
Do you think it is too much of a jump to try to take an atheist from belief in no god to belief in god? I think maybe intermittent steps might be good, like first trying to show evidence that there is a spiritual reality or something more than just the material world that you can test in a lab.
Then I guess the next question might be what would constitute evidence for the spiritual. The miraculous maybe, or ghost or spirits or even the demonic. From then I don't know that you can prove God's existence but you may be able to push them towards faith in a god or gods, and then maybe to monotheism and then possibly even Christianity.
What do you think? Either way I think it might be too much to ask to prove God to an atheist but maybe you can push them in that direction so that eventually they decide to make the step of faith.
Blessings,
Bryan
BTW your last question is one that I was asking the other day. Personally I don't think that I would be a Christian (at least not in any committed sense) were it not for experience. You?
Anecdotally, it seems that religious conversion is a fairly quick and emotional process. Those who have gone the other way, lost their faith, and become atheists typically report it as being a long and intellectual process. Of course, I'm not experienced in this area, so those are just my impressions.
"What would constitute evidence for the spiritual. The miraculous maybe…" Take it from me, the miraculous makes no impression whatsoever at all on those of us who are post-theoretical atheists! If that works, you were not really there to begin with! See Hume for a (theoretical) explanation.
Whatever the "experience" is, I imagine it to be internal, subjective and personal, and not really like what the typical secular skeptic would count as "experience" at all.
But I'm merely speculating.
Do you think it is too much of a jump to try to take an atheist from belief in no god to belief in god? I think maybe intermittent steps might be good, like first trying to show evidence that there is a spiritual reality or something more than just the material world that you can test in a lab.
Then I guess the next question might be what would constitute evidence for the spiritual. The miraculous maybe, or ghost or spirits or even the demonic. From then I don't know that you can prove God's existence but you may be able to push them towards faith in a god or gods, and then maybe to monotheism and then possibly even Christianity.
What do you think? Either way I think it might be too much to ask to prove God to an atheist but maybe you can push them in that direction so that eventually they decide to make the step of faith.
Blessings,
Bryan
BTW your last question is one that I was asking the other day. Personally I don't think that I would be a Christian (at least not in any committed sense) were it not for experience. You?
Anecdotally, it seems that religious conversion is a fairly quick and emotional process. Those who have gone the other way, lost their faith, and become atheists typically report it as being a long and intellectual process. Of course, I'm not experienced in this area, so those are just my impressions.
"What would constitute evidence for the spiritual. The miraculous maybe…" Take it from me, the miraculous makes no impression whatsoever at all on those of us who are post-theoretical atheists! If that works, you were not really there to begin with! See Hume for a (theoretical) explanation.
Whatever the "experience" is, I imagine it to be internal, subjective and personal, and not really like what the typical secular skeptic would count as "experience" at all.
But I'm merely speculating.
Bryan if what I am proposing is true, this is what follows:
In order for me, if I have no desire to believe in anything even like God, to believe in God or something like God, there must be reasonable evidence to lead me to believe that this is true. This evidence must be as reasonable as my son believing that his mom is not home because the car is not in the driveway. Because she drives that car most of the time in his experience and I was home with him and not driving it, it was reasonable for him to believe that she was not home at that point. The point here is that it was his experience of his mother that legitimated that belief.
So, if I have had no experience of God and I do not particularly desire it, I might not give a damn about the evidence of this God you propose to exist. In fact, I reasonably think that the evidence that you give for your God must be something else that you are not willing to observe. If you were a reasonable person, you would understand this and see that there is no car in your garage so to speak.
So in order for me to have an experience of God, must I believe it first? That is the absurdity that apologetics ignores and that atheists have no real reason to accept as simply true. In other words, there is nothing in their experience to legitimate the claim of belief in the case of God.
To Alan, I think it is a misconception that conversion must be sudden and almost miraculous if you will. This can happen, as Bryan indicates, in a gradual manner. Conversion is literally a "turning from" something in a new orientation. And this is something that can happen quite gradually. We just hear about all of those "mountaintop" experiences because they are certainly more sensational.
To both, I do think that any evidence of anything that exists including God, must be seated in what Berger calls a "plausibility structure" rooted in our experience to legitimate it. If there is no regulative norm in our experience to suggest that something might be true, then there is no structure to hold that belief's plausibility. Therefore, belief in God must be rooted in experience conditioned by such a structure. This is what some will confuse with delusional behavior, but if the experience within that structure is with an objective existent, it most certainly is not.
Bryan if what I am proposing is true, this is what follows:
In order for me, if I have no desire to believe in anything even like God, to believe in God or something like God, there must be reasonable evidence to lead me to believe that this is true. This evidence must be as reasonable as my son believing that his mom is not home because the car is not in the driveway. Because she drives that car most of the time in his experience and I was home with him and not driving it, it was reasonable for him to believe that she was not home at that point. The point here is that it was his experience of his mother that legitimated that belief.
So, if I have had no experience of God and I do not particularly desire it, I might not give a damn about the evidence of this God you propose to exist. In fact, I reasonably think that the evidence that you give for your God must be something else that you are not willing to observe. If you were a reasonable person, you would understand this and see that there is no car in your garage so to speak.
So in order for me to have an experience of God, must I believe it first? That is the absurdity that apologetics ignores and that atheists have no real reason to accept as simply true. In other words, there is nothing in their experience to legitimate the claim of belief in the case of God.
To Alan, I think it is a misconception that conversion must be sudden and almost miraculous if you will. This can happen, as Bryan indicates, in a gradual manner. Conversion is literally a "turning from" something in a new orientation. And this is something that can happen quite gradually. We just hear about all of those "mountaintop" experiences because they are certainly more sensational.
To both, I do think that any evidence of anything that exists including God, must be seated in what Berger calls a "plausibility structure" rooted in our experience to legitimate it. If there is no regulative norm in our experience to suggest that something might be true, then there is no structure to hold that belief's plausibility. Therefore, belief in God must be rooted in experience conditioned by such a structure. This is what some will confuse with delusional behavior, but if the experience within that structure is with an objective existent, it most certainly is not.
I don't have a doubt that you are right about conversion, since I don't have much experience in this area. Whatever makes a good story is the story that gets told.
I don't have a doubt that you are right about conversion, since I don't have much experience in this area. Whatever makes a good story is the story that gets told.
My Atheist take on this for what its worth is that for the Theist it works as follows;
Psychological need leads to a need to believe which leads to experience (think placebo here) which leads to the assumption of existence.
Best Wishes
Oh and I just spotted this in the comments;
"Anecdotally, it seems that religious conversion is a fairly quick and emotional process. Those who have gone the other way, lost their faith, and become atheists typically report it as being a long and intellectual process."
Which kind of supports my last comment don't you think?
Which assumes that all who have a religious experience have a psychological shortcoming to necessitate that. Seems rather shoddy.
My Atheist take on this for what its worth is that for the Theist it works as follows;
Psychological need leads to a need to believe which leads to experience (think placebo here) which leads to the assumption of existence.
Best Wishes
Oh and I just spotted this in the comments;
"Anecdotally, it seems that religious conversion is a fairly quick and emotional process. Those who have gone the other way, lost their faith, and become atheists typically report it as being a long and intellectual process."
Which kind of supports my last comment don't you think?
Which assumes that all who have a religious experience have a psychological shortcoming to necessitate that. Seems rather shoddy.