Reason and Religious Experience

A review of Knowing With the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God by Roy Clouser (Downers Gove: Intervarsity Press, 1999)

One of the most difficult things, for me, about being both an Evangelical Christian and a philosopher is articulating the significance of both reason and experience in my life. In my explanation of why I am a Christian I even made a few statements that I felt somewhat uneasy about, because I know that they could be used as points on which to criticize or reject my self-explanation. The difficulty is that saying belief has to be based in some way on experience seems to make it irrational. This can motivate educated people to reject faith, and people of faith to reject rational argumentation.

It should be obvious that I don’t want to be susceptible to either kind of rejection. I insisted in the earlier post that my adherence to orthodox, historical Christianity is a rational conclusion, but also that it is dependent on experience. I even wrote that the experience necessary for being a Christian “can be described in terms of self-knowledge.” What I was suggesting is that the important thing about experience is its result. The quality of the experience, what it feels like, is not important, but what matters is that it produces a new awareness, a new certainty. This certainty can be supported by rational arguments, but cannot be produced by rational arguments. Faith is never the result simply of an argument, though good reasons can pre-dispose one to faith.

What I have struggled to express about reason and experience is given brilliant exposition by Roy Clouser in his book, Knowing With the Heart. The book is written as a dialogue between himself and a religious skeptic who adheres to a vaguely Darwinist or materialist view of the world. (The interlocutor is probably a composite of the many students Clouser has had in his philosophy courses at The College of New Jersey.) Clouser breaks down the issue piece by piece, with chapters covering the meaning of religion, religious experience, certainty and belief in God. Two final chapters give responses to objections, and clarifications. The strength of the book is in the first four chapters; I disagree with certain portions of the last two.

The first point to Clouser’s argument is that we must understand religion as one’s belief about what is independently real (i.e. self-existent, non-dependent). Popular understandings of religion as active worship or beliefs about God or a higher being do not get at what is essential. These popular understandings are the result of our Judeo-Christian cultural background, and they fail to describe some of the world’s major religions (such as Buddhism). What all religions have in common is the claim that some thing “just is,” and is the source of everything else. Clouser cites a number of philosophers and theologians who have come to this conclusion about the meaning of “religion”—including Plato, Aristotle, William James, Herman Dooyeweerd, Paul Tillich, and C. S. Lewis. However, he applies this insight in a way that goes beyond most of them (except Dooyeweerd, whom he follows) when he draws the conclusion that many beliefs that claim not to be religious are, in fact, religious, in spite of what their adherents want to think. For example, the materialist conviction that matter is the source and explanation of everything, is a religious belief, despite materialists’ lack of worship or belief in a personal divinity.

Moving to religious experience, Clouser says that any experience that produces, confirms or deepens a belief about what is independently real, is religious experience. He discusses many kinds of religious experience, mostly following William James’ classic work, Varieties of Religious Experience. However, he stresses a feature of such experiences that James only notes in passing: that all such experiences have the quality of certainty. This is what I was putting my finger on when I discussed experience in terms of the knowledge produced by it. Christian religious experience produces certainty about the person of Jesus Christ and the divine origin of the Bible. Whether “chairs fly around the room,” or we seem to hear a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13) is not important. In fact, most religious experience is probably the everyday experience of feeling that a certain way of looking at things must be correct. Again, what makes the experience religious is that the certainty attaches to the independent (i.e. divine) status of the object.

The third and fourth chapters deal with the whole question of certainty and the status of belief in God. Another way to describe an experience that has the “quality of certainty” is to say that its object is self-evident. Clouser argues that belief in God is, properly speaking, self-evident to true believers. Indeed, he claims that it is no less self-evident than the axiom of equals, which is the principle that two things equal to a third thing are equal to each other. To back up this claim, he addresses the nature of self-evidence.

First of all, he says, some things we know must be self-evident, because in order to prove anything by argument, we have to have some knowledge to start with. So we cannot pretend that all knowledge is justified by argument. Some knowledge is justified simply by appearing to be true. That is not to say that it appears true equally to all observers, for it can take training and repeated exposure to see that such things as the axioms of geometry must be true. It is also not to say that contradictory things cannot appear to be true to different people. Actually, this is often the case. The conclusion to draw, however, is not that controversial things cannot really be self-evident, but rather, that knowledge is not necessarily true. Clouser, along with other contemporary philosophers, rejects the traditional philosophical definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” He instead uses “knowledge” in the everyday sense that we “know” things we have no reason to doubt. The upshot is that believers can be said to know Jesus Christ to be the Son of God on the same basis that a logician knows the axiom of equals, or that we all know the sun to be warm. Christian faith is knowledge, as the best theologians have always maintained.

This leads to an important distinction, between true religious believers, to whom the reality and divine status of their God is self-evident, and religious “fellow travelers” who are only loyal to a way of life, an institution or group of people. Clouser makes the insightful observation that

without the intuition of self-evidency, their “belief” is still mere acceptance, and only adds up to a hope that the belief may be true. Thus, when they are pressed about the truth of their religious belief, fellow travelers usually say something like, “Well, no one can really know that sort of thing.”

This description fits my own experience, and, I suggest, largely accounts for the difference between evangelical and other forms of Christianity. Fellow travelers can be intense in their loyalty and very hard-working, but they may also regard true believers with a mixture of jealousy, disdain and suspicion, and persecute them (the Bible is full of examples of this, as is our modern society).

It follows from Clouser’s approach that the only way to find out if a religion is true is to put oneself in the position where one is likely to have the experience of its truth. For Christianity, this means spending time with other Christians, attending church services, and reading the Bible and theologies. It is important to engage in these things with a genuine openness to the possibility that God could reveal himself through them. If we do them only out of loyalty or duty, we may experience a feeling that we are doing good, but we cannot experience the religious truth. Likewise, if rational arguments convince us that a particular religion could not possibly be true, then we cannot put ourselves in a position to have the experience of its truth. Rational arguments of the latter sort are the subject of Clouser’s fifth chapter, and also of Christian apologetics in general. I shall not delve into them here; that would best be left for another post.

In conclusion, I have found Clouser’s book to be very helpful. There is a lot to think about in what he says. It challenges the dominant way of thinking of our society, but it makes sense of things that otherwise do not have a clear explanation. I disagree with Clouser’s handling of evolution and universalism in chapters five and six, but these are beside the main point of the book. Christian faith is fully rational and dependent upon experience.