Skilled perception and mystical percepion

For the last installment of my featured author blog series on skilled perception, I'd like to focus on the question of mystical perception. How do religious believers come to perceive religious beings such as God? If such perceptions are the result of skilled perception - as I will argue - what follows for the justification of religious beliefs formed on the basis of religious perception? 

Authors like Swinburne and Alston have argued that religious experience provides positive justification for religious belief. Religious experience, so they assume, is analogous to sense perception. Given that sense perception has a strong evidential force, religious experience too has a strong evidential force.For Swinburne (2004) it is rational to adopt what he terms the principle of credulity: if it seems epistemically that x is present, then probably x is present.

In the light of recent psychology of religion, we need to revisit this analogy between religious experience and ordinary perception. Alston, Swinburne and many others rely on William James' highly readable but by now quite dated account of religious experience in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Anthropologists, such as Tanya Luhrmann found that religious experience is rarely a spontaneous matter. American evangelicals typically engage in a lot of deliberate practice before they can hear God 'speaking' to them inside their minds: 

One of the first things a person must master at a church like the Vineyard is to recognize when God is present and when he responds ... Newcomers soon learn that God is understood to speak to congregants inside their own minds. They learn that someone who worships God at the Vineyard must develop the ability to recognize thoughts in their mind that are in fact not their thoughts, but God’s. They learn that this is a skill they must master (Luhrmann, 2012 When God talks back, 39).

What does this deliberate practice consist of? A variety of things, including pretend play, where one imagines one is having a cup of tea with God, lots of prayer, both in group and alone, praying while focusing on an object, such as a candle, and extensive bible study. 

It is the same in other religious traditions: people use techniques such as meditation, ingest mind-altering substances, pray extensively, before they get any sort of religious experience. Take, as another example, Teresa of Avila. This 16th century Catholic nun had very sensuous religious experiences (inspiring the sculpture by Bernini in the picture), and her writings are cited - out of their context - by Alston and colleagues to draw attention to the immediacy of her mystical perception. However, in her works The way of perfection and The interior Castle she places a great emphasis on spiritual practices. Mystical perception would thus be more like art connoisseurship, birding or other such skilled epistemic practices than ordinary perception.

How do we know whether mystical perception tracks truth? A standard way to justify reliance on religious experiences is a Reidian defense, which relies heavily on an analogy with sense perception. If we do not trust our ordinary senses, we end up in a skeptical bog. Since religious experience is like sense perception, we are reasonable to trust its outputs as well. However, if the analogy with ordinary perception breaks down, so does the justification.

I have argued that skilled epistemic practices confer prima facie justification, but not in the same way as ordinary perception. Specifically, I have argued that if you have no higher order evidence about whether the skill is tracking truths, you are justified to place prima facie trust in the practice being a truth-tracking one. For one thing, the skill is socially acquired, but the chance that one's teacher is a fraud is very low (see my previous post for detailed defense of this claim). 

However, for mystical perception we do have higher-order evidence, for instance in the reports of people who have the experiences. In this respect, I think mystical perception fares worse than, for instance, scientific perception. Unlike with scientific practices and art connoisseurship, there is little convergence between religious experts from different religious traditions.

Religious skilled epistemic practices from each community give rise to mutually incompatible beliefs. Take, for instance, Shinto priest Yamakage explains how one can acquire a sensitivity to the presence of Kami by preparing a sacred space appropriately, and by training oneself to be aware for signs of their presence, to communicate with them, and to coax them into a shrine. The expert in this field is the kannushi, a man or woman who knows the proper ways to approach Kami and to make them feel welcome. With an expert kannushi leading a Shinto ceremony, one feels “awe-struck in front of the shrine and we feel that Kami is truly present” (Yamakage, 2012 Essence of Shinto, 76). Again, while attending a ceremony presided by a kannushi, a Christian might experience solemnity and awe, but likely she will not feel the presence of Kami.

There are several ways one may account for the disparities in religious experiences. One obvious explanation is that all religious experiences are false, deceptions brought about by normal neurological processes. Another is a full-blown form of religious pluralism, where saints, the Triune God, Kami, witches, are on an ontological par. Or perhaps religious experiences in different cultures may all point to some transcendent reality, and capture something about what that transcendent reality is. On a more exclusivist reading, some interpretations of religious experiences might be mistaken. For instance, when a Shinto priest feels the presence of Kami he might really be feeling the presence of God, but misinterpret his experiences. It might be that only some religious experiences are genuine.

All these interpretations challenge the reasonableness of reliance on mystical perception to make claims about religious entities. Parochially, within traditions, there are religious experts whose mystical experiences are regarded as meaningful.  However, analytic philosophers of religion do not engage with this local, parochial level. I would venture that few are radical social constructivists, according to which our perception of reality is radically shaped by cultural practices. For this reason, within analytic philosophy of religion, which aims to make universal claims about religion, invoking mystical perception as a source of justification for religious claims is problematic. [note: I have been thinking a lot about this issue, and here is an earlier version of thoughts about this.]

Comments

[Elisa Freschi]

Thank you, Helen, this last post makes all the previous ones even more interesting. By the way, the Sanskrit texts about expert perception we discussed in connection with those posts also end up discussing intellectual intuition of religious truths. For instance, the Buddhists may argue that like a trained jeweler sees more than a normal person in a gem, so a practitioner will be able to directly perceive the Four Noble Truths. The Mīmāṃsakas answer with some variations of "no matter how long you practice, you will never be able to jump until the moon, nor to enlarge the precinct of application of the sense-faculties beyond what is sense-perceivable". To which the Buddhists react that the moon example is not suitable, since in the case of the moon one does not accummulate progress (at each jump, one starts again from the ground), which is not the case with Buddhist practice (see Sarah McClintock's Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason).

Coming back to your initial query, a possible charitative answer (which you probably also hint at) is that the content of the religious experience is right (e.g., "experience of something other than myself who gets in touch with me"), but that the intellectual interpretation of it as "The Virgin Mary appeared to me" is wrong and is a conceptual overimposition in which one fails to distinguish between perceptual (the experience of otherness) and remembered (the image of the Virgin Mary with a blue mantle one has so often seen).

[TM Luhrmann]

So cool that you are tackling this issue. I would make two comments. First, while the training is important, the more dramatic experiences are spontaneous--even though training makes them more likely. Second, the more dramatic experiences are, in fact, similar. I think one can still make an ontological defense the way William James did. To do so you do need to jettison what he called "over beliefs"--that it is, in fact, the Virgin Mary. You can avoid the jettison if you add an argument for why some forms of belief are more likely to be true than others. Scholars like Justin Barrett of course use CSR to make the claim that monotheisms, big gods or even just Christianity are better matches for the way the mind has evolved.

Interesting post.

[Helen De Cruz]

Thanks for your responses!

Elisa, I would think that the charitable answer you provide (and I hint at) might be the best response for the person who wants to defend some epistemic value of religious experiences - it would be compatible with the human shortcomings we have, and the continued emphasis of mystics on being careful about interpretation (Teresa of Avila worries a lot about this). Still, it would mean that we need to rethink classic Alstonian or Swinburne-type defenses, since according to these epistemologists we can know a great deal based on religious experience, whereas this would caution us in our interpretations

[Helen De Cruz]

[In response to TM Luhrmann's comment] Thank you for responding - I have been thinking about the spontaneity of the religious experiences, and it seems that they are perfectly compatible with training. Just like training tends help make other spontaneous experiences happen, so does religious experience. But while the phenomenology of what I call skilled perception and ordinary perception is quite similar, the developmental pathway of how you get there are quite distinct in a way that I think matters for the justification of these beliefs. Take the difference between an ordinary perceiver, who sees a bird in the sky, and a skilled perceiver (birder), who sees a buzzard in the sky. I agree that there is a basic phenomenological component, and a more interpretive component (i.e., there is a buzzard, because of the shape of the wings, the environment; similarly, the sweet voice I am hearing is Mary, because I asked her previously for help, it seems to accord with my ideas about Mary, etc).

I am intrigued (but remain unconvinced) by Justin Barrett's claim that we are disposed to monotheisms, or even to Christianity. In the absence of a good argument for why one's interpretation of the religious experience is valid, it seems to me that the incompatibility of religious experiences across different traditions poses a problem for justifying religious beliefs on the basis of such experiences.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Helen: super-interesting post! I was thinking that one thing you might want to investigate (if you haven't already) is whether skilled religious perception has any relation to skilled perception of other not-straightforwardly-religious things--for instance, skilled perception of kindness, humility, love, empathy, etc. My feeling is that there may be some really interesting connections here.

[anarchris]

There's no part of infinity that's finite. so if you're 'hearing voices', it's not that of the eternal infinite.
i can't tell you the truth-but i can lie to you.
logic and reason cannot show us the truth but they can show us what is not true and thereby process of elimination reveal what must be true.
the mystic is the one who makes no distinction between human history and natural history.

[Helen De Cruz]

Marcus: I know that ancient philosophers drew a close connection between skill and virtues (Aristotle, for instance), but I would be very interested in hearing more about this - both by contemporary and non-contemporary philosophers. If you have any reading suggestions that would be helpful (I'm thinking of looking at how the approach outlined in this series of posts can be developed into virtue-epistemological terms).