- We can outright deny the claim. Say the person who experienced the divine is lying or delusional. This is obviously problematic. Billions of people have claims of experiencing the divine, it seems unlikely that all are lying or deluded. Not impossible, certainly, but unlikely.
- We can change the scope of the claim. Rather than deny it or fully accept it, we can say the person misinterpreted a subjective experience. They thought they were experiencing something outside of themselves, but were really simply experiencing something that was a product of their own mind. This is still problematic because if still implies the person is, to some extent, delusional. Such a view is not conducive to dialogue for that reason.
- We can accept the claim, but deny that the experience was of something tangibly real or real outside of humanity. This is a bit complicated. What I mean to convey is that the divine may be something like love, stories, history, friendship, or ideas. These things are all real, but not tangibly so, and they have no existence apart from humanity.
- We can keep an open mind and neither accept or reject the claim, but be as utterly agnostic on the question as possible. This is not entirely intellectually satisfying. It is also very difficult to be truly agnostic on any claim; it is almost inevitable that we will either believe or not believe any claim we hear (and this is true of other claims besides those relating to the divine).
- We can accept the claim. This is the most conducive to dialogue, but harms our desire to be skeptical. It requires accepting something that seems to be impossible without any personal or objective evidence.
*There are people in the skeptic community who have experiences of the divine, I do not mean to deny their existence. I am using "skeptic" here to specifically refer to those who are skeptical about divine or supernatural matters.
Hey Leum,
ReplyDeleteMy encouragements...glad to see you writing. I don't comment much, but I'll read anything you have to say.
"I would also be interested in hearing other ideas of how to respond to claims of the divine."
Any of your responses above are acceptable, given the way you approach discussions. You've always been a class act...
As someone who's occasionally on the non-skeptic's side of this conversation, I'd say that there's a finesse tucked in somewhere between your "it's real but not tangible, like love" (which is still telling the other person that you know what her experience means better than she does) and your "keep a completely open mind" (which is a lot to ask of the skeptic, frankly).
ReplyDeleteI'd say that the ground rule is to assume the experience did happen--barring evidence to the contrary, it's very rude to assert that someone is lying--and to be truthful about your interpretation but not attempt to replace the other person's interpretation with it. "I don't believe in the supernatural so I look for natural explanations for such events, but I am also interested in how you interpret it--after all, you're the one who had the experience."
In other words, you and the believer are peers: you aren't claiming primacy for your own interpretation (as in your first and second options) but you aren't ceding primacy to hers (as in your last and perhaps next-to-last options--the last one sounds fair, but it's not honoring your lifetime of experience that causes you to doubt).
Another option, refuse to take any stance as long as there is no single accepted definition of divinity. Today it's impossible to really discuss the objective existence of the divine because any understanding of what it means to be divine is almost entirely subjective
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