The Possibility of Perception

Brian Davies raises a number of logical or conceptual objections to the idea of perceiving or experiencing God.  Now, some people might wonder, why all this logical analysis of whether we can perceive God or not, don't we just know (isn't the proof in the pudding?  But that is just the question we are trying to answer).  Sometimes, conceptual and logical analysis allows us to rule "in" some things and rule "out" some things even before we get to the empirical data.  And in the case of God, we often don't have empirical or 'raw' data to appeal to...so logic, metaphysics and conceptual analysis are the only real tools we have....its why philosophy of religion often seems 'abstract' to people.

So Davies wants to know, Can God be an object of experience?  If we experience things as 'objects', as things that might be experienceable, doesn't that require that the thing be a thing?  Is God a thing or object to be experienced?  In addition, how do we 'experience' something that is not physical or material, or without sensory content?  These are just a few of the issues that Davies tries to wade through.  Notice, testimony does not get us very far, because then we are just relying and trusting others.  Which is fine for a lot of knowledge, but then we have to ask the question: "Is this testimony reliable rather than "Is this an experience of God?

There are additional, more substantive worries about knowledge from experience, especially knowledge of God.  These break down into 3 types of worries:

(1)    Experience often deceptive. 

(2) People who claim to see God influenced by social or psychological factors rather than really seeing God 

(3) Hume= any proclaimed experience of God must be “rejected at the outset (3a) because there are no agreed tests for verifying”…..”(3b) because some people report an experience of an absence of God, and (3c) because there is no uniformity of testimony….” (122)

Davies spends considerable time and analyzes each of these objections, eventually arguing for a  hesitant yes to the possibility of experiencing God, although he thinks there are likely better ways (we will get to these in about a month).  This brings up a point he makes at the beginning of the piece on two different ways we reach the "Truth" or gain knowledge, direct and indirect.  The first requires experiential evidence, i.e we have to have direct experience of something.  This is where "experiencing" God fits in.  However, even if this fails, there is still the possibility of indirect proofs for God's existence based on well-formed and reasonable inference.  This is how other famous arguments like the Cosmological Argument, the Ontological Argument, and the Design argumet work...and we will spend some time on these later.
So, what lead's Davies to conclude that experience of God is at least plausible?  First, he thinks we can overcome and address the worries raised above.  In particular, he thinks that Hume's criticisms (3a-c) are overblown, and that we do have some uniformity of testimony, especially among Christian belief.  Still, we must overcome another objection.  If we claim to 'experience' God, can we 'recognize' that it is God?  This is a question that leads us back to our initial conversation about who or what God is, and how we might know what/who that being is.  Thus, questions on the nature of God are never fully divorced from questions concerning his existence....and as we will see with Aquinas, this makes sense if Aquinas is right that God's nature is existence.