Topics Religion

Question I have been doing a lot of research lately, and have started to think that perhaps there is not enough evidence to support a belief in G-d. One of the biggest things stopping me from taking the next step and declaring myself an atheist is that I believe I have felt G-d's presence in the past. Would this alone be justification for believing in G-d? Could the feelings I felt all be imagined?

Accepted:
November 17, 2008

Comments

It might very well be that you have had feelings that you have interpreted as feelings of the presence of God (you didn't imagine having the feelings that you interpreted that way). But the question, presumably, is whether you were right in so interpreting them.

The fact that, given your cultural setting, you found it very natural at the time to interpret the feelings in a certain way may be hardly surprising. But presumably that is in itself not a strong reason for supposing that the interpretation you put on your experiences was actually correct. After all, others brought up differently -- e.g. in a cheerfully atheistic environment -- are no less prone to various patterns of exalted feelings from time to time: but they will no doubt want to interpret the experiences in a very different way.

Though actually, things probably go deeper than mere patterns of acculturation. Dan Dennett has argued that our tendency to over-interpret certain experiences as betokening the presence of unseen agents in fact has evolutionary roots (you can see why it could promote survival to be over-ready to suspect the presence of agent, for it's better to err on the side of safety when there might be potentially dangerous predators around). Evolution shaping us to be over-ready to detect agency perhaps explains why certain supernatural ideas have such a ready grip on our imaginations without those ideas being true. (Ghost stories seem to speak to us all: but that is no reason to belief in ghosts.)

It seems then that you do indeed need independent reasons -- i.e. reasons that go beyond finding it natural to interpret your feelings in a certain religious way -- to show that interpreting your feelings that way is right. And if you now have independent reasons for doubting stories about God, then they give you grounds for now revising how you should think of your earlier feelings.