2010-04-24
Why 'I Feel It In My Heart' Is a Terrible Justification for God's Existence
AlterNet
As vivid as the experience of our hearts and minds can feel, it's unreliable and subject to bias.
"I just feel God in my heart. I sense his presence. Why should I doubt that any more than I doubt my senses?"
As I've written before: Most of the arguments I encounter for religion are dreadful. They're not even arguments. They're attempts to make arguments go away: attempts to deflect legitimate questions; bigoted attacks on atheists' characters; fuzzy confusions between evidence and wishful thinking; the moral equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling, "I can't hear you, I can't hear you!" Or worse.
But some arguments for religion and God are real arguments. They're not good arguments -- but they are arguments, sincere attempts to offer evidence supporting the God hypothesis. So I want to do these arguments the honor of engaging with them... and point out why, exactly, they don't hold water.
Today's argument: "I feel it in my heart."
"I just sense God intuitively. (Or the soul, or the metaphysical world, or whatever.) I feel it. His existence seems obvious to me, in the same way that the existence of the Earth under my feet seems obvious. Why should I doubt that perception -- any more than I doubt my perception of the Earth?"
This is a tricky one to argue against. Not because it's a good argument -- it's not -- but because it's a singularly stubborn one. Religious experiences can be very vivid, very powerful. I had them myself, back when I had religious beliefs. (I still have them, in fact: I just don't interpret them as religious anymore.) And they can feel real -- almost as real as physical perception, in some ways even more so. What's more, this argument is singularly resistant to reason... since, almost by definition, it's not very interested in reason.
But here's the problem. Well, one of many problems.
Our hearts and our minds can't automatically be trusted.
Read more at the source above.
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