Religious Experience
Many Christians believe Christianity is true largely on the basis of their own religious experiences. If a Christian has a powerful, direct experience of God, then this provides good reason for them to believe that the Christian God is real, even in the absence of historical and philosophical reasons for believing in God. They have a self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit within them, and so they can know that Christianity is true, without needing any other evidence or reasons to believe.
Skeptics claim that Christian religious experiences are merely subjective psychological states, rather than actual encounters with a Divine presence. In support of this claim, they make an argument from the reality of religious pluralism. Adherents of many different, mutually exclusive religions claim to have religious experiences which validate their own beliefs. If Christians believe that these religions are false, then it seems that Christians must believe that the religious experiences of non-Christians are illusory. But if that is the case, then how do Christians know that their own religious experiences are not illusory as well?
The problem with this argument from religious pluralism is that it is not necessarily true that if Christians believe other religions are false, then they must believe that all religious experiences of non-Christians are illusory. It is possible for a Christian to believe that non-Christians have real religious experiences of supernatural beings, but that these supernatural beings are demons, rather than the one true God. It is also possible for a Christian to believe that non-Christians can have some real experiences of God, without those experiences being salvific. A person can know what it feels like to get wet in the ocean, without having the knowledge of how to reach its depths. In the same way, a non-Christian may in some sense know what it feels like to encounter God, without having the knowledge of how to be fully reconciled to and intimate with Him through Christ. A Christian can also believe in a combination of these two possibilities, with some non-Christians having religious experiences of God and others having religious experiences caused by other supernatural beings.
Thus, it is reasonable for Christians to point to their religious experiences as evidence that God is real. Appeals to such religious experiences will, of course, not be convincing to those who have never experienced them. But, for those who do have powerful, direct experiences of the Divine, this does provide a good, logical reason for them to believe in God. Skeptics may claim that these experiences are purely illusory, but this is merely an assumption for which they have no proof. If someone claims to have had a religious experience that they know with certainty can only have a supernatural explanation, how can others know this is not true?
However, admittedly, the fact that people of many different religious beliefs claim to have religious experiences means that religious experiences by themselves cannot be used to prove that one particular set of theological beliefs about God is true. Religious experiences can point to a Divine reality, but such experiences are too subjective and vague to establish the truth of particular propositions about Jesus, the Bible, and the Church. In order to demonstrate that Christianity is true, one must give additional reasons besides mere appeals to religious experiences.
Psychological Explanations for Belief
A common tactic of critics of Christianity is to try to explain away Christian faith using psychological explanations. The real reason Christians believe in Christianity, many argue, is because believing there is a Heavenly Father watching out for them functions as an emotional crutch. Or because believing in an afterlife reduces their anxiety about death. Or because believing they are participants in God’s Kingdom gives them a sense of meaning and purpose in a meaningless universe.
There may sometimes be some truth to these psychological explanations. Human beings are not purely rational. Our feelings, desires, and biases often have some influence on what we believe.
But if this is true of Christians, it is true of non-Christians as well. For example, atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel openly admits, “I want atheism to be true. . . It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God. . . I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”[1]Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 130. We can be sure that this is true of many more atheists who, unlike Nagel, are not honest enough to openly admit this.
The real reason many atheists reject Christianity is because they do not like the idea of submitting to God and want to be free of His moral demands. For example, atheist Aldous Huxley once admitted, “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none. . . the philosophy of meaning was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was. . . liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”[2]Aldous Huxley, “Confessions of a Professed Atheist,” Report, June 1996. Any objective observer of our society today can clearly see that one of the main factors contributing to the increasing rejection of Christianity is a desire to be free of the high moral demands of Christian discipleship, especially with regard to sexual ethics.
So, psychological explanations for belief are a double-edged sword. If some people have nonrational, psychological reasons for believing Christianity, then some people have nonrational, psychological reasons for rejecting it as well. Trying to psychoanalyze those who disagree with us in order to determine what the “real” reasons are that they believe what they believe gets us nowhere. Even if many, or most, people who believe something do so for nonrational, psychological reasons, that does not mean that there are not good, rational reasons for believing it. We must still assess the rational arguments for and against a particular belief system in order to determine whether it is reasonable to believe it or not.
Evolutionary Psychology and Religious Belief
A more sophisticated form of the attempt to explain away Christian belief using psychological explanations is to attempt to explain human religious instinct as something that has been biologically wired into us by evolution. The theory is that ancient hunter gatherer humans who were wired to detect a personal agent (like a predator) even when one was not present were more likely to survive than ancient humans who were wired to be less cautious. So, the brains of ancient humans who survived had overactive personal agency detectors, and they passed this on to their descendants. Since our brains have overactive personal agency detectors, we are biologically wired to assume a personal agent is at work even when none is present, and this leads us to believe that there are invisible gods/God at work in the world.
This is an interesting theory. However, even if it is true, it provides no evidence against the truth of Christianity. If it is true that the human religious instinct to believe in God evolved in this manner, then perhaps God intentionally allowed it to evolve, or caused it to evolve. Christians have always believed that human beings have an innate religious capacity that allows us to have a relationship with God, which is the purpose for our existence. Whether God directly and miraculously implanted this into us, or indirectly implanted this into us via evolutionary biology does not matter. Either way, we can say that God created us with a religious instinct so that we could have a relationship with Him.
Again, attempts to explain away Christian faith using psychological explanations get us nowhere. Even if there is some truth to them, this tells us nothing one way or the other about whether there are objectively good reasons for believing in Christianity. To determine this, we must assess the reasonableness of Christian beliefs themselves.