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Can we know God by experience?
Awareness of God is vital for religious belief. But can religious experience help us gain knowledge about God?
1 What does it mean to know?
• Religious experience is the sense of knowledge arising from inner conviction.
• Can we know, and act, ‘for sure’ if we cannot give reasons for knowing?
• To have no doubts about our beliefs may be more a symptom of insanity or arrogance, rather than sound thinking.
• Yet believers claim they know God is there.
2 Intuition and being sure
• There are situations where we feel we know something by intuition (e.g. ‘I know it is wrong to let that child starve’).
• Is intuition a valid way of ‘knowing’?
• Is intuition a valid way of knowing about religious issues?
3 Religious knowledge
• Is religious experience a valid source of religious knowledge?
• What if such knowledge comes from intuition?
• God is known through finite things (e.g. the world), but also through infinite and indirect things (e.g. prayer, meditation, visions).
• Does intuitive awareness help us to know God?
4 H. P. Owen
• Intuition enables us to understand the material world, through the experiences of our senses.
• We also use it to understand our relationships with other people — their minds and feelings.
• In the same way, we can know God.
• God reveals his inner nature by his outward acts (e.g. creation).
• He reveals himself through Christ.
• Thus, we intuitively encounter God through material and spiritual realities.
5 Intuition and religious experience
• Our intuition of the reality of God is coloured by our experience of finite things — the general features of the natural world suggest a divine creator.
• Religious experiences are a form of religious knowledge:
The sense of God’s reality can occur in various contexts…by the contemplation of beauty and order in nature…by some event in our personal experience
6 Faith
• Owen — knowing God by experience is consistent with the teaching in the Bible.
• Knowledge of God by intuition leads to the human response of faith.
• Faith is a way of knowing as an intuitive response.
• ‘The essential content of revelation is God himself’ (H. P. Owen).
7 Criticisms of this approach
• There are two kinds of certainty — ‘psychological’ and ‘rational’. This is shown in the difference between ‘feeling certain’ and ‘being right’.
• One can feel certain without being right. It is about having intuitive knowledge.
• Being right is not about having a state of mind, it is about having verifiable knowledge.
For Edexcel students, Peter Donovan’s anthology article contains a wellorganised and easy to understand consideration of this question
8 Can intuition be right?
• Sense perception can appear to make intuition right.
• Not all religious experiences are necessarily illusory.
• Can some religious experiences therefore be intuitively right?
• If the Bible is true, then religious experiences will happen.
• But how can we decide if someone’s apparent intuition about God is reliable?
9 Martin Buber: I and Thou
• To encounter God suggests a meeting at first hand.
• This is different from simply knowing about God.
• If God is personal it is an I-You, rather than an I-It, encounter.
• Faith and trust are recommended when approaching God.
• Knowledge about God and experience of God are different.
10 The I-You encounter
• I-You relationships cannot always be explained.
• We cannot analyse or offer reasoned argument about our knowledge or awareness of a person.
• So why should we question our knowledge about God?
• We may be mistaken about our encounter.
• ‘Experience of’ presupposes knowledge about.
• ‘Experience of’ is not, in itself, knowledge about.
• ‘You may not be as right as you think you are.’
11 Experience and knowledge
• To ‘know’ in the religious sense is greater than possessing knowledge.
• It involves an ‘I-You’ relationship of trust, obedience and respect.
• An encounter with God cannot be examined scientifically.
• Yet to understand it requires factual knowledge (e.g. I only know my wife loves me if I know she actually exists).
• Existential knowledge, therefore, requires factual knowledge too.
12 Experience of…
• Knowledge helps us to know what to do, and what to make of our experiences.
• It helps us to understand our existing knowledge and experiences.
• I-You encounters enable us to live alongside, share and enjoy our time with others. They are not really concerned with gaining ‘knowledge about’ others.
• I-You encounters with God should be the same.
• Thus, religious experiences are not concerned with gaining knowledge about God.
13 The value of religious experiences
• Awareness of God is vital for religious belief.
• Religious experiences generate a sense of ‘knowing God’.
• But they are not a form of knowledge available to all.
• ‘The sense of knowing is never, on its own, a sufficient sign of knowledge’