George Pell on The argument from religious experience
Pell affirmed that personal encounter with God is a legitimate form of evidence, grounded in the Catholic sacramental tradition.
George Pell was sympathetic to the argument from religious experience, though he framed it within the disciplined context of Catholic sacramental theology rather than individual mysticism. He spoke of the experience of God's presence in prayer, in the Eucharist, and in the life of the Church as genuine encounters with a transcendent reality — not merely psychological states but responses to something objectively real.
Pell was cautious about subjective religious experience as a standalone argument. He recognised that people of different faiths report different experiences, and that psychological explanations are available. But he argued that the convergence of religious experience across cultures, combined with the other arguments for theism, made it reasonable to take such experiences at face value rather than explaining them away.
In his public engagements, Pell often spoke of the transformation he witnessed in people's lives through faith — not as proof in a strict philosophical sense, but as corroborating evidence that contact with God produces real, observable effects in the world.
“The experience of millions of people across centuries — that they have encountered God in prayer and worship — cannot simply be dismissed as mass delusion.”