Matt Dillahunty on The argument from religious experience
Dillahunty argues that personal religious experiences are unreliable evidence because they consistently fail to converge on a single coherent picture of God.
Matt Dillahunty has spent years addressing callers on The Atheist Experience who insist that their personal experience of God is evidence of God's existence. His response is consistent and devastating: personal experience may be sufficient to justify belief for the person having the experience, but it is not evidence that anyone else is obliged to accept — because personal experience is exactly the kind of evidence that is most vulnerable to error, bias, and self-deception.
Dillahunty's key observation is that religious experiences are contradictory. Christians experience Jesus, Hindus experience Vishnu, Muslims experience Allah, and practitioners of countless other religions experience their own deities. These experiences cannot all be accurate — they point to mutually exclusive conclusions about the nature of the divine. The most parsimonious explanation is that religious experience tells us about the experiencer's brain, not about an external supernatural reality.
He is also careful to distinguish between the experience itself and the interpretation placed upon it. A feeling of awe, unity, or transcendence is real as an experience. But the conclusion that this experience was caused by a specific deity is an interpretation, not an observation — and an interpretation that is shaped by the experiencer's cultural background, religious upbringing, and expectations.
“Your personal experience might be convincing to you, and that's fine. But it's not evidence I'm obligated to accept, any more than someone else's alien abduction experience is evidence I'm obligated to accept.”