Peter Boghossian on The argument from religious experience
Boghossian uses street epistemology to show that religious experiences cannot reliably distinguish truth from self-deception.
Peter Boghossian's approach to the argument from religious experience is distinctively methodological. Rather than arguing against specific experiences, he teaches a method — street epistemology — for evaluating the reliability of the processes that produce beliefs, including beliefs based on personal experiences of the divine.
The core question Boghossian asks is: 'How would you know if you were wrong?' If a person's religious experience is unfalsifiable — if no possible evidence could change their mind — then it is not functioning as evidence at all. It is functioning as a conclusion in search of justification.
Boghossian points out that people of mutually exclusive religions all report religious experiences that confirm their specific faith. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Mormons all have powerful, life-changing encounters with the divine — and they cannot all be right. The fact that religious experiences confirm whatever religion the experiencer already holds suggests that the experiences are products of expectation, not encounters with an external reality.
“Faith is not a reliable pathway to truth. If it were, all faiths would converge on the same conclusions. They don't.”
“The question is not 'Did you have an experience?' The question is 'Is your experience a reliable way to know what's actually true?'”