APPEARANCE & REALITY
The "Electric Brae" is a hill in Scotland that appears to go down but this is an illusion: it actually slopes up. If you take the brakes of your car, it will roll "uphill" by itself
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The "Fata Morgana" is a mirage that occurs in the sea between Sicilly and Italy. Ships and mountains seem to float in the air above the horizon.
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A "Fata Morgana" style mirage sighted in China - a floating city in the clouds
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These illusions tell us that our senses cannot always be trusted. Because of things like this, a posteriori arguments may not always be sound. However, illusions and hoaxes can eventually be "exposed".
Ambiguity is different. "Ambiguous" means "having more than one meaning" or "open to more than one interpretation". If an experience is ambiguous, then there's more than one way to interpret what it means and you may never be able to "get to the bottom of it". This was an important idea for the liberal Christian philosopher John Hick (Faith & Knowledge, 1957): |
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the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains non-religious as well as religious responses - John Hick
the same thing appears in either slightly or considerably different ways to different people owing both to their varying spatial locations in relation to it and to differences in their sensory and mental equipment and interpretive habits - John Hick
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In The Lion King (1994), Timon & Pumba illustrate how the universe is ambiguous: Simba has the religious view
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In Contact (1997), Ellie (Jodie Foster) has to defend her testimony of encountering aliens and traveling to another world (clue: it's an analogy for religious experience; Matthew McConaughey's character is a preacher)
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The basic form of Christian experience is the apprehension of God to which I have given the names of ‘intuition’ and ‘faith’ - H.P. Owen
Several blind men were investigating an elephant. The first blind man held the elephant's leg. He said, "I think an elephant is like the truck of a great tree." The second blind man disagreed. While holding the elephant's trunk he said, "I believe an elephant is like a large snake," The third blind man believed they were both wrong. "An elephant is like a great wall," he exclaimed. He was touching the elephant's side. Each blind man was convinced he was right and others were wrong without ever realizing they were all touching the same elephant. Some believe the blind men in this parable represent the major religions of the world, each in contact with the same "elephant" without knowing it. (adapted from God & the Universe of Faiths, 1973)
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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control - Galatians 5: 22-23
Alston claims that self-authentication does exist. This can be compared to the way wine-tasting happens. Once you learn the rules of wine-tasting, you begin to know what is being talked about. Viewed from the outside, the language of the wine tasters seems fanciful or weird. Alston claims each mystical tradition has its own set of "doxastic practices" which authenticate the experiences which happen within it.
Alston's view that authenticating religious experiences is like a language or a code you have to learn ties in with Wittgenstein's idea of language games and the Anti-Realist Challenge.
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YES
Religious belief is supposed to be about certainty, not probability. Jesus talked about faith moving mountains. The great saints and religious reformers didn't think that God "probably existed": they knew God existed. They staked their life on God and believed in him with total conviction. The inductive argument is irrelevant for religious faith.
Inductive reasoning is based on generalising from the things you experience in this world to wider conclusions about the world we live in. But induction doesn't tell us about things that are beyond or outside of this world - things that are metaphysical rather than physical. Drawing metaphysical conclusions from physical evidence goes beyond what induction can ever tell us.
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NO
The inductive argument leaves room for doubt, which is important for reasonable faith. Only fanatics and bigots believe with total certainty. Reasonable people have doubts about things. The inductive argument reassures believers that their faith is reasonable but it leaves a place for questioning and mystery in life.
Intuitions tell us that religious experiences are an actual encounter with the divine reality, not an imaginary phenomenon. All inductive reasoning is flawed by we have strong intuitions that other people exist and that the world isn't a dream; we trust these intuitions and we should trust the intuition that God is encountered through religious experience.
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