Prophets in the Old Testament were crazy guys. Here’s the Priest, keeping everybody in line and happy, and the Prophet would come out of nowhere, blasting their comfort and telling them they weren’t looking after the widows and fatherless, just as bad as Sodom, and what not. No wonder so many of them got killed. Or maybe it’s because, then as now, people didn’t have very good attitudes toward the mentally ill.
I know a Prophet sort of guy. He doesn’t mind nettling the authorities. He claims to have extraordinary spiritual experiences. And, if I may say, he is crazy.
“No, I really wish you wouldn’t,” I say.
“But I want to,” he says.
“No, don’t,” I say. “You’ll tell me some great spiritual story, and I’ll crap all over it and say it’s all in your head, and I don’t like doing that. It’s not fun for me.
“And unfortunately, I already know what I’m going to say, because I’ve had this conversation before.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
“I’ll tell you that your experience is important to you, but it’s anecdotal, and I’m not able to evaluate your experiences. I’d also say that feelings and experiences are not valid evidence. Evidence comes from empirical and repeatable observation, not faith.”
“What if someone told you they’d seen an angel or had a vision where God talked to them?” he said.
“Then I’d try to get them the help they needed so that they wouldn’t hurt themselves — or anyone foolish enough to believe them.”
He thinks and says, “Okay, but you can explain away anything. Are you sure you’re not just rejecting all spiritual evidence that could make you believe? What would qualify as evidence, in your view? If not your own feelings or experiences, then what?
“What if an angel appeared to you? Would that convince you?”
Well, there I was. I sometimes say I’d change my mind if I had a good reason. An angel would be pretty striking. If I say ‘no’, aren’t I really saying I wouldn’t accept any evidence, even the most miraculous? I’ve accepted scientific ideas on much flimsier evidence than what my own eyes have seen.
And yet, if the hypothetical angel did appear, it could be a hallucination. I’m not prone to hallucinating angels, or much of anything else — surely I’m not a credulous nincompoop like all those other people, right? And yet I’ve been wrong before.
But what if it wasn’t just my experience? What if I could submit the experience to critical review, and it still stood up?
And that was really the answer. If I saw an angel, I’d ask it to stick around while I get photos and video. It’d have to be an unambiguous angel and not an image on a wall or a face on toast. I’d need corroboration from some other observers besides myself. We’d need multiple sightings, under different conditions.
But angels never do that, do they? They’re shy of groups. They only ever appear to one person (or perhaps a select group of believers), under irreproducible circumstances. Just like UFOs. Angels and UFOs are both a kind of jealous phenomena, as I discussed in an earlier post.
Experiences are what our lives are made up of. It’s hard to see why they can be unreliable or even just made up. My experiences are meaningful to me, but I need to remember that I can be fooled. I could manufacture feelings or hallucinate angels if it were important enough to me to be able to do so. In this way, faith obscures.
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