Do theists believe by faith in God that God exists?

Do theists typically believe by faith in God that God exists? Faith is much more than propositional belief. But someone who has faith in a person can believe propositions by faith. What does that mean? I want to start with this necessary condition:

1. x believes that p by faith in y only if x believes that p because x takes y to have assured her specifically that p.

To make the condition sufficient as well as necessary one would at least need to specify something that ensures that the the apparent assurance causes the belief in the right way.

But given (1), how could one believe that y exists by faith in y? One would have to believe that y exists because one took y to assure one specifically to that effect. But that would be rationally odd. Granted, I could hear a voice in the dark assuring "I exist", and I could first believe that The Voice is assuring me that it exists, and conclude from this that The Voice exists. But I wouldn't be concluding that The Voice exists because of the specific content of what was voiced, but simply because something was voiced. The connection between the assurance and the belief that The Voice exists is not a connection in the right way for belief by faith.

Granted, it is possible that the voice sounds so trustworthy that I first form the belief that the content of what was said is true, and then because of that I come to believe that The Voice exists. In that case, I would indeed be believing that The Voice exists and doing so by faith. But I would be ignoring an obvious logical inference from one's data and getting the conclusion of that inference by other means. So what we seem to learn from the case of The Voice is this:

2. Anybody who believes by faith in y that y exists is in a position to believe by obvious logical inference and not by faith that y exists.

And we would expect that often people in that position would go for the obvious logical inference.

But that doesn't quite answer the question I started with, namely whether theists typically believe by faith that God exists. For it could be that (2) is true, and that most people do in fact go for the obvious logical inference, but the voice of God assuring them of his existence is so powerful that in most cases the belief is overdetermined: they believe both by obvious logical inference from God's assurance and by faith.

There is a second complication. One might have faith in y under one description and believe that y exists under another description. For instance, suppose that The Voice in the dark says: "I am the brother you never thought you had." Then you might believe your brother exists by faith in The Voice. This model works well for Christianity. A Christian might well believe that God exists by faith in Christ, even though Christ is in fact God.

Does the model work outside of Christianity, say in Old Testament times? Well, the Voice/brother case suggests that it might work in cases of religious experience. But it seems implausible that most of the theists in Old Testament times were theists because they had a religious experience whose content included an assurance of God's existence. Maybe, though, one can introduce the notion of indirectly believing by faith, where you indirectly believe something by faith provided that you infer it from something that you (directly) believe by faith. To adapt a Plantinga example, God might give you a religious experience that God forgave you your sins; trust in the "inner voice" (i.e., in God, but you don't know that right away) leads you to believe by faith that God forgave you your sins; and then you conclude by logic that God exists.

I don't have an answer to the question I started with, whether theists typically believe by faith in God that God exists. But I have a story that would have to hold for the answer to be affirmative. Typical theists would either have to be in a rational overdetermination scenario or they would have to be in a position where the difference between two different ways of referring to God can be leveraged to make it rationally possible for them to first believe in an assurer, who happens to be God, and then in God as such.

Spiritual experiences

The naturalist has to say that spiritual experiences are illusory. It is bad enough that the naturalist has to say this about such a large class of human experiences. But these experiences are central among the experiences that give life its savor, they are among the deepest and most significant of human experiences. Indeed, all of the deepest and most significant of human experiences include an aspect of the spiritual: the person I have encountered is seen clothed in a a significance that organic chemistry could never have, the vista stretching out before one in the night sky bespeaks a mystery beyond the merely puzzle, and so on. The naturalist has to say of the deepest and most significant of human experiences that they are illusions. And that is surely a problem.

Causal theory of content, religious experience, numinousness and naturalism

1. If naturalism (of the non-Aristotelian sort) is true, the causal theory of content is true. (It's the only decent naturalistically acceptable theory of content.)
2. The content of some religious experience involves the property of numinousness.
3. Numinousness is not a natural property and cannot be reduced solely to natural properties.
4. If the causal theory of content is true, and the content of an experience E involves a property P, then some experience is caused either by something's having P or by a combination of entities' having the properties that P reduces to.
5. If some experience is at least partly caused by something's having a non-natural property, then naturalism is false.
6. So, if naturalism is true, some experience is caused by something's being numinous or by a combination of entities' having the properties that numinousness reduces to. (1, 2 and 4)
7. So, if naturalism is true, some experience is at least partly caused by something's having a non-natural property. (3, 4)
8. So, if naturalism is true, naturalism is false. (5, 7)
9. So, naturalism is false. (8)

Another religious experience argument against naturalism

1. If something supernatural exists or if something has the causal power to produce something supernatural, then naturalism is false.
2. If it's causally possible for something supernatural to exist, then something supernatural exists or something has the causal power to produce something supernatural.
3. If p is causally possible, and p entails q, then q is causally possible.
4. For every natural* perceptual faculty in humans, it is causally possible for people to perceive veridically through it.
5. That someone perceives veridically through religious experience entails that there is something supernatural.
6. There is a natural* perceptual faculty of religious experience in humans.
7. So, naturalism is false.

Here, we can specify that a faculty is natural* provided that it is neither abnormal nor entirely dependent on culture.

The simple religious perception argument against naturalism

1. Every natural perceptual faculty we have sometimes functions veridically.
2. We have a natural faculty of religious perception.
3. Religious perception is always perception as of something supernatural.
4. If a perception is as of an F, and the perception is veridical, then there is an F.
5. Therefore, there is something supernatural.

One can always also try a probabilistic version of the argument: it is very unlikely that a faculty should never function veridically, so probably there is something supernatural.

Divine hiddenness and absence

1. (Premise) God is hidden.
2. (Premise) If x is hidden, then x exists.
3. Therefore, God exists.

This argument is logically valid, of course. Moreover, it's hard to dispute premise 2. So the question is whether premise 1 is true. Here is an argument for premise 1.

4. (Premise) Many people experience that God is hidden.
5. (Premise) If many people experience that s, then probably s, barring further evidence to the contrary.
6. So, probably, God is hidden, barring further evidence.

The important thing in connection with 4 is to distinguish the experience that God is hidden from the lack of experience that God is manifest. Obviously, the lack of experience of God as manifest will not do as the start of a theistic argument. But to experience God as hidden is different from just failing to experience God as manifest. It is a genuine kind of spiritual experience of God.

Here is another valid argument:

7. (Premise) God is absent.
8. (Premise) If x is absent, then x existed, exists or will exist.
9. (Premise) God is an essentially eternal being.
10. (Premise) If an essentially eternal being existed or will exist, then that being exists.
11. So, God existed, exists or will exist. (7 and 8)
12. So, God exists. (9, 10 and 11)

I don't know if this argument is sound, because I don't know if God is absent. But there may well be some sense of "absent" in which it is correct to say that God was absent in Mother Teresa's time of darkness (presence and absence after all are things that can hold in various respects), and that sense of "absent" is sufficient, I think, to yield premise 8. (We wouldn't say of a being that never exists, such as the Tooth Fairy, that it is absent.) Again, to support 7, one would need an argument based on experience akin to 4-6, and one would need to distinguish experience of absence from the absence of experience of presence.

I think this shows that the so-called atheological "argument from divine hiddenness" should really be called the "argument from divine non-manifestness." That God is hidden entails that God exists, after all.

Sensory and religious experiences

One might think that the following marks a significant difference between religious and sensory experiences:

1. If x in context C has a veridical sensory experience of K, then typically another person in C with properly functioning sensory apparatus would also experience K.

Here, "context" does not include the fact of x's experiencing K, since then the conditional would be trivial. But, of course, (1) is not true in the case of religious experiences.

But (1) is false. Here is an easy counterexample. There are some things that are "on the edge" of normal human visual capabilities. For instance, seeing a paramecium or the Pinwheel Galaxy (in a dark enough sky) naked-eye is like that. If the organism were somewhat smaller or the galaxy somewhat fainter, people with normal vision would no longer be able to see it. But people with exceptional or well-trained vision (with "vision" understood broadly as including the brain post-processing of noisy data) still could. Thus there will be cases where a person has a veridical sensory experience of a tiny organism or a faint galaxy, but it is false that typically another person with properly functioning sensory apparatus would also see it. Only a person with exceptionally well functioning sensory apparatus would see it. Moreover, even such a person might not be able to see it under all conditions, but only under conditions of being optimally concentrated and rested.

Perhaps we can save (1) by replacing "properly functioning" with "properly functioning on this occasion at least as well as x's faculties in C were". Call this "(1*)". But now it is harder to tell that the analogue to (1*) is false in religious experience cases. For how would we compare how well different people's religious experience faculties are functioning on different occasions. So while it may be that the analogue to (1*) is false in religious experience cases, it is hard to give a non-theological argument for this. (One can give a theological argument by noting that God is surely free in choosing to whom he should reveal himself.)

Moreover, it seems that it can be a matter of chance what one sees and when. Last night, I was looking at NGC 6852 through my Coulter 13.1". Very faint, i.e., low contrast, even through an Oxygen III filter (it wouldn't have been so faint in a darker sky, but my backyard has a lot of light pollution). First, I just saw the blackness of the sky. Then eventually my eyes (or brain!) picked out a very, very faintly brighter patch of the darkness. Then that disappeared. It reappeared again. Eventually I managed to "hold it in view" for a longer time. A fuzzy elliptical patch of extremely faint light. It seems that I was dealing with a pretty random process of perception here: sometimes my brain was managing to pick the nebula out of the visual system noise and sometimes it wasn't. There may have been some oscillation in the atmosphere, but it probably wasn't relevant (it's relevant to seeing detail, but not so much to seeing a faint object).

Now, it is possible to put all this detail into the context C. But then one is in effect building into the context that the situation was such that one would manage to experience K. And that trivializes (1*) and makes it impossible to point out a difference with religious experience.

One might try to save (1) in a different way. Not by saying that the particular experiences—say, of that faint nebula—would be had by someone else, but by saying that anybody with properly functioning faculties at some point have some experience of this sort (say, a visual experience). But now it is not clear that religious experiences fail to pass muster. After all, a lot of people have religious-type experiences, say while seeing a sunset or a really elegant proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. And while some don't, it is far from obvious that this isn't just evidence that their sensus divinitatis is malfunctioning.

However, I think there is theological reason to think that this needn't just be a malfunction (e.g., think of the phenomenon of the dark night of the soul). So there is theological reason to think that religious experience is disanalogous in this way from sensory experience.