Are Sense Perception and Religious Experience Reliable Ways to Find Spiritual Truths?

Sense Perception

This method for procuring truth depends on assimilating data through our five senses (taste, touch, hearing, sight, and smell). Sense perception is vital to everyday living. For example, it is indispensable when it comes to protecting us from harm, such as tasting spoiled food before swallowing it or hearing a car’s horn in time to jump out of the way. It also plays an important role in knowledge acquisition—your sense of sight is necessary in order for you to read this blog article. The Bible also teaches that sense perception is important to learning (Matt. 12:3; 21:16; Mark 12:10; Rom. 10:14.)

As a reliable interpreter of truth or as a means to test truth-claims, however, sense perception is limited because there is more to reality and human experience than what can be apprehended through our five senses. Sense perception is unable to verify ethical, psychological, or religious concepts. Likewise, sense perception is relativistic. People interpret the same phenomena differently. For example, our senses tell us that the air temperature is “hot” or “cold.” But hot to me may be comfortable to a Navaho, or cold to me may be invigorating to an Inuit.

Likewise millions of people claim to have seen flying saucers—some even attach religious significance to them. But upon investigation it has been proven in many cases that the observer mistook an aircraft or some other natural phenomena for the alleged UFO.

And of course there are the hundreds of accounts of people “hearing” God or “seeing” Jesus—but never with a shred of objective evidence to prove that what they saw or heard was actually from God. In short, sense perception, standing alone, cannot be relied upon to give consistently reliable truth. Our senses can weave strange tales.

Religious Experience

In his landmark book on religious experiences, philosopher and psychologist William James asked the question, “Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true?” (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 337) In other words, are emotional or subjective encounters with God real? Can people experience God, or are all religious experiences psychological in nature and void of objective reality? And if real, do religious experiences “point to truth” or are they mere “pointers of truth”—do they reveal truth or confirm truth?

The answers to these questions make or break many religions so far as affirming their authenticity. Why? Because personal religious experiences are the sacred cows of numerous religions, the entire basis of their truth-claims. Most cults have as their source of truth the religious experiences of alleged prophets. Similarly, personal religious experiences are the guiding force in many New Age religions and the so-called “Word Faith Movement.” Even well-established religions such as Islam and Mormonism rely on the religious experiences of their founders as their cornerstone of truth.

Now, before going any further, I need to say this. Just because numerous false religions rely on religious experiences as their source of truth does not mean that all religious experiences are bogus. Nothing can be further from the truth. Many religious experiences are counterfeit (they must be if they endorse a false god or false religious system), but some are genuine personal encounters between people and God. It is undeniable that some religious experiences are real. They can’t be brushed aside as mere psychological phenomenon, as some skeptics are prone to do. J.P. Moreland pointed out, “such experiences are common to an overwhelming number of people and they’re often life-transforming in a number of ways.” (Scaling the Secular City; A Defense of Christianity, 232)

What are these encounters like? As Moreland further explained, they may take various forms, but for most theists a religious experience includes “some sort of direct apprehension of a personal Being who is holy, good, awesome, separate from the subject, and One upon whom the subject depends in some way for life and care” (232).

Notice that these encounters do not include actually seeing God or hearing His voice. Nevertheless, a religious experience moves one beyond mere intellectual acknowledgement. It triggers an emotional or mystical response rather than a cognitive one. It confirms God’s existence, His love and concern for His people, and His desire to have us walk with Him and to trust Him. Religious experiences, then, reveal truth subjectively rather than objectively. However, since I have previously expressed a concern for relying too heavily on subjectivism as a source of truth, we need to look at religious experiences critically—including the Christian religion. ©

This will be the topic of the remaining blog articles in part one of this two-part series. Next week’s blog article will begin with: “Religious Experience and Christianity—Do They Confirm or Reveal Spiritual Truth?”