Experience of God has sometimes been described as the feeling that there is a ‘presence’. This feeling is not connected with a special perceptual sensation. Thus two explorers in the wilderness may say to one another that they feel that there is someone nearby whom they cannot see. In fact they know that no other explorer or native of the region is nearby. Nevertheless, I suppose, the feeling can be strong and shared interpersonally. A psychologist would put it down to an illusion brought on by loneliness and privation. Similarly a vague feeling of a Presence, such as some mystics have reported, need not be taken as veridical. If a person of mystical bent does take it as veridical, a sceptic need not accept the mystic’s claim. The principle of theoretical economy favours the sceptic’s explanation in terms of some sort of illusion. Not that the sceptic will convince the mystic. At the beginning of this essay I put forward scientific plausibility as a guide in metaphysics and the mystic will refuse to go all the way with this guide. There is thus likely to be deadlock here. At any rate I think that the sceptic can say this, that religious experience provides no objective warrant for religious belief unless the possibility of a naturalistic explanation of the experience can be ruled out as implausible, and it is hard to see how this requirement could be met.
There are all sorts of possible explanations of the numinous. Here is an example. I love the hills. Hills at the top of a glen can look a bit like huge crouching animals, and this may make us feel towards them as one would towards conscious beings, even though we know that they are solid rock and have no personality whatever. With this ‘as if’ feeling there can be one that I am inclined to describe as numinous. It presumably arises from some neurological harmoniousness that comes from the fact that the structure of our brains is largely that of our early prehistoric ancestors and so is adapted to surrounds of wilderness, or something like wilderness (even though the hills had been cleared for sheep). I do not put this forward as a serious piece of psychology, as a good explanation for the sort of case that I have in mind. I am neither a psychologist nor an anthropologist. It obviously will not do as a general explanation, since many mystics have hardly been hill persons or lovers of wilderness. I put it forward as a suggestion that naturalistic explanations of mystical experiences need not be too hard to come by. I do not want to decry the experiences: the experiences can certainly be valued, and as I said in an earlier section, contemplation of the laws of nature can certainly induce religious emotions, and these should be prized. As a philosopher I often wonder what it would be like to spend all one’s life on practical and human-centred concerns, such as politics, economics, town planning, and all sorts of business, administrative and managerial activities, with no time and leisure to indulge the philosophic and scientific impulse to contemplate the universe at large. It is fortunate indeed that most people do not have this impulse, for they are the people who make the world go round. In hospital I do not want too dreamily philosophical a nurse or physician. One of the virtues of organized religion is that whether it is true or false it does to a certain extent cater for the speculative and even to some extent cosmic impulses in a wide section of the population, despite a certain anthropocentricity in some features of some of the world’s religions.
(J. J. C. Smart, "Atheism and Theism," chap. 1 in Atheism and Theism, 2d ed., by J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Great Debates in Philosophy, ed. Ernest Sosa [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003], 6-75, at 44-5 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 