In the 'Face to faith' column in Saturday's Guardian, Roger Tagholm marks the 40th anniversary of something called the Religious Experience Research Centre. He quotes an example of the type of communication that the Centre receives, relating a spiritual or religious experience. Here it is:
Vauxhall station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God... The whole compartment was filled with light. I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy. In a few moments the glory had departed, all but one curious, lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all.
The centre, Tagholm says, has 6,000 accounts of this kind, and he adds that they 'form an "evidence" of sorts for some unspecified "other"'. Well, I can't comment on 5,999 of those accounts, but how is this one evidence of an unspecified 'other' in the sense that Tagholm means it? It might simply have come from the perceptions and inner reactions to these of the individual concerned, the person reporting the experience. To that line of thought Tagholm has a ready response. It is, in essence, as follows: sometimes our mental experiences are responses to things that really are out there, as when we see an object; so it could be, too, with religious experiences.
Yes, so I suppose it could be; but so, also, it needn't be. This is a rather soft use of the concept of evidence. It could be that my dreams are copies of events going on in another world, and that that image which I saw was the image of a ghost, or was an extraterrestrial or was a character come to life out of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. But generally we make tougher demands before accepting as evidence for some external reality the idiosyncratic experiences of single individuals, uncorroborated by anyone else in their vicinity. Are the researchers into religious experience really willing to settle for standards of evidence such as would validate a person's claim to have had an encounter with, say, a long-dead ancestor or the Ghost of Christmas Present?