Q&A: The Intuition of God’s Existence
The Intuition of God’s Existence
Question
I generally accept your epistemological theory that our intuitions have significance. But when I analyze an intuition, for example, the one that tells me to trust my senses or the uniformity of nature, those fit pretty well with many other things, and I have additional reasons to adopt them as well (for example, that everyone in the world shares these intuitions with me, that they confirm themselves over and over through experience, etc.). By contrast, the intuition of God’s existence is quite different. It seems to depend almost entirely on education—people who were raised in polytheism are convinced of a multiplicity of deities, people who were raised in atheism have no intuition of God’s existence at all, people who were raised in Christianity believe in God in human form, and so on. That is, it seems that the intuition of God’s existence is simply an outgrowth of how I was educated as a child, and there is not much more to it; and if I had been educated differently, I would simply have had a different intuition. Isn’t that a good enough reason to completely doubt this intuition?
Answer
Not all intuitions have the same force, but the very fact that you are willing to adopt intuitions means that the fact that some claim is the product of intuition is not a reason to reject it. As for doubts about an intuition that is not broadly agreed upon, this is connected to the question of PEER AGREEMENT discussed in my column (columns 247–8). Regarding the influence of education and its significance, see column 630.
Discussion on Answer
Intuition is not always the result of arguments known to you. It can also be accumulated experience and unconscious arguments. In my opinion, if you have some intuition, evidence is needed in order to abandon it. But I don’t have anything to add beyond that.
I’ll try to clarify the problem: I wasn’t really persuaded by the philosophical arguments for God’s existence (the cosmological, the physico-theological, etc.), and I nevertheless grounded God’s existence in the fact that I have an intuition that He exists. I agree that when an intuition is the result of education that does not necessarily invalidate it, but here’s the thing—I looked for additional confirmation for this intuition and didn’t find any. The same goes for PEER DISAGREEMENT: I cannot point to why my atheist peers are mistaken, since I carried out the very examination that they themselves could have carried out (looking at philosophical arguments for God’s existence) and I was not persuaded. So I am wondering whether, in such a situation, the existence of my intuition in itself has any significance, or whether I should attribute it to education and that’s it.