Can the same arguments used to reject metaphysical solipsism also support accepting the existence of God?

Question

Why do most people reject metaphysical solipsism and instead accept the reality of an external world? There are two primary reasons:

1. The perception of having repeated conscious experiences of an external world.
2. A strong intuition that one’s conscious experiences are real and reliable.

While a solipsist might still be able to rebut these intuitions (here is a chat debate in which I play devil's advocate for metaphysical solipsism—quite successfully, I would say, if you are interested (EDIT: follow-up discussion with the same user here)), intuitively, (1) and (2) remain strong pragmatic and intuitive reasons why people believe the things around them exist.

By the same token, wouldn't it be conceivable that (1) and (2) might also hold for the existence of God? Namely, that there could be some people, even if just a tiny fraction of the global population, who have managed to establish a direct relationship with God in which (1) and (2) apply. As a result, these individuals might perceive a strong experiential intuition to accept the existence of God, just as the average person experiences a strong experiential intuition to accept the existence of the external world.

Why wouldn't this be a plausible reason for being a theist, even if it applies only to a small fraction of people who are fortunate enough to experience such a privileged epistemic state of affairs?

Answer 1

This observation does suggest strong counters to arguments against God. For example, if the atheist argues:

We can explain everything that happens without reference to God. Since God is an additional hypothesis, beyond what is needed to explain what we observe, we should discard him as a hypothesis.

You can construct a parallel argument like this:

We can explain everything we experience without reference to an external world. Since the external world is an additional hypothesis, beyond what is needed to explain what we experience, we should discard it as a hypothesis.

Both arguments have the same form, so the atheist is forced to either discard his argument or argue that

We can explain everything that happens without reference to God.

is on firmer ground than

We can explain everything we experience without reference to an external world.

This is a tall order, especially since we actually can't explain everything that happens, with or without reference to God.

Here's another example. The atheist argues:

When people have experiences of talking with God or seeing God at work, it's simpler to just assume they are hallucinating and there is no actual God there.

The obvious response is:

When you think you are drinking a cup of coffee it is simpler to just assume you are hallucinating and there is no actual cup of coffee there.

Solipsism is the simpler explanation at least in the sense that it requires fewer entities. Which suggests another common example:

Your theory of God requires everything that my theory requires: matter, forces, etc. and in addition you require an additional entity, so your theory is more complex. You should just discard the additional entity.

Answerable by:

Your theory of an outside world requires everything that my theory requires, a mind and mental events, and in addition you require an additional entity, so your theory is more complex. You should discard the additional entity.

Another example:

Your strong intuition that life and the universe in general show a deliberate design is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, and since science is the measure of all things, your intuition has no value.

Can be countered with

Your strong intuition that the things you experience are real is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, and since science is the measure of all things, your intuition has no value.

It's less clear that it can stand as a strong positive argument, a strong argument for the existence of God. It can, perhaps be used in a weak positive argument in this form:

I believe in God because (G1) I have a strong intuition that he causes things I see in the world and because (G2) I have experienced communicating with him. I believe in the outer world because (E1) I have a strong intuition that when I perceive a physical object, it is because that object caused my perception, and because (E2) I have experienced the outer world. Since G1 is directly analogous to E1 and G2 to E2, if E1 and E2 are sufficient to make me believe, then G1 and G2 should be sufficient to make me believe.

Answer 2

Imagine your mother is in the room. You now leave the room. You come back to the room and see her. Solipsism has no explanation for why your mother is still there. The external world theory does. It makes sense of your experiences and can predict your experiences in a way that solipsism cannot. Solipsism is discounted not just because it “feels wrong” but because it has a lack of explanatory and predictive power.

But a lack of explanatory power cannot be used to justify the existence of anything, much less god. It is usually used as a justification to dismiss a hypothesis. A lack of explanatory and predictive power is one of the main reasons atheists use to deny or dismiss god.

Answer 3

Your statement (2) is problematic as I'm not sure how we'd get to (2) without the truth of (1). So I really think it is (1) that is operative here.

For God, the analogy breaks precisely due to (1): The perception of having repeated conscious experiences of an God.

If I did have (1) then I would almost certainly be a theist, as would many present atheists and naturalists since "divine hiddenness" would not be a thing. I don't doubt the existence of the Sun exactly because of (1).

I am fundamentally empirical as I don't trust purely "rational" thought given how it likely came about in evolution ;)

So, yeah, if I repeatedly experienced God in a direct way, I'd be hard pressed to maintain my atheism. However, my experience of repeatedly hearing about mental disorders would first make me want to double check my experiences with others. If a bunch of us are all having these experiences, then I'd be inclined to accept it as true.

Answer 4

The fault in your reasoning lies in your assumption that the two primary reasons for rejecting solipsism are the two you mention. They are not the reasons why I reject solipsism.

Putting your argument about solipsism as far to one side as possible, if you consider the real reasons why people believe much of what they do, you will find that they largely believe what they have been told provided it is not inconsistent or denied by direct personal experience. I believe, for example, that the Earth is round, that Australia is on the other side of it, that men have landed on the moon, that hardened arteries are a major cause of death, that the Nile is not in Somerset, that Margaret Thatcher is dead, and so on, even though I have never had direct personal experience of any of those assorted phenomena. I stopped believing in Father Christmas- notwithstanding the fact that I had been assured he exists-because I realised his existence was logically inconsistent with everything else I had learned, such as the inadequate capacity of a sleigh for the purpose of enabling simultaneous deliveries of presents to millions of households.

I suspect, therefore, that many people hold religious beliefs because they were drummed into them as children. That, at least, explains the reason why a child's religious beliefs are commonly observed to be those of their parents. If someone, having been assured of the existence of God, has direct personal experiences of what they believe to be an interaction with God, you can understand why they believe in him.

The more notable parallel between God and solipsism is the fact that logic alone is never sufficient to persuade some people that they are nonsense.

Answer 5

Solipsism claims that the external world doesn't exist and is just in the imagination of the solipsist. If that is true the solipsist's mind is an extremely large and complex system that acts just like the external world whose existence he denies. So solipsism is just realism with a different label on the external world.

A person who claims to have encountered God may be lying or may have mistaken some internally generated experience for an experience of God. These experiences are all of the sort one could explain by them being internally generated. People who see God can't suddenly explain the solution to the problem of quantum gravity or factorise large products of primes with unknown prime factors or do anything else that would indicate that anything outside of the capabilities of a person in our cultural context. And we know that people claiming to have seen God have done no such thing because if there was even the appearance of such an event we would never hear the end of it even if it was later debunked.

Answer 6

Let A denote the otherwise empty field of awareness. Sources of cause map to conventional terms as follows:

A = Man
A = Nature
A = Reality
A = God
A = Unconscious
A = Exist, Not Exist

Man is a source of cause in the context of folk psychology, ethics, morality, and law. We generate the awareness of human agents as a source of cause.

Nature is a source of cause in the context of folk psychology, ethics, morality, and law. We recognize natural events as distinct from human agents. The distinction can be fuzzy or vague in context. For example a person suffers a heart attack while driving. If there is no reason for the person to foresee this natural event then the person driving is not legally responsible for causing harm to others when they lose consciousness. There are natural events (conditions) that enable Man to be responsible; and there are natural events (conditons) that excuse Man from responsibility.

If we rule out human agents as the source of cause then we are left with the other items of recognition: Natural Events, Reality, God, or something unknown and therefore in psychology it is called the Unconscious.

Ultimately we observe events and generate narratives. People make up the concepts of exist or does not exist and map other concepts onto those categories. I say shit happens and people make up stories.

Answer 7

Yes, and you can reject both for the same reason

For a hypothesis to be worth considering, it must make (theoretically) falsifiable predictions. Since neither can, they are both worthy of equal (and near zero) consideration.