Glen Scrivener, who blogs at Christ the Truth, recently watched Derren Brown's Fear and Faith programme. In it, Brown apparently converts (or at least induces a religious experience in) a staunch atheist, a biologist called Natalie. Brown used this as a jumping off point for an argument that we don't need to invoke a god to explain religious experiences. Glen's posting argued that the existence of fakes doesn't disprove the existence of the genuine article.

Blah blah blah Bayes

I commented that Brown would go too far if he claimed that an ability to reproduce religious experiences means there's no God, but he could use it to negate the value of religious experience as evidence for God's existence. If it is trivial for people who aren't God to produce such experiences, then they are about as likely to occur in a world without God as they are in a world with a God, so they aren't good evidence. Glen tried a variant of the Argument from Wife, saying that his belief in his wife's existence is not invalidated because of his feelings about her. But this doesn't work, since he presumably saw and heard her and so believed she existed prior to having feelings for her, so the causality isn’t backwards, as it is when Christians point to feelings from God as evidence for God's existence.

Then I watched the programme on Channel 4's website. In it, we see Brown convert Natalie in what looks like a church, with 15 minutes of chat about her father and tapping on the table to "anchor" certain feelings. He leaves her alone (except for the cameras, of course) for a bit, at which point she stands up and bursts into tears, speaking about how sorry she is and wishing she could have had this feeling all her life. Well, that about wraps it up for God, right?

Hang on a sec...

Something's gone wrong with everyone's argument here, and I probably should have spotted it before I watched the programme, because I've written about Derren Brown before. Can you spot it? Have a think for a moment, then ( read onCollapse )