The Argument from Experience

Introduction:

Last week we began to enter into some of the more subjective aspects of apologetics looking at the argument from desire. Today we want to go a little deeper into the subjective side of things looking at the argument from experience. The argument is a simple one: millions of Christians of all ages, education levels and cultural experiences testify to a real experience of knowing God. The various experiences include, answers to prayer, sightings of the miraculous, a transformed character and life, joy inexpressible and full of glory, a sense of presence, an overwhelming sense of guilt and terror, etc.

In non-Western cultures this is one of the most important and powerful ways to speak about God but we in the West with our history of Modernism which is biased towards a naturalistic explanation of all things and sees empiricism as the only valid foundation for epistemology, this argument has fallen on hard times. So today as we consider this type of argument we will firstly answer some objections and secondly give some examples.