Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Tanya Luhrmann (0:30)

The more lovable God gets, there is a sense in which the more unbelievable God gets.

Curt Jaimungal (0:36)

But is God real?

Tanya Luhrmann (0:37)

Is real and feels real are two different phenomena.

Curt Jaimungal (0:43)

This is Tanya Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford. Much of her work is about how people come to experience God as real.

Tanya Luhrmann (0:51)

People of faith are constantly berating themselves for not believing more deeply, I think there are an awful lot of atheists and churches and temples.

Curt Jaimungal (1:01)

On this channel, I, Curt Jaimungal, interview researchers regarding their theories of reality with rigor and technical depth.

Tanya Luhrmann (1:08)

It's the in-between area, real but not real. That's where God lives.

Curt Jaimungal (1:13)

It turns out people don't often practice religion because God already feels completely real to them. Religious practice is partly what makes God come to feel real. Importantly, the professor is not arguing that God is therefore imaginary or non-existent. Her question is purely anthropological. Regardless of whether God objectively exists, how does an invisible God become experientially real to us?

Professor, when someone says that a Sam Harris or a Dawkins type hasn't found God because they're not open to God, there needs to be some element of sincerity there.

What do you make of claims like that? What's the evidence for that and what's the counter-evidence?

Tanya Luhrmann (2:01)

What I know is that there's the way somebody believes propositionally, their intellectual commitment to the idea that there is a spirit or a God or a higher being, and then their experiences. And those are related, but they're not the same thing.

Sometimes, when people have a vivid experience of what they come to call God, that changes the way they think about belief. It can be terribly, terribly powerful. So Augustine hears God speak, and Augustine has been wanting to be a Christian, trying to be a Christian, struggling with himself. But the fact that he heard God speak enabled him to somehow break through his hesitations and commit. So that really happens for people. And when people are people of faith, those experiences are terribly, terribly important. And when people learn to pay attention to their experience, or when they pray, or when they do the things at a church, or a temple, or a shul, invites them to do, they're more likely to have those experiences. If they, they're subtle experiences sometimes. So if somebody is very clear that they don't believe, don't want to believe, have no commitments to, it's sometimes harder for them to have those experiences.

But it's also true that you can have a vivid experience. You can hear a voice in the absence of a speaker. You can feel a sense of presence. You could feel an amazing sense of joy break over the sky.

And the person can say, oh, that's really interesting. That's something that happened in my body. It doesn't change my belief commitment. So there, it's a complicated relationship. The experience of God and the commitment, the propositional commitment to God. So the short answer is that I don't know what would happen if St. Harris heard a voice called out to him and told him that God was speaking.

Curt Jaimungal (4:28)

What is it about Augustine and people like him who say that they want to believe, so in this case, he wants to become a Christian, but even in that phrase implies he's not a Christian, which implies he doesn't believe. So what precisely is going on?

There is something that you don't think is the case, but then you want it to be the case, but why does he want it to be the case? Why does he want to believe?

Tanya Luhrmann (4:52)

So many, many people these days are what you would call seekers or people. Sometimes they call themselves spiritual, but not religious. So that's a category that's used in the States. And now there's a floating number of 22%, 28% of Americans who would identify themselves in that category. Those tend to be people who want more, but they don't really believe stuff, or they don't believe, the traditional faiths are not for them. They don't believe whatever the traditional faiths tell them they should be believing. So they don't believe in an omnipotent God, they don't believe in a God who became human, or they don't want that stuff, but they want more. So why do they want more? Well, they often they want a sense of meaning, they want the world to be more interesting than just being material. They have a vivid sense that really there must be more to the world. So William James used this lovely phrase, he said, look, all these different religions, they have theologies, they have words, they describe stuff. Let's call those over beliefs. Those are ideas people have about something that's bigger than the world. I'm just going to call it, he said, the more. I know that there's more than the material world, and I don't know how to make sense of that, but many of us feel that. He says, I'm committed to that. I think many people who are spiritual but not religious, they have a sense that there's something more, that somehow there's more coincidence that's not coincidental, or there's more purpose that's beyond random molecular movement. There's something that is more than merely material. They don't quite know how to put it together.