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1. ©
2006, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 3
Marcel on God and Religious Experience,
and the Critique of Alston and Hick
Brendan Sweetman
Abstract. his article examines Gabriel Marcel’s unique approach to the existence
of God, and its implications for traditional philosophy of religion. After some
preliminary remarks about the realm of “problems” (which would include the
“rational”), and about the question of whether Marcel thinks God’s existence
admits of a rational argument, Part I explains his account of how the individual
subject can arrive at an airmation of God through experiences of idelity and
promise-making. Part II proposes a way in which Marcel’s own philosophical
and phenomenological approach could be regarded as a type of argument for
the existence of God. he last section suggests that Marcel’s approach ofers an
advance upon the views of William Alston and John Hick concerning the analysis
of religious experience.
G
abriel Marcel has a quite unique approach to the question of the
existence of God. It is an existentialist approach, to be sure, yet it
is not simply based on a faith commitment to God, as one inds
for example in Kierkegaard, whose view emphasizes the afective and volitional
nature of one’s relationship with God at the expense, many would argue, of any
rational approach to the question. But, although Marcel’s approach is existen-
tialist, it also has room for consideration of the rationality of belief in God, or
so I will argue in this paper.
here are a number of reasons for paying careful attention to Marcel on
the question of the existence of God. Firstly, Marcel’s philosophy is studied by
many thinkers precisely because of its profound implications for a philosophical
approach to religious belief.1
In fact, some regard Marcel’s philosophical writings
on religious belief as perhaps his most profound contribution to philosophy.
1
For a discussion of Marcel’s philosophy of religion, see Neil Gilman, Gabriel Marcel on
Religious Knowledge (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1975), and Clyde Pax, An Exis-
tentialist Approach to God: A Study of Gabriel Marcel (he Hague: Nijhof, 1972).
2
Seymour Cain, Gabriel Marcel (South Bend, Ind.: Regnery, 1963), 87.

2. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
408
According to Seymour Cain, “[f]rom the beginning of his philosophical career,
Marcel’s main interest has been the interpretation of religious experience, that
is, of the relation between man and ultimate reality.”2
Secondly, it seems that
Marcel’s account of the human subject does have signiicant implications for
traditional philosophy of religion, and when we say “traditional” we are refer-
ring, in particular, to the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and,
more generally, to the issue of the nature of an airmation of God. hirdly,
Marcel’s position on the existence of God has some ainity with recent work
in Anglo-American philosophy of religion, especially work on the argument
from religious experience by John Hick and William Alston, among others. I
will suggest that the general position of these philosophers can be advanced
by appeal to the work of Marcel. In this article, I will present no more than
a series of suggestions, or of meditations,3
concerning the implications of
Marcel’s position for the philosophical question of establishing the rationality
of belief in God, and for the question of the nature of an airmation of God.
My aim is a modest one of suggesting a possible fruitful line of enquiry with
regard to the implications of Marcel’s work for central issues in the philosophy
of religion. Accordingly, I will focus on: (i) Marcel’s understanding of what a
rational argument would entail, and whether he believes that the issue of the
existence of God admits of a rational argument; (ii) Marcel’s account of how
the individual subject can arrive at an airmation of God; (iii) the question
of whether or not his own approach can be regarded as a rational argument;
and (iv) I will compare his view with that of William Alston and John Hick
in order to illustrate how his position ofers an advance upon the position of
these thinkers.
I.
Appealing to Marcel’s famous distinction between primary and secondary
relection, we can say that a rational argument, a proof even, is appropriate only
in the area of primary relection. his is because a rational argument attempts
to provide a decisive solution to problems of various sorts, and the domain of
primary relection is the domain of problems. However, we must recall here
what Marcel means by “problem,” for this will be crucial in what follows. A
problem occurs when pre-relective lived experience, or being-in-a-situation,
throws up a concrete situation that requires our attention (or our “relection”),
and (primary) relection is then employed by us in an attempt to solve the prob-
lem. In this sense, primary relection is an essential aspect of human experience.
3
See Marcel’s discussion of the God question in CF, especially chap. 9: “Meditations on the
idea of a proof for the existence of God” (175–83).

3. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 409
Yet, according to Marcel, a crucial feature of the domain of problems is that
any proposed solution to any particular problem must issue from a detached,
disinterested enquiry. If some of the premises of a proof, for example, relied for
their truth upon my personal involvement in existence, this would obviously
constitute a valid objection to the proof (according to the domain of primary
relection) by another person who was appraising the proof. herefore, the
proof must rely only on concepts and on relationships among concepts, which,
by deinition, are universal, shareable, public, and disinterested. Only in this
way, if at all, can what is required—a universally demonstrable solution (either
deductive or inductive) to our problem—be attained.
Marcel has always held that there is a domain of human experiences
that is not totally accessible in the realm of primary relection. his is because
something essential to the nature of the experiences is lost in the transition
from the level of being-in-a-situation to the level of primary relection. hese
experiences include our experience of our own ordinary, everyday involve-
ment in existence (which gives rise to what I have elsewhere described as our
particular ideas4
), our experience of our embodiment, the relationship of the
body to the mind, and the “concrete approaches” to being: faith, idelity, hope,
and love. hese latter experiences occur at the intersubjective level of human
experience, and are even further removed from conceptual knowledge than the
basic level of being-in-a-situation. he reason why such experiences cannot be
fully objectiied, according to Marcel, is that they essentially and intimately
involve the questioner.
It will be helpful to elaborate briely on what it means to say that an experi-
ence essentially involves the questioner. For it seems that any enquiry must in
some sense involve the questioner, insofar as it is carried out by an individual.
However, in a rational argument, or discussion of a problem, the solution does
not necessarily involve the personal and unique experiences of any particular
human subject. his is because the solution is formulated and presented at the
level of abstraction, a level that does not consider or require the particular “situ-
ated involvement” of any particular inquirer. It would be possible to substitute
any other inquirer and still solve the same problem in exactly the same way. For
example, if the sound on my computer were not working, I might discover that
this was the case because a certain software ile was missing. Yet solving this prob-
lem does not require the involvement of my own personal being-in-a-situation.
Anyone could be substituted for me in this example (a computer technician, for
instance) and yet still confront and solve exactly the same problem in exactly the
same way. However, such a substitution is not possible when the issue concerns
4
See my “Gabriel Marcel and the Problem of Knowledge,” Journal of the American Society
for the Study of French Philosophy 7 (Spring 1995): 148–63.

4. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
410
the question of the existence of God.5
According to Marcel, this is one of those
questions in human life that intimately and essentially involves the questioner.
He gives several examples illustrating why this is so, and how an individual might
come to airm the existence of God in their experience. I will discuss one of his
examples in order to give a suicient indication of Marcel’s views on the nature
of an airmation of God. We appeal to one of Marcel’s concrete approaches:
idelity, or more generally, making and keeping promises of various kinds. As an
illustration of human idelity, Marcel very often discusses marital idelity, giving
witness to idelity, and making-promises. I will focus only on the latter.6
In his
phenomenological analysis of promise-making, Marcel is concerned to uncover
how to understand the commitment that one makes when one makes a promise.
he nature of the commitment is elusive, yet essential to the act. He refers to
the example of promising to make a return visit to a sick friend who is lonely in
the hospital (an action that Kant would classify as a moral obligation). Marcel
holds that it seems futile to try to specify a set of conditions, or criteria, that
a particular action would need to fulill in order for the commitment entered
into in the promise to be kept. Yet, despite this, we still look upon the promise
as binding. Marcel explains that:
At the basis of this committal, there may be present (a) my desire at the
moment to give him pleasure; (b) the fact that nothing else is attracting
me at the moment. But it is quite possible that tomorrow, i.e., at the time
when I fulill my commitment, I shall no longer have the desire, and
shall instead be attracted by this interest or that, which I never dreamed
of when I committed myself. I can by no means commit myself to the
continued experience of the desire. . . . For [the promise] would then
become conditional. . . . One sees at once where the commitment is
partly unconditional: “whatever my state of mind, whatever my temper
. . . I will come and see you tomorrow.”7
his leads him to suggest that the commitment involved is an unconditional
commitment. One way perhaps to show this point is to try to imagine mak-
ing a promise that was based on conditions. While some (rather impersonal)
promises could perhaps still make sense if regarded this way (for example,
legal contracts), promises based on real human relationships could not. It
5
See TWB, 181f. On this point see also Pietro Prini, “A Methodology of the Unveriiable,”
in he Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, ed. P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court,
1984), 205–39, at 207–8.
6
For anexcellent analysis of Marcel’s view of promise-making,see Pax, AnExistentialist Approach
to God, 53f. My exposition in this and the succeeding paragraph beneits from Pax’s analysis.
7
BH, 41–2. See also HV, 132f.

5. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 411
becomes clear very quickly that these would not really be promises at all if
they are based on conditions. hus it becomes necessary to examine further
the meaning of this notion of unconditionality. I cannot be faithful, accord-
ing to Marcel, except to my own commitment (that is, to myself), so it seems
that “the problem of commitment logically comes before that of idelity.”8
To
whom do I make the commitment? Do I make it to myself, or to the other
person? It seems that it cannot be to myself because this would not capture
the experience of giving that seems essential to making a promise.9
In some
cases, we can say that the commitment is made to the other person. Here,
that person would appear to have a claim upon me. Yet when we push the
description further, even this explanation is not adequate. For there may be
cases in which the other person does not know that he or she has a claim on
me. his would be the case, for instance, where I have made a promise to a
person without even telling him or her that I have made it. I can also make
a promise to a person, Marcel suggests, who tries to release me from it; or
perhaps to a person who later dies, and whose death would appear to release
me from the commitment that I have made. Yet in all of these cases, Marcel
holds, the person who has made the promise still experiences that the pledge is
a commitment, that he or she is still under an obligation to fulill the promise.
hus in the light of our description of these various cases, we are nearer but
not quite there in answering our initial question: to whom is the commitment
in a promise made?
Marcel believes that his phenomenological analysis has been pointing in
a religious direction. He concludes that the commitment underlying various
types of promises is best explained if they are understood as being pledged to
an absolute, transcendent reality. According to him, “[u]nconditionality is the
true sign of God’s presence.”10
his argument can also be extended to the case of
marital idelity. In this case, the love between a man and a woman is uncondi-
tional, and as unconditional it is ultimately grounded in an “Absolute hou.”11
Detailed analysis of these examples of what he sometimes calls “I-hou” relations
illustrates, according to Marcel, not only how one might arrive at an airmation
of God, but why it would be rational to believe in God on the basis of these
experiences. As he puts it in Creative Fidelity: “It seems to me . . . reasonable to
think that this world is itself rooted in being, hence that it transcends in every
8
BH, 42.
9
See Pax, An Existentialist Approach to God, 56.
10
Marcel, “heism and Personal Relationships,” Cross Currents 1 (Fall 1950): 38–45,
at 40.
11
Marcel uses this phrase throughout his work to convey the unconditionality of the
commitment.

6. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
412
way those localized problems with their similarly localized solutions which permit
the insertion of the technical into things.”12
Marcel presents the human experience of making and keeping promises
as a way in which a person might come to believe in God. But it is important
to point out that when the believer is airming the reality of God he is making
an inference on the basis of his own personal experiences. his point has been
expressed well by Clyde Pax: “He is . . . appealing to an ultimate strength which
from within enables him to make the pledge which he knows he could not make
from himself alone.”13
In other words, the person who has such experiences is
involved in the question, is involved in the airmation of God, and only inso-
far as he is involved is there an airmation. he “objective” existence of God
cannot be detached from the believer’s experience and presented as an object
of demonstration for everyone. his comes out in Marcel’s phenomenological
description of promise-keeping. herefore, his position is that the airmation of
God can be attained by an individual only at the level of a being-in-a-situation,
or secondary relection. At the level of primary relection, the existence of God
cannot be demonstrated, because (as in our example above of making a promise)
the individual must be genuinely involved in the airmation, but such genuine
involvement is precluded at the level of abstraction.
I do not think Marcel is saying that this particular experience in isolation
would lead one to an airmation of God (although this possibility could not
be ruled out in exceptional cases). His view is that many experiences of this
kind—and the realization that these experiences are an essential aspect of much
in life that we value above all else—can lead one to the airmation of God. Of
course, not everyone who has such experiences necessarily arrives at an airma-
tion of God. However, Marcel might suggest that, nevertheless, in these cases
God is still the ultimate ground of such experiences. hat is to say, people who
engage in such commitments are implicitly committed to a view of the world
that is grounded in an ultimate reality. His claim is that human beings have a
capacity within their experience which requires appeal to a reality outside the
realm of experience in order to be fully explained.
II.
What are the implications of these remarks for traditional philosophy of
religion which, after all, is very concerned with the arguments for the existence
12
CF, 80. Marcel’s thought on this issue can be seen to be very similar to Martin Buber’s, a
point which he himself recognized. For more on this point, see my “Martin Buber’s Epistemol-
ogy,” International Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2001): 145–60.
13
Pax, An Existentialist Approach to God, 60.

7. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 413
of God? It is well known that Marcel is not especially sympathetic to attempts
to prove the existence of God. his is because, according to him, for an argu-
ment to produce a genuine airmation of God, it would have to involve the
personal experience of the subject in some fairly profound and unique way,
but in a rational argument, this is ruled out by deinition. Yet I do not think
Marcel is here committing to the view that the traditional arguments for the
existence of God have no value. He can surely agree with those who hold that
the traditional arguments provide some evidence for the existence of God, and
can prepare one intellectually (that is to say, at the level of primary relection)
for such a belief. However, one can make a genuine airmation providing only
that one has certain experiences such as the kind that Marcel has outlined. One
could also justiiably airm the existence of God on the basis of the experiences
without any appeal to the traditional arguments.
However, there is a way, I think, in which Marcel’s own position could, taken
broadly, constitute a type of argument for the existence of God. We might even
call it a moral argument (indeed it might be a version of Kant’s moral argument
for the existence of God). Although I think he would resist the suggestion that he
is ofering us an argument for the existence of God, nevertheless, if one believes
in God, as Marcel does, there has to be some way to help the unbeliever to an
airmation of God. More importantly, from the philosophical point of view,
there has to be a way of illustrating the rationality of a belief in God. I think we
can develop his view to present the following possible three-part argument for
the existence of God: (i) various experiences open up the possibility of God,
such as unconditional marital love, making promises, creative testimony, and
so forth; (ii) the traditional arguments (especially the cosmological and design
arguments) can show that there is some “objective” evidence for the existence
of the Being airmed in (i), and perhaps also that an atheistic worldview is
problematic; and (iii) a consideration of the consequences that would arise for
humanity if we rejected God constitutes yet another reason to accept him (a
signiicant theme in Marcel’s thought). Accepting God here means that we seek
out those experiences in which God is revealed, and which are generally lost
when God is rejected. his three-part “argument” would have to be illed out in
more detail, and it would not demonstrate the existence of God (in the sense of
being a knock-down proof), but it can, I think, at least illustrate the rationality
of belief in God, and this is part of Marce1’s task.
No doubt atheistic objections will be raised against Marcel’s view. One of
the most typical will be of the form: “but he does not really prove the existence
of God, nor does he show that belief in God is reasonable.” Marcel’s reply to this
type of objection is clear. he existence of God cannot be proven objectively,
but if one opens oneself up to the possibility of, and enters into, the kinds of
experiences described above then an airmation of God becomes possible, and

8. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
414
is shown to be rational. If one is unwilling to enter into these experiences, then
one can continue secure in the belief that the existence of God can never be
proven. Marcel, of course, does not overlook this point. he atheist is secure
because he knows he can reject any proof, or even a rational argument which
stops short of claiming to be a proof. But if other experiential ways to an af-
irmation of God are ofered, he cannot reject these philosophically until he has
genuinely tried them out.
here are two other challenges to Marcel’s view that we need to consider
briely: (i) one might reject his claim that the experience of an unconditional
commitment can ultimately be explained only by the existence of God; and (ii)
one might hold that experiences of the type he describes are not really possible
in human life, and that those who would claim to have them are engaging in
self-delusion. Perhaps the atheist will claim that we “create” these experiences
ourselves, but that they have no objective basis. We can quickly dismiss the second
objection in the light of the overwhelming evidence that human beings do have
such experiences, and that they are genuine experiences, which transcend our
own psychology. We should add that Marcel further argues that the rejection of
God on a large scale in modern culture will inevitably lead to an inability to see
the possibility of such experiences. Also, conversely, an inability to have such
experiences, which is becoming more and more characteristic of the modern age,
will lead people to reject belief in God. he reply to the irst objection is that the
existence of God is, irstly, a reasonably good explanation of these experiences,
and, secondly, perhaps the only reasonable explanation available. his is not to
deny that people can have these experiences without making the airmation of
God, as I have noted, but it may well be that the existence of God is neverthe-
less their ultimate ground.
III.
It will prove very instructive to compare Marcel’s position with work in
recent Anglo-American philosophy of religion, especially the inluential views of
Alston and Hick. (I need to emphasize that I can do no more in the space avail-
able than briely sketch out the argument.) Both Alston and Hick approach the
question of God from the position of whether or not it is rational to believe in
God, rather than from the position of trying to establish whether there actually
is a God. As we have seen, Marcel’s view easily lends itself to this same approach,
although Marcel would naturally be hesitant to talk about “the rationality of
belief in God” since this phrase has been almost exclusively associated with
abstract discussions of the God question.
Alston argues that religious experience can provide direct justiication for
religious beliefs. He does this by arguing that Christian epistemic practice enjoys

9. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 415
basically the same epistemic status as ordinary perceptual practice, and, therefore,
in the absence of signiicant potential defeaters of direct experiential justiication
of religious belief, belief in God on the basis of religious experience is rational.
he kind of religious experiences that Alston has in mind, however, are not those
typically associated with the traditional argument from religious experience.
Alston gives an example of what he has in mind by “religious experience”:
When someone believes that her new way of relating herself to the world
after her conversion is to be explained by the Holy Spirit imparting super-
natural graces to her, she supposes her belief that the Holy Spirit imparts
graces to her to be directly justiied by her experience. What she directly
learns from experience is that she sees and reacts to things diferently; this
is then taken as a reason for supposing that the Holy Spirit is imparting
graces to her. When, on the other hand, someone takes himself to be
experiencing the presence of God, he thinks that his experience justiies
him in supposing that God is what he is experiencing. hus he supposes
himself to be directly justiied in his experience in believing God to be
present to him.14
In the absence of any detailed phenomenological description of an actual case,
it is not clear from these examples what Alston’s means by religious experience.
He seems to have in mind some kind of total picture, or total view, or even in-
terpretation, of the total panorama of one’s experience, in which the existence of
God is somehow directly made manifest. I say “directly” because Alston makes it
clear that there is no inference made to the existence of God. Rather, the existence
of God is somehow directly presented in one’s total experience.
John Hick holds a similar view. He makes it clear that he shall not be
[a]sking directly whether A’s “experience of existing in the presence of
God” is genuine (for that would require us to know irst, independently
of this and all other such experiences, and as a matter of established public
knowledge, whether God does indeed exist and was present to A), but
rather whether it is rational for A to trust his or her experience as veridi-
cal and to behave on the basis of it; and also, as an important secondary
question, whether it is rational for others to believe in the reality of God
on the basis of A’s report.15
14
William Alston, “Religious Experience and Religious Belief,” Nous 16 (1982): 3–12, at 3.
(his article is reprinted in R. Douglas Geivett and Brendan Sweetman, Contemporary Perspectives
on Religious Epistemology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 295–303.)
15
John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 212.
(Chap.13ofthisbook,“heRationalityofReligiousBelief,”fromwhichthisquotationistaken,isalso
reprinted in Geivett and Sweetman, Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology, 304–19.)

10. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
416
Hick also seems to hold that belief in the existence of God is carried directly
in the experience. By “religious experience,” Hick says that he means what people
mean when they “report their being conscious of existing in God’s presence
and of living in a personal relationship of mutual awareness with God.”16
his
is obviously very similar to Alston’s view. However, in the absence of a detailed
phenomenological description of a particular case of a religious experience, the
positions of both Hick and Alston remain quite vague. his makes the kind of
detailed discussion that this very complex issue requires very diicult. However,
it seems, to put it as speciically as their exposition will allow, that what both
are saying is that one can understand the whole panorama of one’s experience
in a religious way, an experience in which one becomes aware (directly or non-
inferentially) of the presence of God, and that such an experience makes it
rational to believe in God.
However, there is one quite basic and, in my view, very serious criticism of
this approach. his is the criticism that it is simply not possible to experience the
panorama of one’s total human experience in a completely religious way—unless
one is already a religious believer, in which case the argument would be ques-
tion-begging. (At some points, including the early part of the above quotation,
Alston appears to suggest that he is talking about the religious experiences of
those who already are religious believers, but this is clearly not his general inten-
tion). In the panorama of an individual’s experience, she experiences features of
reality that may appear to make a supernatural being manifest, and features of
reality that appear incompatible with the existence of a supernatural being. All
of these features make up the total panorama of one’s experience. If this is the
case, then it would seem to be diicult to airm the existence of God directly
on the basis of a religious experience of one’s total human reality of the kind
discussed by Hick and Alston.
Instead, one would have to distinguish the religious from the other features
of one’s total human reality, and conclude that the religious features suiciently
outweighed the other features, and were of supreme value, and so forth, and
then infer the existence of God from, or on the basis of, these religious features.
In the panorama of our ordinary experience, we experience evil as well as good.
So if we come to believe in the existence of God, it would have to be on the
basis of something like a belief that the good in our experience in some way war-
rants such an inference, and that the bad does not make the inference irrational.
he total panorama of human experience has an essential temporal aspect that
cannot be ignored in the analysis of any particular experience. his criticism,
it seems to me, is a major problem for the views of Hick and Alston. Unless
they admit that the existence of God is inferred based on parts (that is, speciic
16
Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 211.

11. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 417
experiences) of the total panorama of human experience, they run the risk of
falling into another form of the Wittgensteinian view, held by D. Z. Phillips and
others, that religion is a form of life, which establishes its own internal criteria
of meaning and rationality. Such a view comes very close to saying that religion
is invulnerable to rational criticism.
Another signiicant criticism of Alston and Hick is that their analogy to
perceptual experience is problematic. his is because perceptual experience is
universal, whereas religious experiences of the kind they discuss are not. here-
fore, it is questionable to move from the rationality of perceptual experiences
to the rationality of religious experiences.
Before I go on to consider the signiicance of Marce1’s view for this discus-
sion, I wish to consider briely one objection that Hick and Alston might make.
It will serve to clarify the issues further, and also to highlight the diferences
between their position and Marcel’s. Hick and Alston could reply that if an in-
dividual has a certain experience in which they think that (say) God is talking to
them, is it not, therefore, rational for them to believe in God on the basis of this
experience (as long as certain conditions are fulilled, as speciied by Hick17
)? Am
I not ruling out this possibility by holding that it is not possible to experience
the panorama of one’s total human reality in a religious way?
My reply to this objection is that the experience in which I think that
God is talking to me does not constitute the total panorama of my experience.
I will also have other experiences in which God is not talking to me, and per-
haps experiences which appear to make God’s existence unlikely, as well as later
experiences which might make me doubt that God talked to me in previous
experiences. hese experiences will all have to be taken into account when I
consider whether my experience that God was talking to me makes it rational
for me to believe in the existence of God on the basis of this one experience.
Now, during the experience, it might appear to be rational to believe in God,
but what about the time after the experience is over? hen I must decide if it
really was a religious experience (that is to say, an experience in which God
was somehow “present”). And this is where a phenomenological description of
17
Hick lists three criteria that a religious experience must satisfy in order to be considered
rational. he irst criterion is that there must be no obvious countervailing considerations to the
experience in one’s life. he other two are that the belief should not conlict with our overall
knowledge of the universe, and that the belief should have some transforming efect in one’s
life; see ibid., 214f. I am claiming here that it is very hard to deny that there are countervailing
considerations which, when taken into account, force us to conclude that a belief in God on the
basis of religious experience must be an inferred belief. Hick also appears to agree with this since
he seems to suggest that evil is the kind of thing which even religious believers consider to be a
countervailing consideration; see his statement of the problem of evil (and his reference to Marcel)
in Evil and the God of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 3f.

12. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
418
the experience is essential. Such a description would help to answer such vital
questions as: why did I conclude that God was talking to me? Was this because
I interpreted a particular event in a certain way? Did I make an inference from
certain sensations and certain happenings to the existence of God? If not, how
exactly did the experience present the existence of God to me? How did I know
it was God? It is obvious at this point that a phenomenological description of
the experience is imperative. Otherwise we are left with vague accounts of what
is going on in the experience which not only cannot advance the discussion,
but may even be detrimental to it. I would hold that when such an experience
is described phenomenologically, it will become clear that there is an inference
involved, at least most of the time (I am not ruling out experiences where there
is no inference involved, but these are hardly common, and Hick and Alston are
talking about common religious experiences, not mystical experiences). here-
fore, Alston’s and Hick’s view that the existence of God is carried directly in the
experience as an attempt to illustrate a new way of justifying the rationality of
belief in God is problematic. In order to rule out the possibility of an inference
being involved, it is incumbent upon them to provide a phenomenological
description of one of the experiences they have in mind which illustrates that
there is no inference involved.
Marcel’s position, it seems to me, ofers an advance on the views of Hick and
Alston. For my reading of Marcel is that the human experiences which appeal to
unconditional commitments of one kind or another provide enough evidence
for one to infer the existence of God as the basis for the experience. (But, as
pointed out above, one may not actually make this inference, of course). Marcel
does not hold that the experience of God is directly carried in these experiences,
nor does he hold that God is directly revealed in the total panorama of one’s
experience. Yet his view still makes religious belief rational, even if it does not
prove that such experiences are genuine (in the sense that they establish that
God actually exists). I would also go further and say that such experiences may
make atheism irrational (atheism understood here in the negative sense as the
denial that God exists).
For these reasons, Marcel’s view ofers us a way to avoid the problems
which face Alston’s and Hick’s view. Marcel’s view avoids the two criticisms
mentioned above yet still establishes the rationality of belief in God because he
actually provides a phenomenological description of the experiences involved,
and illustrates how the existence of God may be inferred on the basis of some
of the subject’s experiences. Marcel would undoubtedly add that the experi-
ences he discusses are universal to humans, and that even if some people reject
the inference to the existence of God, they are still implicitly committed to the
existence of God, and, most importantly, it would be rational for them to believe
in God. Alston and Hick cannot make a similar claim about their position since

13. Marel on God and Religious Experience, and Critique 419
the experiences they discuss are not universally recognized. his point is very
signiicant because if the experiences are universally recognized, then this fact,
coupled with a phenomenological description of the experiences, makes the
Marcelian position for the rationality of belief in God quite strong in contrast
to Alston’s and Hick’s view. heir position remains obscure and problematic
because they do not provide a phenomenological description of the experiences
they have in mind nor do they appeal to ordinary common experiences.
It is important inally to distinguish the present discussion from discus-
sions of the traditional argument from religious experience. Marcel’s position
difers from traditional arguments based on religious experiences because such
arguments usually took the form that belief in God could be established on the
basis that some people had religious experiences—such as St. Francis of Assisi
and St. Teresa of Avila, for example—and that, therefore, there must be a God
who caused these experiences. Also, these experiences were usually understood
in a mystical or esoteric sense (though not always). Further, the distinction of
whether the existence of God was inferred by the individual who underwent
the experience or carried directly in the experience was not always made. Argu-
ments of this kind faced the criticism that we could not know if such religious
experiences were genuine religious experiences, and therefore could not infer
that God existed on the basis of them.
Marcel’s approach, however, is diferent. He holds that one must have the
experience oneself, and this can lead one to a rational belief in God. Further, it
is not an esoteric or mystical experience, as we have just mentioned, but a basic
intersubjective experience of ordinary everyday life. his aspect of Marcel’s view
is extremely important, for Hick has suggested that the universe is “religiously
ambiguous” (which means that there is evidence in roughly equal measure for
the rationality of religious belief and of atheism). Granting him this point simply
for the sake of argument, it would obviously be imperative to be able to appeal
to universal experiences with which all human beings can identify in any argu-
ment for the rationality of belief in God based on religious experience. his is
just what Marcel does. His discussion, therefore, raises the debate concerning
religious experience out of the realm of purely private experience, to a level where
it can become at least partly an issue of public discussion. Hick and Alston may
be forced to conclude, on their view of the nature of religious experience, that
it is up to God to reveal himself to the individual if the individual is to have a
religious experience that would make belief in God rational. Marcel, however,
since he appeals to universal experiences, can suggest that there is something
each individual can do personally to bring about an airmation of God, namely,
actively seek out those experiences and their ultimate explanation.
Finally, regarding the question as to whether Marcel would agree with Hick
that a person can be justiied in believing in God if he only knows of somebody

14. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
420
who has had a religious experience (in Marcel’s sense), he would undoubtedly
agree with this. For this is just what Marcel means by the living witness, or
creative testimony, which he sought to express throughout his work, and, by all
biographical accounts, throughout his life as well.18
Rockhurst University
Kansas City, Missouri
18
I am grateful to homas Anderson and Doug Geivett for helpful comments on an earlier
version of this paper.